BR pension cash 'to go on royal train service'
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
THE Government is planning to take pounds 730,000 from British Rail's pension fund to pay for improvements to the royal train service, and is trying to cover up its plans. That is the apparent implication of documents sent by civil servants to a parliamentary committee and obtained by the Independent, writes Tim Jackson. A paper put before the House of Commons transport select committee asks Parliament to 'increase provision for current expenditure on royal travel . . . with a corresponding decrease in the provision for government support of British Rail pension funds'.
Accounts also show an increase in spending for the year to March 1994 on the royal train service of pounds 730,000, and a cut of the same sum in funding to the pension fund. The changes will bring public spending on royal trains up to pounds 2.6m, and on pensions down to pounds 66.7m.
But a handwritten amendment removes the words 'corresponding decrease', and splits the trains increase and the pensions cut into items running first and last in a list of five items. Civil servants mistakenly sent the committee the draft, rather than the final document.
The Department of Transport maintained it was a routine accounting procedure.
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments