The government spent £5.5m in a single month on management consultants to help with Brexit policy, it has emerged.
Labour analysed government data on all spending of £25,000 or more in January, the last month for which figures have been released, and calculated that the amount spent on external consultants for Brexit-related work was £6m.
The Cabinet Office, the department which organises such cross-departmental spending, said just over £400,000 of this was spent not on consultants but by a media buying company to purchase advertising space for the government’s Brexit-related public information campaign.
It said the £5.5m, which primarily went to multinational companies including EY, PwC and Bain, covered necessary extra skills for Brexit-related tasks such as operational and project management tasks. The monthly cost was expected to increase as the Brexit process accelerated, the department said.
At the end of last year the Treasury said it had allocated £4.2bn for government spending on Brexit preparations.
At the weekend the Centre for European Reform released calculations suggesting Britain’s economy is 2.5% smaller than it would have been if voters had chosen to stay in the EU in 2016, resulting in an extra £19bn of government borrowing a year.
Jenny Chapman, a shadow Brexit minister, said: “The Tories’ handling of Brexit is a national embarrassment. While the prime minister is stubbornly refusing to accept her bad deal is dead, we now learn her government spent millions of pounds on private consultants in the same month it suffered the biggest defeat in parliamentary history. This underlines the importance of parliament taking control and finding a way to break the deadlock.”
A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “It is long-established practice for government departments to draw on the advice of external specialists. In preparing for the UK to make an orderly and successful exit from the European Union, we are equipping ourselves with the right people and the right skills.”
• This article was amended on 2 April 2019. The £5.5m was spending on consultants across government, not just by the Cabinet Office as an earlier version said. This has been corrected.
