Analysis of hundreds of transparency documents by the Labour Party has found that at least £145.5 million has been spent on Government procurement cards (GPCs) in 2021.

The party raised concerns over spending on dining and alcohol purchases, including almost £350,000 spent by Foreign Office officials in a year under the heading “restaurants and bars”.

Labour argued that there was evidence of end-of-year sprees to use up departmental budgets.

Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, said the investigation into the use of GPCs revealed a “scandalous catalogue of waste”.

But transport minister Richard Holden accused Labour of wasting civil servants’ time on information already in the public domain.

“All of this data is publicly available online, it has been since 2012 — something which didn’t happen under the last Labour government,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.

“The Labour Party has spent half-a-million pounds asking parliamentary questions, 2,500 of them, wasting my civil servants’ time for information that is already publicly available and that they hid when they were last in office.”

Ms 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.

“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 or the next tranche of bills.”

Labour’s dossier showed that on 30 March 2021, when Rishi Sunak was chancellor, the Treasury spent £3,393 buying 13 fine art photographs from The Tate Gallery to hang in the department’s Horse Guards Road building, despite ministries having access to the Government Art Collection’s pictures.

Downing Street has insisted officials rather than Rishi Sunak authorised the spending on fine art photographs.

The rules on GPC use were relaxed at the start of the Covid pandemic, allowing individual card-holders to spend up to £20,000 per transaction and £100,000 per month, and permitting the use of GPCs across all categories of spending.

A senior Conservative source said: “Awkwardly for Labour HQ they’ve forgotten that they introduced these ‘civil servant credit cards’ in 1997.

“By 2010 Labour was spending almost £1 billion of taxpayers’ money on everything from dinners at Mr Chu’s Chinese restaurant to luxury five-star hotels.

“The Conservatives swiftly stopped their absurd profligacy, cutting the number of cards, introducing a requirement for spending to be publicly declared and introducing controls.

“Typically, Labour’s ‘big idea’ is to spend millions to establish yet another quango, stuff it with thousands of bureaucrats and give them gold-plated pensions.”

It comes after Lisa Nandy, Labour’s shadow levelling up secretary, took a firm stance with councils at the party’s Local Government Conference in Nottingham on Sunday.

“It would be tempting to come here today and thank you for your hard work [...] but I won’t,” she said.

“We will undertake the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster in British history, but that will require the best of you to raise your game again.

“Bad Councils undermine the best. They undermine our party and our politics. They stand as a barrier to real devolution and the chance for communities to take charge of their own destiny.”

Today research from the County Councils Network (CCN) found that three in four councils plan to raise council tax by 4.99 per cent.

Elliot Keck, from the Taxpayers Alliance, said: "Surging council tax bills are the last thing hard-pressed households need.

"With the cap on rate rises lifted, local authorities have been given the green light to charge taxpayers for another year of wasteful spending and princely pay packets.

"Councils must crack down on waste before coming cap-in-hand to residents."

Ministers accused of presiding over 'lavish' waste of taxpayers money