The public spending watchdog will investigate the Government’s so-called “festival of Brexit” amid concerns that visitor numbers were less than 1% of early targets. A cross-party parliamentary committee has asked the National Audit Office (NAO) to look into how the £120 million project was managed to “help get to the bottom of how so much taxpayer money could be frittered away for so little return”.
In August, Politics Home reported that the festival – which is supposed to evoke the spirit of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the 1951 Festival of Britain – had received 238,000 visitors compared with organisers’ initial “stretch target” of 66 million. But the organisers say those figures “misrepresent the public engagement” and reflect attendance at only eight of 107 physical locations within the event’s programme.
Named Unboxed: Creativity in the UK, the event has been running throughout the year and is billed as a “celebration of creativity across all four nations of the United Kingdom”. The initiative was originally unveiled in 2018 by Theresa May as Festival UK 2022 and was due to be a nationwide festival of creativity following the UK’s departure from the European Union. Jacob Rees-Mogg previously dubbed it the Festival of Brexit.
