£1.9 BILLION
That’s the staggering sum wasted in Whitehall blunders in just one year ... almost £4,000 EVERY MINUTE
WHITEHALL blunders cost taxpayers a staggering £1.9 billion last year, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Ministers and officials blew almost £4,000 a minute on failed projects, botched contracts and compensation payouts – up 12 per cent on the previous year.
The worst offender was the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), which wrote off an astonishing £330 million overpaid to benefits claimants who couldn’t afford to repay the money when the mistakes came to light.
Transport chiefs paid an eyewatering £134 million in compensation to Agility Trains because failures by Network Rail to re-lay tracks meant new rolling stock could not operate. They also waived £53 million of fees and fines owed by motorists who used the Dartford Crossing in Kent but failed to pay the toll.
Other shocking examples of waste include almost £2.5 million s quandered o n deport a t i o n flights for asylum-seekers that had to be cancelled due to court rulings, and £39 million on outof-date medicines.
The figures, covering the last financial year, come from an analysis of accounts across Whitehall’s 20 Government departments and emerge ahead of Chancellor Philip Hammond’s Budget on October 29.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘This is an astonishing amount of money that is going down the drain. The Government needs to get to grips with this and think twice before it starts even thinking about increasing taxes.’
The Whitehall waste list covers sums of £300,000 or more, the threshold at which an official explanation is required of how the cash was mis-spent.
A total of £57 million in student loans was abandoned after officials realised they would never recover the money. Education chiefs blew £57.6 million to rescue crisis-hit colleges, including £21.3 million to Hull College and £12.1 million to Central Sussex College. The bailouts are usually loans, but in these cases were waived by Ministers.
A f urt her £ 60 mill i on was handed to solar energy and construction firms to settle legal claims against the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy after Government subsidies were slashed.
The analysis also revealed how the Cabinet Office squandered £ 377,000 to pay architects to work on a revamp of its Whitehall headquarters before mandarins decided the cost of major works on the Grade I listed building would be ‘too high’.
The £1.9 billion sum is the same as the entire annual budget for the Foreign Office.
Jeremy Hutton, a policy analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘ This level of waste is beyond the pale. It is vital that Government departments take some responsibility for poor spending if they hope to keep the trust of taxpayers.’
A Government spokesman said: ‘We have taken action to reduce the write-off of difficultto-recover debts. We continue to deliver savings for taxpayers, including operating efficiencies, asset sales, spending controls and action on fraud.’