IT’S not just the City high-flyers who are enjoying big bonuses. Senior civil servants are taking home up to £20,000 each in performance pay in a £120m bonus bonanza.

At HM Revenue & Customs, which recently lost two discs containing the details of 25m people, more than 350 top-grade staff are thought to have shared almost £2m, while bureaucrats at the Ministry of Defence have been given £44m and at the Treasury £21m.

Over the past six years, bonuses have almost doubled and the wages bill for senior civil servants has risen from £144m to £250m.

Civil servants are also enjoying record pensions. Almost 3,700 have packages worth £1m or more, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Theresa May, the shadow Commons leader, said the bonuses were “rewards for failure, plain and simple”.

She added: “This government has overseen the first run on a British bank in over 100 years, lost the details of 25m people and managed to alienate the entire police force, and yet civil servants in these departments are earning bigger bonuses than ever before.”

In the past three years taxpayers have funded a 20% rise in overall bonuses for civil servants, from £102m in 2004-05 to £123m in the last financial year. The 2,000 elite civil servants have been given bonuses worth £12m, taking home an average of about £5,600 each. A select handful of “exceptional performers” earned more than £20,000.

HMRC said that because the bonuses applied to the 2005-06 financial year, any “perceived failings” over the discs would not have been taken into account. Police are expected to abandon the search for the discs before Christmas.

At the Ministry of Defence 181 senior civil servants have received bonuses of almost £6,500. Soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are paid just £2,240 each in bonuses.

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