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A shocking waste of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is exposed by the Mail today. A major investigation has found that £5.6 billion in public cash has been frittered away on luxuries, feathering Whitehall mandarins' nests and a wide range of jaw-dropping projects. It comes as Chancellor Rishi Sunak prepares to set out a plan for taking back control of the nation's finances after spending hundreds of billions tackling the Covid-19 crisis. The investigation – carried out with the TaxPayers' Alliance – involved more than 4,000 Freedom of Information requests, and the analysis of thousands of government contracts and databases.  Ofcom's new chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes (pictured with Prince William at Buckingham Palace) pocketed between £15,000 and £20,000 on top of her salary  The exact waste figure the Mail arrived at was £5,577,988,036.64. Our probe into the state sector gravy train exposed how: Meg Hillier, chairman of the public accounts committee, sai

While millions of Britons are struggling on shared dining tables or working from bedrooms, Whitehall staff have used taxpayers' cash to buy top of the range kit for their home offices. More than £10million has been spent across Government departments on working from home since the outbreak of the pandemic, according to a joint investigation by the Daily Mail and the TaxPayers' Alliance. HMRC alone used almost £4million of public taxes on working from home, with its staff spending £500,000 on transporting office furniture to employees' homes. HMRC staff were also given an allowance of £80 for an office chair and £120 for a desk. The Cabinet Office spent £11,554 on moving its staff home – including the purchase of a tailor-made designer Herman Miller Sayl chair for a cool £449. While millions of Britons are struggling on shared dining tables or working from bedrooms, Whitehall staff have used taxpayers' cash to buy top of the range kit for their home offices (file image)

A bicycle that appeared as part of Banksy's artwork of a hula-hooping girl in Nottingham has gone missing. Locals were delighted when the elusive artist adorned the outside of a salon wall with a black-and-white stencil of a girl hula hooping with a bicycle tyre on October 13. But the bike chained to a post in front of the wall in Rothesay Avenue as part of the piece has now gone missing. Locals are 'saddened,' after a bike, which formed part of a Banksy mural that arrived in Nottingham in October, disappeared this weekend Resident Tracy Jayne discovered it had vanished on Sunday morning. She told the BBC: 'The artwork records an important part of Nottingham's history, Raleigh bikes. 'My late husband worked for Raleigh until it closed in 2002. He died at age 48 in 2017. 'It's such a shame if someone has stolen the bike. It's sheer disrespect and saddens me very much.' Tracy Jayne discovered the bike was missing on Sunday morning, she said it show

A public sector pay cap on golden goodbyes caused a 'stampede' of workers keen to leave on six-figure payouts before it came into effect. More than 1,000 staff in government departments and quangos received exit payments above the £95,000 limit before it was finally imposed this month. The cap was introduced after a Daily Mail and TaxPayers' Alliance investigation brought the issue to light five years ago. The Mail revealed how fat-cat bosses were being paid fortunes to walk away from their jobs – often after a record of failure. A public sector pay cap on golden goodbyes caused a 'stampede' of workers keen to leave on six-figure payouts before it came into effect Yet it took until November 4 for the cap to be implemented – allowing public officials to leave on huge sums in the intervening years. Last night, Tory MP Andrew Bridgen told the Mail: 'What we saw among the public sector was a stampede to get out the door before the pay cap came in. Many of these huge

They are the figures that should give any government pause for thought — a terrifying reflection of the catastrophic effect on the economy of the pandemic. This Mail analysis of the financial cost of the virus — to jobs, the economy, businesses and the public finances — could not be more sobering. It follows our publication on Saturday of medical data which showed that the Government’s grim predictions charting the course of the pandemic were worse than the reality. An indication of the true state of the shattered public purse will emerge on Wednesday when Chancellor Rishi Sunak conducts his Spending Review. Our national debt is more than £2 trillion and counting: the equivalent of a year’s output by the entire country, or £100,000 for every family in the UK (graph showing economic pressure, pictured)  In the meantime, our dossier shows the crippling scale of the damage already inflicted and sets out how much worse it will become if large swathes of the economy remain trapped in lockdo

Police have seized mobile phones used by a pizza bar worker whose lie about how he contracted coronavirus put South Australia into strict lockdown. Residents across the state were stuck in their homes for three days in Australia's strictest lockdown since the pandemic began, but it was all due to the 36-year-old Spanish man's attempt to disguise how he contracted the virus. Rather than disclosing he worked at the Woodville Pizza Bar in Adelaide's inner north-west, he claimed to be a customer and that the virus must have been caught off the pizza box, raising fears it could have been similarly transmitted to hundreds of other customers. In fact the man had worked in close contact with another pizza bar worker who also worked at a quarantine hotel.  Specialist detectives from Task Force Protect have seized devices from the Spanish man as part of their investigation into the Parafield coronavirus cluster. More than 4,500 people across the state linked to the Parafield cluster