In February I highlighted the £554,000 government contract awarded to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for two months of "consultancy support regarding geospatial data" immediately prior to the Geospatial Commission announcement in November.
I now see that BCG was also awarded a £1.7 million contract for five months of consultancy on the 'MasterMap Options Project'. That contract ended on June 1st.
The scope and outputs from this consultancy work are unclear. The contract document has not been published on Contracts Finder, the Government's transparency platform for public procurement.
However it's difficult to reconcile the amount of public money spent helping Ordnance Survey develop options for MasterMap with the lack of detail in the MasterMap announcement itself.
According to open spending data, Cabinet Office paid £557,400 to BCG in April and £668,760 in May. The Geospatial Commission was the expense area for both transactions.
Cabinet Office also made two payments totalling £282,000 to BCG in January – those transactions pre-date the formal start of the Geospatial Commission and were allocated to "DEPT OVERHEADS MISC".
(HM Treasury may have made payments on the first BCG contract, but that's hard to tell because the ministry is more than a year behind in publication of its spending data.)
Update 23 August 2018:
Treasury spend data published today includes UKGI payments of £553,600 and £182,700 to BCG in November and December 2017, for "consultancy services". That brings the total to just over £2.2m.