ALASTAIR DALTON

TRANSPORT CORRESPONDENT

RYANAIR, the budget airline famous for cutting costs, has banned its head office staff from charging their mobile phones at work.

Chargers have joined stationery items such as highlighter pens and Post-It notes to be outlawed from the Irish airline’s head office in Dublin in an effort to save money.

Ryanair staff are also encouraged to use pens picked up elsewhere, while cabin crew have to pay for their own uniforms.

The latest move was condemned yesterday by a union for showing the airline’s ``lack of respect`` for staff.

The employees’ experience has some parallels with that of passengers, who have experienced an ongoing series of cost-cutting measures, such as non-reclining seats and photograph processing envelopes doubling as sick bags.

The airline also charged a disabled passenger £18 to bring his wheelchair on to a flight at Stansted airport, which a court later ruled was unlawful.

Ingo Marowsky, the secretary of the civil aviation section of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, said: ``This penny-pinching is certainly not the worst thing happening at Ryanair - but it is another example of a lack of respect and a culture that always picks on the company’s workers first when any savings are to be made.``

A spokeswoman for the airline said the charger ban was part of its cost minimisation approach, but no estimate had been made of the likely savings. Mobile phones cost a fraction of a penny of mains electricity to recharge.

The spokeswoman said the edict was circulated to staff in an internal e-mail, but it had not originated from Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s colourful chief executive.

She said: ``The cost may not be expensive, but every penny saved counts and all savings go back towards lowering fares for European consumers. There’s not going to be a direct correlation between this measure and fares, but every time we make a saving, our fares go lower.``

The spokeswoman said there had been ``no reaction`` to the ban among the 200 head office staff. ``No-one has batted an eyelid,`` she said.

Staff should ``ask a friend`` if their mobile phone battery ran out at work, the spokeswoman added, but she declined to comment about whether they might be tempted to use an office phone instead for personal calls. ``I am not going to speculate about the psychology of what might happen,`` she said.

The spokeswoman said staff were permitted to bring in their own highlighters, but this was an example of ``a cost that could be cut out``.

Ryanair, which claims the ``lowest fares and lowest costs in Europe``, has achieved this partly by having a fraction of the staff of other airlines.

According to its own figures, the carrier handles 10,000 passengers per employee, compared to no-frills rivals EasyJet’s 6,300 and British Airways’ 760.

The charger ban comes days after Ryanair’s latest planned money-spinner was scrapped after failing to take off. Mr O’Leary had previously hailed hand-held in-flight entertainment screens as ``the next revolution in the low-fares airline industry``, and said Ryanair expected to make enormous sums of money from them.

The airline announced in January that its latest quarterly profits had fallen by 26 per cent to £24 million due to record fuel prices and competition