Nestled inside a shaded courtyard, Plataran in south Jakarta offers diners the promise of authentic Indonesian food “with the atmosphere of Javanese royalty”. Five miles to the north, Kaum gives guests a taste of tribal Indonesian cooking with modern inflections.
Together, these are two of the city’s finest restaurants, and they are where Liz Truss and her team decamped, first for lunch and then for dinner, during a whistle-stop trip to the Indonesian capital in 2021. The two meals cost the taxpayer £1,443 – all paid for conveniently by handing over one of the thousands of government procurement cards (GPCs) that officials can use to pay for anything under £20,000.
Just over a decade ago, the Conservatives highlighted the amount of wasteful spending carried out on these cards, with David Cameron calling it “hideous” when he was running for election in 2010.
However, a Labour analysis published on Monday shows that the use of them since then has increased. Since 2010-11, the amount spent on GPCs by 14 of the main 15 central government departments has risen by about 70% to £146m, the Labour figures show. The one department not analysed was the Ministry of Defence, a heavy user of the cards but the data from which contained inconsistencies.
Much of that money has been spent on the day-to-day items needed to run a government department, such as office stationery, furniture and training courses. The government likes using such cards because it can reduce bureaucracy and transaction costs, and make sure suppliers get paid on time.
In 2020, the Cabinet Office told departments to increase spending limits so that individuals could pay for items worth up to £20,000 on the cards, with a monthly limit of £100,000. That guidance was intended to make sure small suppliers continued to trade through the pandemic, but has not been subsequently rescinded.
Oversight of what is bought with the cards is patchy, however, and rules vary from department to department on how the money can be used.
Some departments, for example, ban staff from using the cards to buy alcohol. On the other hand, the Foreign Office, where officials are expected to entertain foreign dignitaries, spends hundreds of thousands of pounds a year on beer, wine and spirits in locations around the world.
Accounting also varies hugely around Whitehall. Nine departments provide no specific description of what has been bought or why, but others, such as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, give the date, cost, supplier and detailed reason for each transaction. So, if a voter wants to know how the department welcomed back 250 staff to the office in Workington, Cumbria, in July 2022, they can find out that it spent £779 on cakes from Sainsbury’s.
The data sheds a light on the lengths some departments go to carry out corporate-style rebranding. The Environment Agency, for example, spent £3,482 on branded hi-vis jackets and another £2,450 on branded hand sanitiser. Meanwhile, UK Visas and Immigration spent £968 on vacuum-insulated cups in the agency’s corporate colour of purple.
Throughout the data, though, it is the Foreign Office that stands out as one of the most liberal users of GPCs, spending millions of pounds on food, wine, hotels, catering, gifts and furnishings for offices and residences.
The hotels often have five stars, and the restaurants, awards from the Michelin guide. Gifts come from Royal Crown Derby and Fortnum & Mason. Wines come from high-end English producers such as Ridgeview Estate and Chapel Down.
But standards are not always so high, depending on who is being catered for.
When staff from Border Force were deployed to Glasgow airport last year to help manage the number of delegates turning up for the Cop26 climate summit, they were given £609-worth of sandwiches from Pret a Manger. And when officials from the same agency had to work in Dover on Christmas Day in 2021, they were given permission to use a procurement card to buy a Christmas meal at the local Holiday Inn for about £30 each.
