THERE may not, at first glance, be much connection between a new computer system for the NHS and an RAF female aircraft mechanic retraining as a pole dancer.

One cost £2,500, the other may end up costing £50 billion, about the same as the total of African national debt written off after Live8. The common factor is that we, the taxpayers, paid for both — and we are not getting our money’s worth.

Total public expenditure during the current financial year will be about £519 billion.

According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a pressure group that monitors what Gordon Brown does with our money, £82 billion of that will be wasted, either on giant projects that have completely run out of financial control, or on well-meaning but fruitless schemes.

It started with Lord Irvine of Lairg’s hideously expensive wallpaper for his Lord Chancellor’s lodgings in the Palace of Westminster; the tradition remains alive and well, with MEPs allowed to claim up to 21 visits a year to the sauna on their expenses.

Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, is co-author of a book, The Bumper Book of Government Waste, published yesterday, which catalogues a galaxy of black holes into which our money disappears.

“Public spending is now completely out of control. Day after day people read of projects going way over budget, and they are getting furious. Taxpayers really deserve better,” Mr Elliott said yesterday.

The £2,500 retraining grant paid by the RAF to Aircraftwoman Stephanie Hulme to fly from her Northern Ireland base to a London hotel last year to train for a new career as a stripper is but loose change in the bigger picture of profligate misuse of public money. New government computer systems siphon off spectacular amounts for very little result, according to the book.

The NHS National Programme for IT, with an original budget of £6.3 billion over ten years, is now expected to cost at least five times that, and may end up costing £50 billion. The £450 million computer system for the Child Support Agency went £50 million over budget, and now seems to deliver nothing but grief to those ensnared in its net.

One of the biggest scandals, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, is government ministries’ profligate use of outside consultants to do work which the ministries ought to have the expertise to do themselves. The Department for Constitutional Affairs, for example, spends £9 million a year on outside consultants — including one who is paid £2,100 a day — compared with £700,000 in 1997 when it was still called the Lord Chancellor’s Department.

In the light of yesterday’s verdict at the Old Bailey, it is enlightening to note that the Metropolitan Police spent £874,387 patrolling Abu Hamza’s street meetings.

But of all the black holes that money vanishes into, none is bigger than Brussels. The book calculates that £1,900 million of Britain’s annual EU contribution goes to subsidise farmers in other European countries, including £88 million to tobacco farmers whose crop is so foul that Europeans refuse to smoke it.

On a more positive note, the authors note that the net gain to the country of having a monarchy is £127 million a year. “Not only does it pay for itself, it buys everyone in the country a drink as well,” they conclude.

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