Labour has claimed it has unearthed proof of a “scandalous catalogue of waste” by UK authorities departments involving using taxpayer-funded debit playing cards, together with faulty descriptions of spending, lavish presents and end-of-year spending sprees.

The celebration claimed that spending on “authorities procurement playing cards” has risen sharply and that in particular person circumstances there was misreporting of what public cash has been used for.

It mentioned the Overseas Workplace wrongly recorded the acquisition of 1000’s of kilos price of English glowing wine below headings reminiscent of “laptop tools”, “industrial provides” and “consulting and administration”.

However the authorities replied that it was the final Labour administration that launched the playing cards in 1997 and by the tip of Gordon Brown’s time in workplace, spending on them had hit nearly £1bn.

Labour hopes {that a} information dump on Monday morning, which it has dubbed “the GPC recordsdata”, will reopen questions of economic profligacy or worse over dealing with of public cash by the Conservative authorities.

Angela Rayner, deputy Labour chief, mentioned: “[Prime minister] Rishi Sunak has didn’t rein within the tradition of lavish spending throughout Whitehall on his watch.”

However the evaluation of spending information by most Whitehall departments is unlikely to generate something like the general public uproar that accompanied the discharge of particulars of MPs’ bills.

Some claims of “lavish” spending — for instance the £4,500 spent on lodging for Sunak, when he was chancellor, and his aides on the G20 Venice assembly of finance ministers in July 2021 — could not appear significantly extreme to some within the company world.

Labour has gathered information for the final full yr obtainable, 2021, and mentioned the one division not included was the Ministry of Defence, whose revealed information was “neither dependable nor complete sufficient”.

It discovered that in 2021 the 14 departments examined spent a complete of at the least £145mn utilizing GPCs, a rise of 71 per cent for a similar departments over the previous decade.

Nevertheless, Labour’s base yr for this calculation is the primary yr of David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition authorities, not the ultimate yr of Brown’s administration. A Labour supply insisted comparable detailed figures weren’t obtainable earlier than 2010-11.

Labour says it discovered £343,803 of card expenditure by Overseas Workplace workers in 2021 below the class “eating places and bars” and £7,218 spent on a reception for then overseas secretary Liz Truss in opposition to the backdrop of Sydney Harbour.

The celebration additionally claims the playing cards had been used to e book five-star motels and to make use of up departmental budgets on the finish of a monetary yr.

Labour hopes to gas a way that the federal government has been cavalier with public cash, significantly following the controversy over the dealing with of procurement in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However the Conservatives identified that the federal government procurement card was launched in 1997 by the Labour administration of Tony Blair and was as soon as rather more extensively used throughout the general public sector.

“The Conservatives stopped their absurd profligacy, chopping the variety of playing cards, introducing a requirement for spending to be publicly declared and setting up controls,” a Tory supply mentioned.

Labour mentioned it will arrange an “Workplace for Worth for Cash” to uphold transparency and excessive requirements in public spending. The Conservatives mentioned it will price thousands and thousands to run and can be “one more quango”.