Foreign Office spent £500,000 on luxury furnishings in just 12 months

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 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 business – while another £11,500 went to the designer wallpaper supplier Romo Group.

More than £30,000 was also spent on luxury furniture from Heal’s, 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.

Sir Keir Starmer’s party has dubbed the findings “the GPC files”, describing the purchases made by civil servants and ministers using government procurement cards (GPC) as a “scandalous catalogue of waste”.

Deputy Labour 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 fabrics appear to have been chosen when “less expensive but still perfectly decent alternatives will have been available”.

The party also 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 concerns about the amount spent on dining and alcohol, including almost £345,000 by FCDO officials in 2021 under the heading “restaurants and bars”.

open image in gallery

The dossier also showed:

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 spokesperson – who claimed that the prime minister had not signed off on the £3,000 photos when he was 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, introduced a requirement for spending to be publicly declared, and introduced controls after the last Labour government.