£120billion of your money down the drain by councils

[THE FUGITIVE]

Wasteful spending by the public sector on useless projects costs every British household £4,500 a year - enough to 'buy a luxury holiday for every family', a pressure group has claimed.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance has identified cuts that it says could save about £120billion â€" effectively wiping out the UK’s budget deficit â€" without ‘closing a single hospital, firing a single teacher or disbanding a single regiment’.
The organisation has collated a list of ‘ludicrous examples of wasteful spending’ â€" including the Ministry of Defence paying £22 for a light bulb and the Arts Council squandering £95,000 on an installation comprising a skip covered in yellow lights.


Some £19,000 was spent by Cotswold District Council on hiring a ‘motivational magician’ to boost staff morale, while Labour-run Durham Council gave chiefs a £12,000 clothing allowance, which Prime Minister David Cameron derided as ‘Geordie Armani’.

Ministers and officials ate £3 million worth of biscuits in 2011-2012 and spent £45 million on taxis to move prisoners and staff around the country.
More than £20 billion is lost through public sector fraud and £15 billion on duplicated procurement across Whitehall departments and councils.
The Home Office spent £427,000 on rubber bullets police are not even allowed tom use.
Crawley Council Spent £5,070 on 12,200 hot drinks from vending machines for employees, when the equivalent number of tea bags would have cost just £200.
The alleged wasteful spending - a sixth of the total government expenditure - is more than the whole of the NHS budget and five times the amount spent by the Ministry of Defence.
A spokesman for alliance said: ' This equates to a massive £4,500 for every household inn the UK - enough to give every family in the land a luxury holiday or pay their household energy bills three times over.'
In its annual Big Bumper Book of Government Waste, the TaxPayers’ Alliance recommends a number of major reforms to claw back cash, including shaving £53billion off the pay and pensions packages of public sector workers.
This is the amount it claims these workers are being overpaid compared with the private sector average.
‘Nearly £120billion of taxpayers’ money was wasted or spent on useless projects by the Government in 2011-12,’ the report states.
‘We have identified and listed hundreds of examples of spending by politicians and bureaucrats that can be cut without closing a single hospital, firing a single teacher or disbanding a single regiment.’
According to the research â€" which the pressure group said is based on official statistics, independent reports and media coverage â€" £25billion was wasted that year through inefficient public sector procurement and poor use of outsourcing, while £20.3billion was lost through public sector fraud.
About £5billion was paid out in benefits to claimants with an income in excess of £100,000, while £1.2billion was paid out in an annual subsidy to foreign farmers through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.