The Foreign Office splashed out almost £500,000 of taxpayers’ money on luxury furnishings and fabrics in one year alone.
The spending spree included almost £4,000 on two purchases from Lady Deirdre Dyson’s designer rug and carpet collection, and £8,000 at Chelsom Ltd, a high-end lighting designer.
Just over £7,000 was spent at Osborne & Little – former Tory chancellor George Osborne’s family wallpaper firm, while another £11,500 went to the designer wallpaper supplier Romo Group.
More than £30,000 was also spent on luxury furniture at Heals, The Cotswold Company and Ercol. Just over £2,300 was spent on a single purchase from Weaver Green, a hand-woven rug designer.
Other one-off purchases were also made from Olivia’s (£1,680 on 7 January), Clare Gaudion (£2,370), Soho Home (£2,070), and Amara Living (£2,160 on 8 March) – all specialists in luxury decorative homeware.
The huge amount spent by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the year up until August 2022, when both Liz Truss and Dominic Raab were in charge, came from the latest Labour analysis of the use of government debit cards.
Keir Starmer’s party has dubbed the findings “the GPC files” – attacking the “scandalous catalogue of waste” in civil servants and ministers use of Government Procurement Cards (GPC).
Deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “This is a culture of extravagance and excess set from the very top… and now it is clear the Foreign Office have followed suit with spending splurges on luxury fabrics and furnishings.”
Labour said “high-end” furniture, lighting and fabric appear to have been chosen when “less expensive but still perfectly decent alternatives will have been available”.
The party pointed to evidence of end-of-year spending sprees to use up budgets – with well over a quarter of the amount splashed on furnishings (27 per cent) spent in March 2022 alone.
It has emerged that Ms Truss oversaw a significant increase in spending on the debit cards used at the FCDO when she took over the department.
The Foreign Office is thought to have spent more than £30m on the cards in the 11 months from October 2021 to September 2022 – 50 per cent higher than the final 11 months of Mr Raab’s time at the department.
Labour has also raised concern about dining and alcohol purchases, including almost £345,000 by FCDO officials in 2021 under the heading “restaurants and bars”.
Former foreign secretaries Liz Truss and Dominic Raab
The dossier also showed:
– In March2021, when Rishi Sunak was chancellor, the Treasury spent £3,393 buying 13 fine art photographs from The Tate Gallery, despite ministries having access to the Government Art Collection’s pictures.
– The Foreign Office spent £7,218 on a reception for then-foreign secretary Ms Truss at Sydney Harbour in early 2022. Ms Truss and her entourage also spent £1,443 on lunch and dinner at two restaurants in Indonesia.
– Then-attorney general Suella Braverman and her Ukrainian counterpart visited Indian restaurant The Cinnamon Club in Westminster along with six others in May 2022 at a cost of £909, just under £114 a head.
The rules on government procurement cards were heavily relaxed at the start of the Covid pandemic, allowing cardholders to spend up to £20,000 per transaction and £100,000 per month.
Some 14 departments splashed out at least £145.5m on the special procurement cards in 2021 – up from £84.9m in 2010-11, according to Labour analysis of government data and parliamentary questions.
Ms Rayner said a Labour government would set up a new regulator called the Office of Value for Money to monitor civil service spending.
Mr Sunak’s official spokesman – who said the PM did not sign off on the £3,000 photos when chancellor – said: “As ever, everyone who spends taxpayers’ money needs to be aware that they are doing just that and as the government we are very responsible in how we use these cards.”
A senior Tory source said the party had cut the number of procurement cards, introducing a requirement for spending to be publicly declared and introduced controls after the last Labour government.
