The National Audit Office has rebuked the flagrant spending at the Bank of England who spent £5m without following proper procedures (for that read any procedures). They spend much of this on IT issues and the NAO indicate that considerable savings could have been made. Further, they had 800 empty desks which they defended by stating half of them were because of staff leave. Still even allowing for this 400 empty desks seems excessive and with some planning, they should be able to do away with most of them with hot desking.
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At a time when public services for the poorest in our society continue to be underfunded, it is sad to see such blatant disregard for costs especially by an institution tasked with overseeing financial stability.
This culture of exuberant spending seems common though and in June this year, it was revealed that they spent a quite staggering £390,000 on travel and accommodation expenses for Two staff between December 2015 and February 2018. This included a £469 taxi fare and £8,000 for a flight from Washington. You can tell these were excessive when a Conservative MP serving on the Treasury Committee criticizes them!
