§ Mr. Tony BanksTo ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will state the total costs incurred by his Department on foreign travel during the financial year 1987–88, identified by(a) ministerial travel and (b) travel abroad by civil servants.
§ Mr. Peter BottomleyThe latest estimate of expenditure by the Department on foreign travel during 1987–88 is:
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£ (a) Ministers 50,700 (b) Civil Servants 1,236,556 have been open to traffic for more than 12 months, and for which counts of actual traffic have been compared with the forecast for that year, more than half were within 20 per cent. of the forecast. Errors below that level are statistically not significant because of the errors inherent in translating a count of one day's traffic into an annual figure. Only 5 per cent. of schemes had differences greater than 40 per cent. between the forecast and actual traffic counts. In all these cases traffic had been substantially overestimated on assumption about events wh]ch subsequently took a different course. The smaller errors were in both directions and there is no evidence of any systematic error in the forecasting methods used.