The Price of 'Global Britain' .

 

The MOD is apparently the “Ministry of Debauchery” with overpaid and underworked ‘woke’ officials and senior officers gallivanting around the world to luxury hotels, spending hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money on jollies, while our brave boys suffer at home. That’s the latest diatribe from the Telegraph, whose ongoing crusade to fight the deep state forces of waste & woke, wherever they may lurk is now firmly fixed on that bastion of leftwing hippy nirvana that is (checks notes), the British Armed Forces… Alternatively there is perhaps more here than meets the eye?

According to FOI releases seen by the Telegraph, but which don’t appear to have been hosted on the MOD website yet, the MOD has spent over £300m on hotels and £350m on rail and air travel since 2018 (£650m). This works out at roughly £2.5m per week, covering the approximately 140,000 regular, 30,000 reserve and 60,000 civil servants who make up the MOD. Broken down, each person in defence is spending about £500 per year on travel – although of course it doesn’t really work like this. Does it represent value for money though?

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2022

There are lots of good reasons why the MOD would spend money on T&S to support its goals. Most practically, its an operational department with people based and working across the entire globe. There are British personnel deployed in scores of countries, ranging from singleton defence attaches through to thousands of troops on operations. On any given day there will be UK MOD (e.g military and civilian) working in dozens of nations on all manner of jobs from engaging in defence staff talks, providing training to local militaries, helping prepare exercises or operations, supporting defence export competitions for UK industry, attending major conferences where the UK is a leading player or simply carrying out the routine business of Defence.

You cannot be a globally deployed military power and not run up a large bill for travel and subsistence. To give a few vignettes of the sort of travel that is going on daily across the MOD, you only need to look at the roulement of personnel to Las Vegas to support the wider RAF Predator operations at Creech AFB or participation in Red Flag at Nellis. There are regular crew rotations for the Batch 2 RIVER class OPVs involving flying crews around the world to join their ships, be it in the West Indies or the Far East. The Army has personnel based in Nepal and Brunei who may need to return to the UK for different reasons too. All of these require long haul air travel and accommodation on the way. In the US the huge presence of hundreds of exchange and liaison staff across the nation means regular travel to different locations for meetings, while in Europe there will be a constant flow of staff moving to talks in NATO HQs across the continent or supporting bilateral diplomatic talks. The war in Ukraine will have seen a significant increase in people needing to travel to Eastern Europe for essential activities to support Ukraines ongoing fight for freedom against the evil that is the Putin regime.

The point is that the global nature of the activity and the sheer scale and diversity of it means you need to travel. Some will argue that you should use military transport to do this – a great idea with just one major flaw, which is that as a result of defence cuts which in the last few years have reduced RAF aircraft strength by over 30%, the withdrawal of the C130 and BAE146 fleets means that there is no spare capacity to fly people around – the A400M force size is not sufficient for the jobs it has, let alone trying to reduce the T&S bill of the MOD. There is no ‘communications fleet’ really available anymore for local flying – look at any guides to the Cold War armed forces and most major Commands usually had a couple of aircraft that could fly people around as needed for shuttle missions. These have long been scrapped on cost grounds, so there is no capacity to do the job ‘in house’. Finally even when Govt does go ‘in house’ using the Titan Airways charted Airbus or the VIP Voyager, they come under fire from papers like the Telegraph for using a private solution and not using corporate travel. Plus ca change…

Given there is a need for travel, is it really luxury cocktails at the Ritz on the public account? Anyone with any experience of trying to book travel with the MOD will laugh out loud at the idea that they can live it up in luxury hotels. Like all major companies and government departments, the MOD has highly stringent policies on approval of travel, usually needing senior approval to get permission to do so – which during times of particularly tight budgets can lead to situations where very senior officers time is spent not leading their organisation, but instead approving travel requests. Such policies may sound good, but lead to odd situations. The author vividly recalls some years ago watching a 3* military officer wince as he was told he’d need to get approval from CDS to travel abroad on a £60 Easyjet flight for a particularly important visit. Watching very senior staff who early in their careers were trusted to fire nuclear weapons suddenly being told they could not even think of using their own budget to travel speaks volumes about the chances of a ‘culture of empowerment’ being successfully implemented in the MOD.

