Our civil servants rate themselves very highly for a trip to Mongolia

DO you know what the “conference rate” is? It’s one of the categories of travelling expenses paid to civil servants while they’re abroad.

There are four different rates — one paid for every night they’re away from home, two that apply if they’re away for five hours or 10 hours, and the conference rate. All these rates have been in operation for years and years.

The assumption is that a civil servant who has to travel abroad has expenses to incur — one meal if they’re away for a short time, two meals if they’re away for a bit longer and, of course, a hotel room if they’re away overnight.

But sometimes they go to meetings where they incur no expense at all — where their meals, transport and accommodation are provided — and in that situation they are allowed to claim the conference rate.

The conference rate is exactly half the overnight rate and it’s payable (on top of salary) for just being there.

The Department of Finance has just published a detailed list of all the expenses that civil servants are allowed to claim while abroad.

It runs to 16 pages because it covers every country and every major city in the world. It must have taken someone (or more likely a team of someones) weeks to prepare — and all the expenses are in local currencies.

I don’t know why Irish civil servants would need to be sent to the Cook Islands, for instance, but if they go they can expect an overnight rate of 418 New Zealand dollars, and if someone else is paying for their meals and accommodation, they will still get $209.

Isn’t this nutty? Apart from the ludicrous idea that anyone should be paid extra, over and above their salaries, for just being there, isn’t it crazy that there is a division of the Department of Finance that is responsible for keeping an enormous table like this up to date?

And the insane detail — you get $11 more if you go to Ulaan Baatar (the capital of Mongolia) in the high season than if you go in the winter season.

Incidentally, according to my cursory look at the internet, a double room in Ulaan Baatar will always cost less than $30, but the overnight rate we pay is $117.

Why, over the years, have we inflicted this sort of crazy bureaucracy on ourselves? Why aren’t civil servants told, if you have to travel abroad, keep your receipts and we’ll reimburse you when you get back? If we’re really serious about the need to make savings in the current climate, we need to begin by expecting people in well-paid and secure jobs not to look after themselves quite so well.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve shown how it is possible to make savings of around 150m in the Government’s day-to-day spending without cutting essential programmes.

We could easily add another couple of million by doing away with whatever team exists in the Department of Finance to keep travel expenses up to date, and by instituting a new rule that would simply recoup public servants the actual expenses they incur.

But we also said that this week we’d look at some of the actual estimates for some of the government departments — so here goes.

As you know (if you’ve been doing the homework I set you) there are 41 “votes” altogether, and they account for a net 48,962,138,000. That’s a pretty big number, so let’s round it to 49 billion.

The very first vote is for the president. Most people would agree, I think, that the president actually gives us really good value for money. The total cost of running her office is around €3.5m.

I imagine, however, that the president would want to lead by example in a time of cutback, so I think we should shave, say, €100,000 off the cost. That can be covered by savings in travel, office equipment, and telecommunications.

Come to think of it, would it be unseemly to suggest that one of our phone companies might be encouraged to sponsor the telecommunications costs in their entirety? That would increase the saving to €146,000.

Next up is the Department of the Taoiseach. This is a government department in its own right, and its cost has risen steeply in recent years — up 29%, for instance, between 2007 and 2008. The total cost of the department is around €45m and it employs 222 staff, including no fewer than 48 people who provide personal and constituency services to the Taoiseach and his ministers of state.

All well and good, you might think, in a time of plenty. But surely if cuts have to start anywhere they have to start at the top. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to expect to save at least €3m from a budget like that, in the interests of leadership if nothing else.

I’m going to skip some of the next votes and come on to the Department of

Finance, Vote No 6. A massive department, it employs 611 people and costs €90m a year to run.

Here too, surely, is an area where leadership is needed, and I strongly believe the department should be aiming at a cut of €5m in its own budget.

The Office of Public Works (Vote 10), costs €659m to run and employs 739 people directly (although that’s a small proportion of their overall spending). A huge proportion of its spending comes from capital projects and the cost of services to other government departments.

The OPW, although it does good work, has been a fierce resister of change for years and would surely benefit from more openness to a public/private approach (as well as providing a boost to the now beleaguered construction sector).

Such an approach could well reduce this estimate by as much as €50m.

WHY do we have a secret service in Ireland? It has an entire vote to itself, even though it is expressed in one line. It costs only €800,000, but it looks nutty.

I suspect most of that money is spent on witness protection and that kind of thing, but even if it saves no money, the secret service (whatever it is) should be rolled up and put into the Department of Justice.

Which brings me to the Department of Justice itself — Vote 19 (again, I’ve skipped over some small votes where only tiny savings are likely).

The gardaí, the prisons and the Courts Service all have their own votes, so the

Department of Justice is essentially involved only with policy and administration. And that requires 612 employees and costs €480m. It’s some bill for policy and administration, isn’t it?

I’d almost be afraid to advocate a cut here because they’d likely cut some of the stuff I regard as important, like youth justice and probation, but I still feel €25m would be a reasonable target.

So, all told, between last week and this, we’ve saved around €235m without cutting anything essential — and without looking at the bigger spenders at all.

We’ll finish off by examining them next week, just in time for the Government’s own decision-making meeting.