Civil servants bag £1.4m in gift vouchers as unofficial bonuses
Reward scheme went on for years until The Telegraph found out about it
CIVIL servants have given themselves shopping vouchers worth almost £1.4million as a reward for good performance, a Sunday Telegraph investigation has found.
The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) spent £1,385,035.91 of taxpayer’s money on Love2Shop vouchers between September 2018 and Dec 31 2022.
Senior civil servants at BEIS spent the money on more than 350 separate transactions, with the largest individual purchase being almost £29,000 worth of vouchers on Feb 1 2019.
Any purchases of more than £500 on the department’s card must be reported for transparency purposes, and some government departments describe the reason for each purchase, but no such information is provided by BEIS.
It is understood that junior civil servants within the department received the vouchers of either £25, £50, £75 or £100 after being nominated for good work, and these were signed off by a senior colleague.
The department, which was disbanded in February as part of a reorganisation by Rishi Sunak, had almost 6,000 staff in its core department. If every staff member received an equal share of the spending, that would equate to £237.57 each. “The vouchers are BEIS’s method of rewarding high performance,” the department said in response to a Freedom of Information request. The unofficial bonus scheme went on for four years until The Telegraph uncovered it.
The final purchases from Park Retail Ltd, Love2Shop’s parent company, are recorded on Oct 26 2020, the day after a Freedom of Information request was received by the Government.
BEIS spent £2.5 million in total on departmental credit cards between April 2018 and December 2022, with more than half of that going on Love2Shop vouchers.
The most expensive month for vouchers was March 2022, when Kwasi Kwarteng was minister for business, with more than £77,000 spent on vouchers in 26 different transactions.
The total expenditure on shopping coupons in the first five months of last year was more than the annual salary of BEIS’s then top-earning civil servant, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser.
Sir Patrick’s salary is listed as between £185,000 and £189,999, while in January to May last year BEIS spent £193,394.46 on vouchers.
Monthly spending on the vouchers, which can be redeemed at a wide variety of outlets, exceeded the £34,000 estimated average annual salary of an NHS nurse on 11 occasions.
A BEIS spokesman said: “This expenditure is fully in line with long-standing arrangements in the Civil Service for rewarding and recognising good performance from staff.”
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Incentives for hard work and achievement are all well and good, but top brass have to remember the families picking up the tab.”
£77k The amount the BEIS spent on Love2Shop vouchers in March last year alone