Taxpayers are now receiving a document that sets out some detail on how our taxes are spent. Behind this initiative must be the desire on the part of Government to give reassurance that our hard-earned money is being used prudently.

However, I can see a significant gap in what we are being told. There ought to be a slice of the pie chart labelled ‘Government Waste’.

A few days ago, in the midst of all the furore in Parliament about immigration, Margaret Hodge MP made a TV broadcast in which she revealed that one of the contributory factors to the Home Office lack of control on immigration was the failure of an information technology project.

Margaret Hodge chairs the public accounts committee that tries to maintain a watchdog role on Government spending and she expressed her concern that the Home Office IT project that failed cost £1 billion of taxpayers’ money, all of which has been wasted.

Added to the financial impact of this debacle must come the fact that the Home Office continues to lack an efficient IT system.

This situation would be very serious if the Home Office project was an isolated case of incompetence in the delivery of a major IT project for central or local government, but it is just one of a long list of disastrous public sector IT projects.

The civil service has repeatedly proved itself incapable of successfully managing IT projects and local government has faired little better. The amount of taxpayers’ money wasted has been scandalous.

I understand that when he was appointed Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove MP declared that there would be no major IT projects undertaken by his department on his watch.

This shows the lack of faith by a senior member of the Cabinet in the ability of the civil service to successfully deliver such support to the Government.

I further understand that the serious problems in implementing the Universal Credit system by the Department of Works and Pensions was due mainly to a failing IT project.

Margaret Hodge and her select committee cross party colleagues spotted the problem a few years ago and set out to try to analyse what was going wrong and make recommendations.

This resulted in a report to Parliament and Whitehall headed ‘Government & IT –A Recipe for Rip-Offs; Time For A New Approach.’ This report is dated July 2011 and it must have made uncomfortable reading for the senior civil servants and also the IT contractors.

I will never be told what happened to implement the recommendations in the report but I assume that, had they been taken seriously, the loss of £1 billion on the Home Office project might have been avoided.

This must surely be what lay behind the obvious irritation displayed by Margaret Hodge in her recent TV interview.

Part of the problem lies in the way that the civil service approaches failure. When I was a senior public servant I would have expected to be sacked if I had presided over the loss of public money just a tiny fraction of that wasted by the Home Office.

One cannot help wondering what action is being taken to deal with the incompetency highlighted by the waste of £1 billion.

The present Coalition Government has done a great deal to try to reform the civil service. However, it still remains the case that those who lose our money on a scale that would lead to them being named and shamed in a public sector calamity of equal scale escape under a cloak of anonymity within Whitehall.