If the RAF’s top brass were taken aback when Senior Aircraftwoman Stephanie Hulme announced her desire to retrain as a pole dancer, their handlebar moustaches hardly betrayed a quiver. She was flown from her base in Northern Ireland and put up in a London hotel so she could learn the sinuous arts of stripping on a £2,100 course.

“It hadn’t occurred to me that they might pay, but I just filled in the paperwork and sent it in. I was very surprised when it was approved,” said Hulme, now successfully re-employed as an exotic dancer in a Mayfair club where she earns up to £2,000 a night.

This apparent case of bare-faced cheek is only one of the myriad ways in which taxpayers’ money is dissipated. Gordon Brown insists he is getting value for money in government spending, and that he has instituted a rigorous process to root out waste. But a forthcoming book will reveal the chancellor’s stewardship of the economy has resulted in an unprecedented squandering of public money.

Few countries can rival Britain’s versatility in this respect, according to Matthew Elliott, co-author of The Bumper Book of Government Waste. “Added together, they come to £82 billion of wasteful and useless spending,” says Elliott, who is chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. “That’s more than the annual turnover of many east European countries, or more than £4,000 per family in Britain.”

Britain’s enthusiasm for throwing suitcases of dosh at the £20 billion Eurofighter, which cannot fly in cloud, and the SA80 rifle, which is prone to jam, has been well documented. But the imaginative manner in which our wealth is frittered away in daft schemes displays a special dedication for which British officialdom is renowned.

Consider the government’s £225,000 scheme to teach grannies how to wear slippers. The idea was to persuade the over-55s not to wear ill-fitting slippers in case they tripped headlong down the stairs. After three pilot projects in which people were invited to produce their slippers for expert guidance, schemes proliferated, many offering new slippers for old. Teaching grandmothers how to suck eggs cannot be far behind, suggests The Bumper Guide.

Or take the Ministry of Defence’s £200 payout to the owner of an African grey parrot that was so alarmed by a low-flying jet that it fell off its perch and broke both legs. This was a mere bagatelle beside the £30,900 awarded to an 80-year-old woman who was blown off her feet by a Chinook helicopter. (Her slippers were not a factor in the case.)

Elliott’s figure of £82 billion waste a year relies in part on an international comparison by the European Central Bank in 2003, showing that the efficiency of Britain’s public sector lags far behind that of the US, Japan, Australia and Switzerland. “The British government could spend 16% less than it currently does while still producing the same level of public services,” he claims.

As the biggest employer in Europe, and third only to Indian railways and the Chinese army, the National Health Service enjoys huge scope for waste. According to a report commissioned by the Office for National Statistics, this may be up to £6 billion a year in rising inefficiency, the equivalent of 250,000 new nurses. “Quite simply the NHS system has become a sponge in that its very structure soaks up the money,” Elliott says.

In addition to the current NHS bill of £5.89 billion for clinical negligence claims, some estimates put a £2 billion price tag on the 100,000 “health tourists” who visit Britain every year to take advantage of free hospital treatment.

Yet there is plenty more moolah for such fripperies as a £2m-a-year scheme for computer training open to hospital porters, cleaners and other staff. In 2004 more than 3m hours of tuition were provided, suggesting to Elliott that the real cost is nearer £30m.

The Home Office is not short of novel ways of spending its £13.6 billion expenditure limit, even leaving aside the £74m spent in 2004 hiring 142 consultants at an average of half a million each. A prime example is a recent project to interview up to 300 convicted drug dealers and traffickers to draw up a model of their business practices.

In much the same spirit, Kingston prison in Portsmouth has hired a pagan priest to give spiritual guidance to three inmates who converted to the religion while serving life sentences. To deny them such solace (costing the taxpayer £11.56 an hour plus expenses) could infringe their human rights, said John Robinson, the prison governor.