MoD civil servants rack up £15m bill on hotels

The Ministry of Defence has spent more than £15m on hotel rooms in the past year insisting its civil servants should not be expected to sleep in "cockroach infested flea pits".

Officials ran up the huge bill between April last year and March 2002 staying throughout the world on official business. The total cost of £15,035,034 does not include putting up soldiers, air personnel or navy recruits.

MoD staff have spent almost 250,000 nights staying in hotels in the past year, including up-market international chains such as the Marriott.

Opposition MPs condemned the bill as "excessive" and a waste of taxpayers' money. "This seems pretty lavish. It defies the imagination to see how they could spend this amount of money on hotels," Norman Baker said. The Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes was informed of the bill in a House of Commons reply from Dr Lewis Moonie, a Defence minister, who said that 80,000 bookings had been made by civil servants in the past year, at an average cost of £61 a night.

The MoD defended the bill and said that it was "a travelling department". The money was spent on providing back up staff to soldiers abroad, including secretaries, administrators and press advisers. "As with all public spending we have to spend money responsibly but we wouldn't expect people to stay in cockroach-infested flea pits. It's not fair to expect them to in the course of their work," a spokeswoman said. "They wouldn't stay in the penthouse suite of the Hilton either."