Rishi Sunak signs half a million tax dollars for focus groups and polls

Exclusive:

Labor accused Rishi Sunak of using taxpayers’ money on “an exercise in vanity for a chancellor desperate to fix his image”.

Rishi Sunak has signed a £500,000,000 taxpayer-funded deal for focus groups and online polls.

Deltapoll researchers have been brought in to conduct two targeted focus groups and one national online survey led by the Treasury every week until February 2023 – at a cost of £9,805 per week.

Labor accused Rishi Sunak of using taxpayers’ money on “an exercise in vanity for a chancellor desperate to fix his image”.

This will bring the Treasury’s total spending on private focus groups and opinion polls to more than £1.35m – or £41,000 a month – since June 2020.

Angela Rayner, Labor Deputy Leader, said: “At a time when Rishi Sunak has been telling the British people he has no money to ease the cost of living crisis and that it would be ‘stupid’ to pay his energy bills To lower it, it’s just mind boggling that he’s ordered another half a million tax dollars to be spent on private focus groups and opinion polls.

“The government appears to have half a million to spend on spin doctors while Jacob Rees-Mogg threatens to ax thousands of public sector jobs in the name of cost-cutting and throwing working people under the bus again.”

About £250,000 of taxpayers’ money was spent on focus groups in 2020, with more than half taking place in Tory target seats.

Information disclosed under freedom of information laws shows that 16 out of 28 focus groups were held in the North East, North West, Midlands and Scotland.

Four meetings were held in Scotland and only one in Wales.

A further four were held in the East Midlands, two in the West Midlands – but only one in London.

The 2020 focus groups conducted by Hanbury Strategy have been instructed to test public opinion on the government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.

But the new contract with Deltapoll makes no mention of the pandemic.

Ms Rayner said: “Early on in the pandemic, the Treasury Department justified its spending on focus groups and surveys as an emergency measure to test the impact of various policy options, but now this is little more than a taxpayer-funded vanity exercise for a chancellor desperately trying to improve his image to repair.

“He shouldn’t have to spend a small fortune on focus groups to hear what the British public is telling him: they want serious action to tackle the cost of living crisis, starting with the adoption of Labour’s plan for a windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas, to fund savings on energy bills.”

A UK Treasury spokesman said: “The Treasury conducts regular surveys to help develop and measure the impact and understanding of its policies. All surveys are subject to the usual tendering process to ensure the best value for taxpayers money.”