If approval to travel is given then there are established budget rates for accommodation bookings. The precise rate isn’t publicly available, but it was described online as being ‘about enough to afford a Travelodge or a premier inn on a good day’. The reality is that staff are required to book at the cheapest hotel for their trip, and cannot book a luxury one outside of the ‘cap rate’. On the occasions when the booking is above the authorised limit as no cheaper accommodation is available, staff need special permission to exceed the rate, and which is recorded and monitored. Woe betide anyone thinking they can sneak into the Ritz when accommodation was available elsewhere.  Much of the argument in the Telegraph article was based on quoting room rates outright, and assuming that the MOD was paying the same rate. Its worth noting that like any major organisation, the MOD will almost certainly benefit from corporate rates that are significantly below the ‘rack rate’ they’d charge a walk up guest. To get an idea of the scale of discounts hotel chains may offer, look at how much cheaper the ‘US Government’ rate is for US hotels when booking there – often the saving can be 20-30% lower – and its likely that the MOD enjoys similar priced discounts.

Similarly with airline travel, there is a push for cheaper is better at any price. There are plenty of MOD staff with horror stories to tell of travel cells booking a hugely complex itinerary of international travel with multiple stops en route to save £50 and fly economy, when flying business directly may only have cost £200 more and saved 18hrs of travel each way. The policies on flying are economy, with business travel only approved in the most exceptional cases and usually on the clear understanding that the people are going straight to work on arrival and return.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 

Travelling abroad is more complex as depending on where you go, hotels may vary in both price and safety standards. The FCDO usually conduct inspections of all hotels at their Posts to know where is safe to stay - e.g. meets fire regulations, has fire exits, meets food hygiene standards and  is not a brothel in disguise (which has happened to at least one traveller the author knows), and where the terrorist threat is higher, has good security measures in place. In more challenging locations it may be the case that Western visitors will stand out, so for their own safety they may need to stay in certain hotels. This naturally can cost more -anyone familiar with the Middle East will know there is a vast gap between the local 3* hotel and one intended for Western visitors – this in turn means that staff will often stay in what sound like nicer hotels but do so for their own safety standards. It is not unreasonable to expect that when asking staff to travel, you pay to put them up in hotels that meet these basic standards.

One line of attack in the Telegraph was that the MOD was staying in Las Vegas. The reason the MOD looks like it is staying in places like Las Vegas is simple – there is a large RAF presence in the Nevada area, often in remote locations where on base accommodation is not possible and where the nearest hotels are in Las Vegas itself. The Civil Service is not flying out to Vegas to put it all on black and solve the ‘black hole’ in the EP – rather they are going for essential activity linked to exercises and operations with our closest ally.

In London the MOD was attacked for not booking into the Victory Services Club or the Union Jack Club which are apparently ‘cheaper’. Both sites are private members clubs, so not open to MOD booking. Also, the MOD bill may well cover hosting inbound VIP visits by senior delegations for talks and activities – in those cases, it may be more appropriate to host very senior delegations in local luxury hotels next to MOD, such as the Horseguards hotel, rather than sending 4* visitors to the less salubrious locations of facilities that are essentially a Junior Ranks and NCO’s mess. Defence diplomacy sometimes comes with a bit of a price tag attached to it, but the long-term benefits in terms of access and economic benefits of orders for UK industry would surely justify spending a few hundred pounds extra per night on a decent hotel versus ideological puritanism. If the UK won’t look after our guests on an official level, plenty of European partner nations will happily wine, dine and win their business instead… This report also doesn’t seem to take into account is that much of the travel will also be domestic – the cost of sending staff to meetings around the UK or visiting industry or other locations. There is a shortage of military accommodation to put people up in, so staying in the local mess isn’t always practical as there are no beds to sleep in. If you want to reduce the estate, you reduce the places where people can sleep if needed.

Its also worth comparing the MOD spend to industry – while it is hard to get detailed figures for corporate T&S budgets, there are indications online that in 2023 in the USA alone, Amazon spent $483m just on air travel, while Deloitte spent $284m. This just covers travel for US staff, but highlights that in one year Amazon spent roughly the same on airfare for US staff as the MOD did in 5 years – highlighting that the travel figure represents surprisingly reasonable value for money.

Ultimately its hard to work out what the Telegraph is angry about here beyond the fact that the world is changing in a way that it seems to be scared of. For years the paper has demanded a ‘Global Britain’ with a presence of British troops and engagement across the world to support wider British interests. It has also angrily railed against what it sees as laziness on the part of the Civil Service for not coming to work and instead working remotely most days. It is therefore a bit odd to see the Telegraph angry at the MOD pushing a global Britain agenda and incurring the costs associated with it, while it is also angry that Civil Servants are travelling and therefore ‘in the office’. What exactly that they want because their entire argument makes no logical sense.