The Ministry of Justice is unlikely to have lost much sleep over Labour’s dossier of Whitehall spending, dubbed with great fanfare ‘The GPC Files’. Labour – which introduced the Government Procurement Card scheme while in government to cut red tape – described the scheme as ‘Whitehall’s version of a contactless debit card’.

‘Thousands of these black cards are used by government departments with little control, scrutiny or oversight,’ claimed the would-be guardian of sound public finances. ‘Treating taxpayers’ money like this is wrong.’

Alas for Labour, evidence that MoJ mandarins have been living the high life on the plastic is thin. But we do learn that on 15 September 2020, the MoJ paid Positive Media Promotions £4,018.80 for 850 branded USB cables to distribute to staff taking part in a virtual conference. £4.73 per cable doesn’t strike Obiter as a particular rip-off, though you’d expect many households to have drawers full of the damn things anyway.

Meanwhile a search through the transactions of HM Courts & Tribunals Service revealed stationery as the most popular purchase, despite the alleged onward march of digitisation.

The Attorney General’s Office was not among the 14 Whitehall departments whose transactions were uploaded on Labour’s database. However, Labour said that on 8 August 2022, the office uploaded several months of GPC data, which described each transaction in detail and published the names of the card holders responsible.

After the apparent error was pointed out, the data was rapidly revised and detailed explanations of spending replaced with generic descriptions. For example, £909 of spending at Westminster curry house The Cinnamon Club on ‘the attorney general’s lunch with the prosecutor general of Ukraine’ (26 May) became simply ‘meeting refreshments’, while £1,120 paid to The Crafty Hen Ltd for an ‘Away day, team-building, ceramic painting for 35’ (1 March) became simply ‘Training’. Obiter is glad to have escaped that one.

Topics