The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has issued an estimated £32million tender for temporary workers to “replace staff losses” that will occur when it relocates.
The shock revelation comes after it emerged three quarters of staff at the EMA said they would want to stay in Britain rather than moving to one of the 19 remaining member countries.
Gus Tugendhat, head of public data firm Tussell, said this was “easily the EMA’s biggest published tender in over four years”.
He said it was equivalent to almost 40 per cent of the total value of tenders published by the EMA since August 2013, according to the Financial Times.
The European Union trumpeted Brexit as an opportunity to relocate the regulatory agency to the continent alongside its banking equivalent.
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Staff will be relocated to one of the 19 remaining member states that are bidding to re-home it after Brexit.
The EMA said they were publishing the tender notice because its existing framework contract for recruiting interim staff would shortly expire.
Bosses said the firm, currently based in London’s Canary Wharf, recruited staff in this way to “make up for short-term spokes in workload in certain areas or to replace staff on long-term leave”.
The agency said it would be “also using the framework to make up short-term for some staff losses expected to occur in the course of its relocation”.
Mr Tugendhat said the move was “driven by higher than normal staff turnover caused by the uncertainty about where and when the EMA will move out of London as a result of Brexit”.
The EMA is by far the biggest of the two regulatory bodies set to leave Britain after it quits the EU and employs some 890 staff out of their combined workforce of 1,000.
European Parliament sources have told the Telegraph MEPs have now been briefed that three quarters of them may refuse to make the move, sparking a potential crisis for the EU.
A recent staff survey also showed that eight out of the potential locations had been backed by less than 30 per cent of the staff.
This could mean the agency “is no longer able to function and, as there is no back-up, this would have important consequences for public health in the EU”.
The agency has warned that the best-case scenario was keeping up to 81 per cent of their workforce.