THE Foreign and Commonwealth Office could raise tens of millions of pounds a year by charging revellers on stag and hen parties who get into trouble abroad, a public spending watchdog says today.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says that consular staff are increasingly having to bail out drunken groups on stag weekends who lose money, get arrested or are injured.

Consulates are allowed to charge £84.50 an hour for assisting Britons but this power is rarely used. Last year the levy was applied in only 323 out of 84,000 cases where consulates provided help.

Today’s PAC report urges the Foreign Office to make more use of its powers to charge “those who have been clearly negligent or otherwise at fault”.

A Foreign Office spokesman said that 70 per cent of stag and hen parties now took place in cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Prague, Dublin, Paris and Tallinn in Estonia. Of these as many as one in four “turn into horrors” where a consulate is contacted directly by a stag party or by the police.

Half of the requests for assistance last year involved lost or stolen money, a third involved illness or injury and a quarter concerned arrests mainly for being drunk and disorderly. The spokesman said that many of the parties were also badly prepared. Only 31 per cent of revellers had taken a copy of their passport and nearly half had no travel insurance.

The Foreign Office does not hold a breakdown of stag party incidents but overall consulate figures show that 3,900 Britons die abroad each year, 4,200 are taken into hospital and 6,000 are detained in foreign prisonEdward Leigh, chairman of the PAC, said: “Consular staff increasingly have to deal with the appalling results of British tourists carousing abroad. The Department should get a clearer idea of the effectiveness of its publicity aimed at improving the behaviour of the groups who most often end up needing help, such as stag and hen parties. Where our nationals have landed themselves in trouble as a result of their own irresponsibility, the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] should not hesitate to charge them for its services.”

Britons spent £430 million last year on stag and hen trips abroad, according to the Egg online bank. Kitty Ussher, a Labour committee member, said: “I think the problems that we have seen are the result of changes in travelling culture caused by no-frills airlines offering low-cost flights.”

The committee paid tribute to the “great dedication” shown by consular staff in responding to no fewer than nine major incidents and natural disasters last year including the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Pakistan earthquake. But it called for better training and planning for dealing with emergencies and more consistent practices around the world. The Foreign Office has conceded that mistakes were made after the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004.

The committee also questioned the issuing of passports at consular posts around the world, suggesting that security could be compromised.

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