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Treasury ministers have been criticised for spending thousands of pounds on improving their media performances while axing winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners.
An answer to a written parliamentary question by Tory MP John Cooper shows a total of £9,700 went on “media training for members of the ministerial team”.
That would be enough to pay the winter fuel payments for around 50 pensioners.
The Foreign Office and Scotland Office have also admitted spending thousands of pounds on media training since Labour entered office on July 5.
Cooper, the MP for Dumfries and Galloway, said Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, criticised the last Tory government for spending hundreds of millions of pounds on content for ministers’ social media platforms.
He said: “Now he has been left red-faced by the shameful revelation that the taxpayer has been forced to shell out thousands of pounds to train him, Rachel Reeves, and her ministers how to defend their cruel decisions like cutting winter fuel payments on the airwaves – money that could have funded support for dozens of vulnerable pensioners.
“The British public deserve better than this Labour government of broken promises.”
A Labour source said: “John Cooper who is complaining about this spending is the same John Cooper who worked as an adviser in the last government when it spent vast sums on media training, including handing a £110,000 contract to Rishi Sunak’s TV debate coach.”
Reeves has faced severe criticism for the decision to means test the winter fuel payment, meaning 10 million old people who previously received it now do not.
Two weeks ago, she pledged to take “an iron fist against waste” as Labour tries to plug the £22 billion black hole left by the last government.
A spokesman for the chancellor said: “We’re not going to take any lectures from the Tories on how to handle the public finances when they lost billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to dodgy contracts during the pandemic.”
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