Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how much his Department has spent on (a) hospitality and (b) catering since May 2015.
Guidance to staff now states that refreshments may only be ordered for meetings with external attendees of longer than four hours.
The Department has no separate budget for hospitality and catering. The Department spent £10,829.44 on hospitality from May 2015 to 29 February 2016.
This compares to a bill of almost £500,000 in the last year of the Labour Government.