How long have Civil Servants been abusing taxpayers’ money?

A recent investigation by The Telegraph exposed the astonishing bills racked up by civil servants at the taxpayers’ expense.

Costs incurred on government credit cards has quadrupled in four years, jumping from £155 million in 2020-21 to £675 million in 2024-25.

But whilst those of us from a private sector background are used to having our expense claims and company credit card usage thoroughly scrutinised and necessitating a strict adherence to company expenses policy, it seems that when it is taxpayers’ money involved, the public sector approach is considerably more relaxed.

Among the items in the data collected by The Telegraph include £43,164 on work-from-home equipment (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), £704 at a restaurant in Cape Town (Business and Trade), £500 on ice cream truck hire (Ministry of Justice), and £2,258 at an adventure park in Belgium (Foreign Office).

Here are some of the more eye-catching entries in the data. You decide whether you think the below represent value for taxpayers’ money whilst Winter Fuel Allowances were being revoked:

• In October, The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) racked up a bill of £906 in Zizzi Manchester. That same month they spent £636 in Pizza Express, and £599 at Prezzo. At some point in early December, someone spent £591.50 in Waitrose, which is logged under “Equipment – Operational”.

• In October they also spent £3,225.31 on a hotel called the Island Club, right on the water in Turks and Caicos. The following month they spent £3,267.97 at the same hotel.

• In September, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) spent £4,107 at The Kitano Hotel, a luxury hotel in Tokyo. The next month, a bill for the Harbour House Waterfront, a restaurant in Cape Town, came to £704.

• September saw a £603 bill at an Indian restaurant in Chelsea and £1,046 on catering from St Ermin’s, a four-star hotel in Westminster.

• The Ministry of Justice paid for staff to play volleyball, enjoy ice cream, and visit an activity centre in Yorkshire where the menu of fun includes axe throwing, archery, clay pigeon shooting and quad biking. Volleyzone set them back £526.82, the activity centre cost £595, and the department also spent £500 on Super Soft Ices, a firm that provides ice cream vans for weddings and corporate events.

• The department also spent £1,581 at vestment.co.uk, which sells liturgical dress, £1,109 on high-end spices, and £765 at a company which sells trophies.

• The Foreign Office were among the worst offenders, as you might expect from a department headed up by David Lammy. The department Spent £2,258 at an adventure park in Belgium, £1,009 on a camper van in New Zealand, and £640 at a fine wine company in Singapore.

• The Foreign Office also racked up £8,000 at the KL Tower, a skyscraper with a viewing deck and a restaurant at the top in Kuala Lumpur. At home, there was a cumulative bill of £6,914 at Fortnum and Mason, mostly listed as catering. There was also £10,360 spent at John Lewis, and £4,059 at M&S, all between November and December.

• Finally, the department also spent £600 in the UAE branch of Jeeves of Belgravia, the dry cleaners, and in October £500 at One Night Stand, a ballgown rental shop in Chelsea.

It makes my blood boil that the Civil Service not only believe it justified to fritter away taxpayers’ money on 5-star beach hotels, gourmet dining experiences and fine wines, but that the government’s procurement system allows them to do it with impunity.

In any business I have worked for, if I attempted to use a company credit card for any of the items listed above, it would have been identified during the approval process and I would have been hauled in front of my bosses and held accountable for misappropriation of company funds. At the very least, I would have had my card taken from me, and likely would have faced disciplinary action.

This is symptomatic of a culture within Whitehall that has been allowed to fester for decades, where dubious expenses claims and use of government credit cards are seen as a perk of the job. They are all on the take, quite happy to take the piss out of us because they know they will get away with it.

Just this month, a civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been in court for fraudulently claiming £41,000 in unauthorized expenses.

Some serious questions need to be asked of government procurement controls and those administering them. Quite clearly there are spending policies in place, but they are either far too lax or are not being enforced appropriately.

