Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many flights were undertaken by his Department's officials at a cost to the public purse during the last six months; what the cost of those flights was; and what the reasons for those flights were.

The central Department made a total of 1,409 bookings for flights at a cost of £806,711, for the 6 month period from 01/09/16 to 28/02/2017.

1,144 bookings were made using the Department’s internal ‘Clarity’ system at a cost of £722,973. The table at Annex A (attached) summarises the reasons for those bookings.

The remaining 265 bookings costing £83,738 were made through either the Department’s Travel & Subsistence system or using Government Procurement Cards. These bookings were made to undertake official Departmental business.

Please note that due to the configuration of DfT’s systems, several assumptions were made in order to answer these questions:

• Our systems cannot be filtered on ‘Officials’, as per the request. The data provided contains bookings that were made for parties other than just departmental officials, including Ministers and external parties (e.g. speakers at conferences).

• Our system records flight bookings that have been made, but if they were subsequently changed or refunded, our system cannot not identify which flight it related to. Similarly, if several flights have been booked at once, they may be reported in our system as one booking.