04 November 2023 , 18:04
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Civil servants at the Home Office have been given £14.5million in bonuses, despite a string of failings.
The payments handed out in 2022-23 to staff working for Home Secretary Suella Braverman are more than double the £6.6m given out the year before. In total, Government civil servants have been rewarded with bonuses of more than £40m, paid to them in vouchers to spend in High Street stores.
That is up £10m in a year but the 33% rise across all departments is dwarfed by the 119% Home Office surge. And the increase is likely to raise eyebrows at a time when the department is in the public eye for its failures. Those include its inability to get a grip on the small boats crisis, including the shambles of its flagship policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Announced more than 18 months ago, it still faces a challenge in court. The department was also hit by the scandal of the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, Dorset, and the £6m spent daily to keep asylum seekers in hotels due to a backlog of 175,000 applications. Amnesty International’s Steve Valdez-Symonds said of those delays: “It is utterly disgraceful that new asylum laws will make this backlog, its cost and the limbo it imposes even worse.”
The vouchers – given as bonuses to thousands of Whitehall staff, often in values of £25 to £100 – can be spent in stores such as Asda, Greggs, John Lewis and Primark. The scheme is run by French-owned Edenred, which ran the school meals initiative.
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In answer to a question from Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry, Home Office minister Chris Philp said bonuses reward “excellent performance”. The Foreign Office had the second highest total at £11.1m, then the Ministry of Justice and Department of Work and Pensions at £5.8m each. The Cabinet Office gave £920,000 and HMRC £820,000. The lowest were £138,500 at Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, £110,000 at the Treasury and £74,325 at Health and Social Security.
The Government said awards “follow an approval process to ensure value”, adding: “These schemes incentivise productivity. Non-cash vouchers are standard practice across the private sector.”