Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 22 October 2024 to Question 8813 on Government Departments: Communications and Consultants, what the baseline figures on expenditure on (a) communications and (b) consultants are in each Department in 2024-25 or the closest year for which data is available.

Cabinet Office provided estimates of communications spending during the Public Spending Audit in July 2024. Estimates were based on internal Government Communication Service data on campaigns planned by Departments and arm's length bodies at the time of commissioning.

These indicate that the UK Government was expected to spend £449m on communications campaigns during 2024-25. At Autumn Budget 2024, the Chancellor announced that the Government Communications Service is expecting to save £85 million from reducing unnecessary communications spend – exceeding the £50 million target set out in her July 2024 Inheritance speech.

Communications and marketing spend above £100,000 is subject to central spending control and, as such, is published by each government department alongside other spend control data on a quarterly basis on gov.uk. This can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/search/all?keywords=spend+control+data&order=relevance.

In July 2024, the government committed to stop non-essential government consultancy spend in 2024-25 and halve government spending on consultancy in future years. This will save £550 million in 2024-25 and £680 million in 2025-26. To help departments do this and make value for money decisions about how to resource work the civil service headcount cap announced by the previous administration will be lifted. Individual departments publish different categories of spending on external resource including consultancy in their Annual Reports and Accounts. These can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-reports-and-accounts-for-central-government-departments