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The Ministry of Justice, the Whitehall department in charge of a £13bn annual budget for prisons, probation and courts across England and Wales, has failed to file spending receipts of nearly £11bn, a report has said.
Tussell, the public spending analyst firm, said the government department was more than two years behind on publishing receipts for multimillion pound contracts, weakening scrutiny around public money.
The last time the government department filed receipts from its suppliers was May 2023, Tussell said. The industry standard is to allow leeway of two months to publish receipts.
A spokesperson for Tussell said: “This gap in publication is deeply concerning and highlights that the government is failing to meet its own transparency standards.
“Such delays undermine visibility over public spending at a time when accountability and scrutiny are more critical than ever.”
Between June 2022 and May 2023 – the most recent 12-month period for which the MoJ has published its receipts – the department’s spending receipts amounted to £5bn.
Tussell has calculated the missing spending by dividing this figure by 12 and multiplying it by the number of months when the department has failed to file receipts, which is 26. The estimated total came to £10.8bn, Tussell said.
This calculation includes all Ministry of Justice arm’s length bodies, except for the family court advisers Cafcass and the Legal Services Board, which are both more up to date in their publishing.
Tom Brake, the director of the transparency organisation Unlock Democracy, condemned the MoJ’s failure to publish.
“With government finances painfully tight, spending receipts must be published promptly,” he said. “They help detect and prevent the misuse and waste of precious resources. Delaying their publication damages the government’s ability to control its expenditure.”
According to government-wide calculations, the Ministry of Justice is by far the worst performing department when it comes to missing spending data.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is 13 months behind on disclosing its spending receipts, worth an estimated £3.7bn. The third-worst department is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which has a 10-month lag on publication of spending estimated at £880m.
The MoJ received a real-term 1.8% spending increase in June, according to the spending review announced by the chancellor.
Day-to-day MoJ spending is set to reach £13.2bn by 2028-29, while capital spending will rise to £2.3bn annually for 2026-27 and 2028-29, before returning to £2bn in 2029-30. This will support the initiative to create 14,000 new prison places by 2031.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies noted in February that MoJ spending was cut by 70% over the early 2010s and, within this, capital funding for HM Courts and Tribunals Service and HM Prison and Probation Service was cut by more than 90%.
The government aims to create 14,000 additional prison places by 2031 by spending £4.7bn – with about 2,500 of these having already been built since July 2024.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that all spending had been accounted for.
“We need to review a substantial amount of data to ensure we do not release anything that could cause any risk, particularly to individuals,” they said.
“All departmental spend is accounted for in our annual accounts and it’s misleading to suggest otherwise.”
