The Government has been accused of “rank double standards” after giving almost £30 million in high-street vouchers to civil servants amid a pay freeze prompted by the cost-of-living crisis. Sixteen Whitehall departments in 2021-22 paid out a combined total of £29.57 million to staff in the form of ‘reward and recognition’ vouchers, a third more than in 2020-21 and two thirds more than in 2018-19, according to departmental data provided to Labour.
The surge in the use of vouchers coincided with the imposition by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak of a one-year, post-Covid pay freeze across most of the civil service as food inflation in the UK soared. Shadow cabinet office minister Florence Eshalomi said: “No-one would dispute that hard-working civil servants deserve to be recognised for their efforts, especially those who went the extra mile during the pandemic, but once again, what we see in these figures is a Tory government guilty of rank double standards.
“At the same time that ministers are refusing even to discuss the subject of pay with our nation’s nurses, we now discover they got around their own pay freeze last year by giving out record numbers of non-cash vouchers to Whitehall staff instead.”
