75. Head 28 - Civil Aviation Department. Subhead 111. Hire of services and professional fees. Air passenger departure tax. In paragraph 125 of my report for the year ended 31 March 1985, I drew attention to the expensive system for in collecting the air passenger departure tax and following the recommendations of the Public Accounts Comm paragraph 7.14 of their Eighth Report, a Review Team was set up by the Director of Civil Aviation to consi. the possibility of devising a flat rate fee, to be paid to the aircraft operators for collecting the tax, to replace the present arrangements for reimbursing the estimated costs submitted by each operator. The Review Team has completed its report which is now under consideration by the Government.
76. During the Review Team's consideration of the various expenses of the tax collection system, a proposal was made that could reduce the fee by up to $1 million a year and at the same time provide a more convenient service to passengers. As part of the arrangements for collecting the tax, a security company employs staff specially for checking and invalidating the air passenger departure tax tickets at the entrance to the immigration control area. This independent check is considered necessary for ensuring that each departing passenger has paid the tax and that the tax ticket is not re-used. The Review Team was of the opinion that the ticket check could be done more cheaply and conveniently by Immigration Officers while the passengers were passing through immigration control.
77. The Director of Civil Aviation accepted the proposal and renewed a previous request to the Director of Immigration to take over the task of checking and invalidating the air passenger departure tax tickets. As part of immigration control procedures, Immigration Officers are required to inspect a passenger's boarding card, to which the tax ticket is attached. Therefore, an Immigration Officer would only need to sight the tax ticket and invalidate it, taking about one second, according to my estimate, out of an average of 60 seconds now needed to clear each passenger. However, the Director of Immigration rejected the Director of Civil Aviation's request for the following reasons:
-the integrity of the immigration control staff must be fostered and therefore, the staff must not be exposed to any
system with inherent opportunities for corruption or other malpractices;
-staff shortages made it difficult to keep pace with increases in the number of passengers and any additional work would slow down and complicate immigration clearance of departing passengers, especially at peak traffic periods; and
-immigration control staff were under great pressure and if they were required to perform non-immigration duties
it would cause resentment and lower staff morale.
In following up the matter with the Director of Immigration, I commented that it was not a satisfactory reason for a Government department to refuse to carry out a duty on the grounds that its staff might be exposed to corruption opportunities because the objective of fostering integrity was to ensure that officers could be placed in positions of trust. I went on to suggest that the additional work might be less than one man-year in a year and that it should be possible for this extra effort to be absorbed within the Immigration Department's existing establishment of nearly 5 000 staff. The Director of Immigration does not accept that the additional workload could be absorbed without extra staff, particularly as it would be necessary to incorporate anti-corruption measures into the procedures for checking and cancelling the tax tickets. However, he has agreed to work out what the additional workload would be but, because of the need for thoroughness, it was bound to take some time.
78. Head 30 - Correctional Services Department. Operating industries.
79. Efficiency of the Correctional Services Industries. The Correctional Services Industries is engaged in manufacturing, laundry, vocational training and domestic and community services. The most important activity is manufacturing which uses about 62% of the Correctional Services Industries' resources in making garments, shoes and furniture and also metal, concrete and fibreglass products. The objectives of the Correctional Services Industries are to:
-keep inmates purposefully occupied;
-provide training in a variety of trades and skills to assist inmates in resettling into the community after release;
and
-provide, as economically as possible, goods and services for the Government and the public sector generally
through the use of prison labour.
I recently carried out a review of the Correctional Services Industries on the extent to which the third of these objectives was being achieved and concluded that, whilst there had been considerable developments and improvements in recent years, which has generated much saving and benefit to the Government, the Correctional Services Industries has been unable to fully achieve the objective because of inefficiency in certain aspects of its manufacturing activities and resistance by some Government departments to using its products.
80. In the mid-1970s the Government was aware that the potential of the prisons workforce was not being fully exploited and in 1977 an adviser in prison industries from the Scottish Prison Service was asked to report on improvements needed for the Correctional Services Industries to undertake more Government contract work. The Adviser's Report recommended that the Correctional Services Industries should be expanded and by further investment in workshop space and equipment it was hoped to take on more work and over a period of five years to absorb the Government's entire demand for garments and textiles. The Report stressed the importance of creating confidence amongst Government departments that the Correctional Services Industries could produce products equal to those
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