Taxpayer millions spent on IT in civil servants’ homes

WHITEHALL chiefs are continuing to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on chairs, laptops and IT services for home workers, with some contracts running until the end of 2025.

A Mail on Sunday analysis across central and local government found around 20 contracts related to home working worth £4.9million which extend well beyond the end of this year, even though the official guidance on home working has already been scrapped.

HM Land Registry has a £2.74 million contract which runs until February 2023 for the supply of home office furniture for its 6,000 staff, which works out at around £450 per person. The ongoing contracts contributed to an estimated £33.3million government spend on home working between March 2020 and September last year.

The top-spending agencies were the HMRC with £7.9million, followed by NHS England with £5.9 million, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by The Spectator magazine.

Other offices spent lavishly compared to the size of their workforce. The Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland spent a total of £2.8million on home working for their 3,040 staff – the equivalent of £928 each.

Last night, a spokesman for HM Land Registry said: ‘This contract has been awarded to ensure we can provide furniture needs for office working, but also home working and hybrid working, to meet the needs of today and the future and is comparable in value to similar furniture contracts in previous years.’

Further figures from the TaxPayers’ Alliance show that more than £800million has been spent on civil service offices in London since the pandemic began.

Danielle Boxall, media campaign manager at the pressure group, said: ‘Taxpayers won’t take kindly to footing the bill for empty offices.

‘Paying for the prime location of Whitehall pen-pushers costs a small fortune, with operating costs alone running into the hundreds of millions of pounds.’