Cost of MPs’ foreign trips rises a third and you pay

THE amount of taxpayers’ money blown by globetrotting MPs on foreign trips has soared by a third in a year.

In 2016/17, select committees spent £556,000 on overseas junkets to destinations including San Francisco, Seoul and Montreal.

The worst offenders were MPs investigating Britain’s foreign aid budget, who spent almost a sixth of the total amount – £89,000 – on trips to Washington, Paris, the Middle East and central Africa.

Details of the spending were contained in the annual report of the House of Commons that revealed the total rose 31 per cent on the previous year. When trips to EU institutions and locations in the UK are included, the total amount spent on travel was £704,000 – a rise of 28 per cent on the previous year.

In total there were 55 overseas jaunts, with five costing more than £40,000 each. Critics questioned why so much was being spent on the trips in the age of video conferencing, and why as many as seven MPs are going on some of the visits.

Last night Alex Wild, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘With the public finances in such an appalling state, these trips should be kept to a minimum, especially given the vast improvements in communications technology.

‘Some of these have cost almost £10,000 per person, which is closer to the cost of a deluxe family holiday than what taxpayers expect to pay their representatives for factfinding missions.’

Trips by the international development committee, which looks at Britain’s £13billion foreign aid spending, included sending six MPs to the Democratic Republic of Congo costing almost £34,000. And trips to consider the Department for International Development’s work on education – one to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda for six MPs and a second to Jordan and Lebanon for seven MPs – cost almost £45,000.

Although the list of expensive fact-finding trips is dominated by committees with a foreign affairs remit, many of the others cover only domestic issues.

The most expensive trip – costing £59,000 – was a home affairs select committee trip for seven MPs to the US and Mexico. This was followed by a visit to Canada by the public administration committee, which oversees the civil service. The education committee spent £41,000 on a trip to Finland and South Korea to investigate the ‘purpose and quality of education in England’.

Not all of the most expensive trips were to far-flung countries.

The culture committee managed to make a trip to Belfast cost just over £8,000 by taking seven MPs and four members of staff to discuss the impact of Brexit on tourism and creative industries.

A spokesman for the Committee Office said: ‘Foreign travel expenditure is strictly authorised for two purposes: visits to European institutions and visits which are integral to a committee’s work in conducting inquiries that scrutinise and hold government to account.’