PN,
Nail, head, bang.
There's no problem selling this as the number of applicants for the "gucci" jobs abroad will always exceed the number of slots, even if the allowances are cut. Similarly, you could probably bin flying pay for new applicants tomorrow and still have far more volunteers than you could ever need - indeed, look at what happened when FP was no longer paid for training.
Consequently, this will be deemed a successful saving, and is probably a whole lot less damaging than some other ones that could have been considered. Salami slicing it may be, and certainly unpleasant for those on the receiving end, but we got a lot of sausage to save.
S41