Public spending watchdog to investigate £120m ‘festival of Brexit’

Festival’s design and execution ‘has been an unadulterated shambles,’ MP says

Julian Knight said the project was an ‘excessive waste of money’ (House of Commons/PA)

The government’s so-called “festival of Brexit” will be probed amid concerns that £120 million of taxpayers’ cash was “frittered away” on a project that brought “so little in return”.

MPs in a cross-party parliamentary committee have approached the National Audit Office (NAO) to ask it to look into how the project was managed and whether political pressures kept it going.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee had found that the number of visitors to the event – called ‘Unboxed: Creativity in the UK’ – was just 0.36 per cent of early targets.