Blundering ministers and officials in Whitehall have been wasting more than £4.6million of taxpayers’ money every day.
Over a year, £1.7billion was squandered on botched projects, accounting mistakes, faulty overtime payments and compensation payouts.
Equivalent to blowing £54 a second, the sum would be enough to train 100,000 nurses, pay the wages of 91,000 soldiers or recruit 87,700 police officers.
The waste included more than £1.2million spent on severance payments to 54 people working on the controversial HS2 high-speed railway line.
Almost £2.1million was spent on deportation flights for failed asylum seekers whose journeys had to be cancelled at the last minute because of court rulings.
Another £1.6million went up in smoke because the Department for International Development ordered too many medicines to help tackle the Ebola outbreak in Africa between 2014 and 2016.
And a Whitehall department ended up with a £750,000 bill after a Cartier diamond ring vanished from the British Museum in London.
Meanwhile, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport shelled out £4.2million to the owner of a painting by the German neoclassicist Johann Zoffany that was destroyed in a fire at the National Trust property Clandon Park in Surrey in April 2015.
The payment for the picture, entitled The Mathew Family at Felix Hall, Kelvedon, Essex, was the largest ever made for a lost or damaged work of art in Britain under the Government’s indemnity scheme, which insures works on loan to public venues.
The figures, which cover the 12 months to last March, were calculated from the accounts of Whitehall’s 20 departments. They come at a time when public services are being cut and social care funding is in crisis.
A Whitehall department ended up with a £750,000 bill after a Cartier diamond ring vanished from the British Museum in London
The Whitehall loss list covers sums of £300,000 or more – the threshold that triggers an official explanation of how the cash was spent.
Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake said: ‘These figures expose a staggering level of incompetence.
‘People will be furious to see that while their local schools and hospitals are facing cuts, every day millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash is being thrown down the drain. Ministers have got to crack down on the scandalous waste happening right under their noses across government departments.’
James Price, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘People will be absolutely astounded to see so much of their money wasted by the Government on mistakes and bad projects.’
The biggest money-waster was the Department for Work and Pensions, which wrote off £412million. This included £335million on overpaying benefits that officials were unable to claw back from claimants, including double-paid £10 Christmas bonus payments totalling £395,000.
The biggest money-waster was the Department for Work and Pensions, which wrote off £412million
The ministry also blew £2.9million on a project in the belief that it would eventually be paid for by the EU, only to realise too late that it did not qualify for Brussels money.
The newly formed Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was the second most profligate department, wasting £388million.
This included £97million that one of its quangos, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, had to pay to two US firms after botching a contract for cleaning up old nuclear power stations. Defence chiefs lost £263million, including almost £90million when they decided to scrap Operation Soothsayer, a project to develop a state-of-the-art system for tapping into enemy communications.
The Ministry of Defence also took a £3million hit to its finances after the £1.1billion nuclear submarine HMS Ambush was damaged when it collided with a merchant ship in a training exercise off the coast of Gibraltar in July last year.
The £2.1million wasted on cancelled flights for failed asylum seekers was at the Home Office. Officials booked seats before legal challenges were launched against deportation.
Taxpayers have forked out £7.3million on scrapped flights in four years.
The Home Office was also fined more than £366,000 by the Treasury after the chairman and panel of the child sex abuse inquiry were handed six-figure packages without authorisation.
Some £35.2million was written off by the Department for Transport for tolls it failed to collect from motorists using the Dartford Crossing, partly because its number-plate recognition equipment was not up to scratch.