Latest updates: Labour deputy leader says her expenses were necessary for work and accuses government of wasting taxpayer’s money
Transport minister Richard Holden said a Labour investigation into government procurement cards (GPCs) had “wasted” civil servant time as the information was “already publicly available”.
It comes after Labour compiled a dossier on the use of the cards – with the party using parliamentary questions to secure some of the data – showing that across 2021 for 14 major Whitehall departments, a total of at least £145.5m was spent using GPCs.
In the big picture, what we’ve seen since 2010, is an 85% reduction in this. All of this data is publicly available online, it has been since 2012 – something which didn’t happen under the last Labour government.
We publish it on a monthly basis. The Labour party has spent half-a-million pounds asking parliamentary questions, 2,500 of them, wasting my civil servants time for information that is already publicly available and that they hid when they were last in office.
I don’t think any government minister would have been involved in that decision.
I could be wrong but that’s not my [understanding]. What wouldn’t normally happen is a spending of around £3,000 going over a minister’s desk because, if you did, that’s all ministers would do on a daily basis.
Today’s shocking revelations lift the lid on a scandalous catalogue of waste, with taxpayers’ money frittered away across every part of government, while in the rest of the country, families are sick with worry about whether their pay cheque will cover their next weekly shop or the next tranche of bills.
I don’t think the £1,600 on that is the same as millions of pounds that is being used on these credit cards in an inappropriate way. You know, we need to make sure there’s transparency and that the public are getting value for money.
I can absolutely justify my use of using electronic equipment to do my job, especially when I’m not – during the pandemic – when I wasn’t in the office in Westminster. And as I say, now I’m speaking to you on that very iPad that was purchased.
