TORY ministers have overseen a culture of “lavish spending and a serious catalogue of wasting taxpayer cash,” Labour charged yesterday as it published a dossier on government expenses.

Shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry said that, from the party’s analysis of the use of government procurement cards (GPCs), “you would think we were in the last days of Rome, not the worst cost-of-living crisis for decades.”

Spending on Civil Service credit cards across 14 Whitehall departments hit £145.5 million in 2021, the party said, up from the £84.9m recorded in 2010-11, when Tory ministers were enjoying their first year in Downing Street this century.

The data, compiled from publicly available records and ministerial questions, reveals that when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was chancellor, the Treasury forked out £3,393 on 13 fine art photographs from the Tate Gallery to hang in the department’s Horse Guards Road building.

The extravagant purchases on March 30 2021 were made despite ministries already having access to the government’s official art collection.

Foreign Office officials used GPCs to spend a whopping £345,000 on “restaurants, bars and entertainment” in the same year, while in May last year, then attorney general Suella Braverman and seven others racked up a £909 bill at luxury Westminster restaurant the Cinnamon Club — amounting to almost £114 a head.

Several departments appeared to be using the cards to exhaust their budgets at the end of each financial year, including the Department of Health and Social Care, which spent £59,155 on stationery in just one month, March 2021, compared with just £1,470 in the whole of the rest of the year.

Rules on the use of the cards were relaxed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing individual holders to spend up to £20,000 per transaction and £100,000 per month and permitting their use across all categories of spending.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Britain may be facing the worst cost-of-living crisis for decades, but whether as chancellor or prime minister, Rishi Sunak has failed to rein in the culture of lavish spending across Whitehall on his watch.

“These shocking revelations lift the lid on a scandalous catalogue of waste, with taxpayers’ money frittered away across every part of government, while families are sick with worry about whether their pay cheque will cover their next weekly shop or the next tranche of bills.”

Further examples of exotic spending choices include the £36,293 frittered away on items of fine bone china between January 2021 and June last year by Foreign Office officials, who also embarked on an £11,853 spending spree at upmarket department store Fortnum and Mason in the same period. 

Downing Street insisted that officials, rather than Mr Sunak, had authorised the spending on fine art photographs.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “In terms of artwork in the Treasury, the PM, when chancellor, was not involved in that decision — it was a non-ministerial decision related to refurbishment of some offices.”

A Tory source noted that it was Tony Blair’s New Labour government which first introduced GPCs in 1997 and claimed that the number of cards had been cut during 13 years of Tory rule.