Historic culture of “take what you can”

This is not the first time such investigations have exposed this very kind of wasteful spending within government.

In 2012, the BBC reported that 99 cases of inappropriate use of government credit cards had been reported during the three years prior, with a Public Accounts Committee report into the use of 24,000 government cards in issue finding that some staff had used cards to pay for doughnuts, luxury hotels and online iTunes purchases. The report found that some departments weren’t even able to produce receipts for a large proportion of the purchases made, and concluded that tougher rules governing their use were needed.

Despite this, in 2023 a Labour-led freedom of information investigation revealed that spending on government credit cards had increased 70% since 2010. A culture had clearly been fostered of using the cards for lavish entertainment, expensive gifts for foreign dignitaries and luxury hotel stays, as reported in The Guardian in February 2023.

At the time, the then-deputy leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner said: “Today’s shocking revelations lift the lid on a scandalous catalogue of waste, with taxpayers’ money frittered away across every part of government, while in the rest of the country, families are sick with worry about whether their pay cheque will cover their next weekly shop.”

And yet, the recent Telegraph report shows that since coming into power the Labour government has continued with the very same frivolous attitude towards taxpayers’ cash, with spending on the cards being even higher under their watch.

The disdain with which our elected officials treat our hard-earned money is bad enough, but the hypocrisy is even worse.

Bloated Civil Service partly to blame

The dramatic increase in spending is not simply a reflection of a wasteful culture and “take what you can” attitude from staff towards taxpayers’ money. It also carries a direct correlation to the bloating in staff numbers across the civil service over recent years.

Under the previous Tory administration, staff numbers in Whitehall increased exponentially, with many roles seemingly unjustified and it being reported that many staff were bored and didn’t have enough work to fill their days.

Latest figures show there are no fewer than 546,000 civil servants in Britain. Despite efforts from David Cameron and George Osbourne to reduce the numbers by 105,000 during the austerity years, they jumped up again dramatically during and following COVID. We hired 92,000 more civil servants between March 2020 and December 2024.

Seemingly the civil service HR department has been applying the government’s open-borders approach to immigration to its own hiring practices over recent years.

Taking back control

Following the investigation, the current government has at least stated its intent to address both the size of the civil service and the frivolous use of government cards.

Rachel Reeves has vowed to cut 10,000 jobs from the civil service, although clearly considering the size of the current staffing base this will barely scratch the surface. The Cabinet Office is also set to cut a third of its staff, with 1,200 redundancies planned. Whilst the principle is correct, the figures are just not large enough to make a real difference.

Real reform is needed of how the civil service operates such that it can perform an effective and efficient role whilst providing value for money to the British taxpayer.

In addition, the government has moved to put a freeze on all civil service credit cards, with cardholders now required to submit a renewed justification for why they continue to need them before the freeze will be lifted. This is absolutely the right thing to do, however it must be backed up with meaningful action. If the current review is just a paper exercise that results in 99% of current cardholders getting their cards back, with no additional controls put in place to govern spending nor accountability for those seen to be abusing their usage, then it is pointless.

Issuance of government cards should be limited to ministers and department heads only, with each department then being issued one card for general use with strict controls over who has access to them. This would mirror how company credit cards are often distributed and controlled in the private sector, where much more rigour is applied to authorizing and reviewing spend.

And government procurement policies also need a major overhaul. There must be a clearly defined list of what cards can be used to purchase. No longer should their use be a free-for-all where justifications such as “to benefit team morale” or “to ensure a suitable welcome for dignitaries” are considered acceptable reasons for spend.

There needs to be true accountability for every penny of public money that is spent on these cards, with a clear and actively-enforced disciplinary procedure for anyone judged to be pressing the boundaries of what would be perceived to be reasonable and necessary by an ordinary member of the public.

Without this, the “take what you can get away with” attitude will perpetuate indefinitely, and our hard-earned money will continue to be frittered away by successive governments of all colours.