Treasury counts the cost of Truss’s mini-Budget

Many institutions were left counting the cost of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget. And nowhere more so, it seems, than on Horse Guards Road, where those much-loathed guardians of Treasury orthodoxy were forced to work overtime to deal with the resulting market fallout. 

New figures, released in response to a parliamentary question by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney, reveal that Treasury staff overtime almost doubled after September’s ‘fiscal event’. As officials battled to cope with the resulting market chaos in the weeks that followed, they clocked up more than 1,500 extra hours in October than in the same month last year.

Exchequer Secretary James Cartlidge told the Commons that staff claimed 3,541 hours of overtime in October, up from 1,884 the previous year – an increase of 88 per cent. It saw staff earn an extra £89,771 for their work. Kerching! But Cartlidge also confirmed that these extra hours were only the ones where staff claimed for payment, meaning that officials may have worked many more hours, unpaid.