The European Medicines Agency (EMA), based in London, has issued an estimated £ 32million tender for temporary workers to replace staff losses that may occur when it relocates due to Brexit.

The Financial Times reported that Gus Tugendhat, head of Tussell, a company that compiles data on public procurement, said this was “easily the EMA’s biggest published tender in over four years”. He added that it was equivalent to almost 40% of the total value of tenders published by the EMA since August 2013.

Tugendhat also suggested that the need for temporary staff could be “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 added that it had published the tender notice because its existing framework contract for recruiting interim staff would shortly expire. It routinely recruited interim staff in this way “to make up for short-term spikes in workload in certain areas or to replace staff on long-term leave.”

Meanwhile, an internal survey by EMA showed that three quarters of staff said they would want to stay in the UK rather than moving to one of the 19 remaining member countries. EMA staff will be relocated to one of the 19 remaining member states that are bidding to re-home it after Brexit. The agency stated that the best-case scenario was keeping up to 81% of their workforce.