Hypocrisy of green quango and its huge bill for taxis
CONSERVATION chiefs spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on taxis and flights – while nagging the public to save the planet by ditching their cars.
Scottish Natural Heritage staff have been accused of ‘rank hypocrisy’ after it emerged they took 7,665 taxi trips in only three years, along with 685 flights within the UK.
The Inverness-based quango ran up a travel bill of more than £270,000, while urging the public to cycle to work.
It included more than £14,000 spent on 65 flights abroad to destinations including Spain, Finland and Russia.
On its website, SNH boasts that its staff are ‘leading by example’ in cutting carbon emissions by ‘building greener offices’ and shunning cars in favour of rail travel and cycling.
It urges the public to cycle instead of driving, unplug household appliances to save energy and avoid using peat to fertilise their gardens.
But documents released under Freedom of Information legislation have revealed that, amid their green rhetoric, SNH bosses are allowing staff to take an average of 48 taxpayerfunded taxi trips every week.
And despite previously boasting that ‘air travel is rare’ for its staff, the quango was found to be leaving a significant carbon footprint by sending workers on 20 flights every month.
Between 2013 and last year, SNH racked up in excess of 82,000 miles in flights within the UK alone – the equivalent of flying around the world more than three times.
Critics last night questioned whether the sheer volume of taxi trips and flights signed off by SNH represented good value for taxpayers.
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘These are significant amounts of money and taxpayers have every right to question the rank hypocrisy of these quangocrats.
‘When times are hard and all areas of the public sector have to find necessary savings, taxpayers will wonder how spending such huge amounts of their money on taxis and flights can ever really be good value.’
The documents show that taxpayers coughed up £82,046 for three years’ worth of taxi trips taken by SNH staff between 2013 and 2016 – an average of £10 per journey.
A further £174,527 was spent on domestic flights over the same period, and an additional £14,382 funded flights abroad.
In a ‘Low Carbon Vision’ document the SNH states: ‘We avoid high-carbon modes of travel and air travel is rare.’
It adds: ‘We use public transport and active travel where possible.’
SNH last year received around £53million via the Scottish Government.
A spokesman for the quango said significant progress had been made in recent years in
‘No suitable bus service’
reducing its carbon footprint, largely by using public transport wherever possible.
He added: ‘Travelling by train instead of car helps to reduce our overall emissions, but it does often mean that a taxi is required at the end of a train journey, if there is no suitable bus service to the final destination.’ He said taxi journeys had been reduced by almost a quarter since 2013 and the 2,271 journeys taken last year equated to less than two return journeys, or £40, per staff member for the whole year.
He added: ‘The nature of our work means that we have a number of offices and staff in island locations such as South Uist, Stornoway, Kirkwall and Lerwick.
‘The vast majority of our domestic flight journeys are to and from these islands and are only authorised when it is not practical or possible to take a ferry – our use of ferries has increased by 780 per cent since 2003.
‘International flights are occasionally necessary in order to meet EU obligations and to keep up with conservation research abroad.
‘We are working to make it easier to work effectively without travelling at all, for example by recently improving our telephone and video conferencing facilities.’