Hilarious. The Department of health has got through at least 40,000 packets of biscuits in about 65 working days.

That quantity of biscuits can’t be good for them. Should Andrew speak to his doctor?

Doesn’t this kind of story belong on the Taxpayers Alliance homepage…?

The point, surely, is that no one is in a position to say whether these levels of spending are fair enough or not without knowing how many staff are drinking all that tea and using all those taxis. As Ben points out, it is a bit TPA to just chuck around figures for the outrageous amounts of public money being spent on this or that without putting them in any kind of context. £1,000 a day for tea and biscuits seems a bit steep if there are only 100 people slurping and dunking, but rather less so if there are 1,000, or 10,000.

And the ‘spend it on front line services’ line is populist crap which is being used to justify cutting essential admin staff in the NHS and elsewhere, with the unsurprising result that ‘frontline’ staff are having to spend more of their time on admin.

And presumably every Brit should be furious about this frivolous spending, if it were exposed by anyone else. But as http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/7754038/lansleys-biscuit-bill.thtml mentions that “Labour aren’t telling the whole story here. The amount being spent has declined under the coalition, from £194,000 for the equivalent period in 2010, to £137,000 in 2011, to that £109,017 figure now.”

As things stand, it’s just yet another example of extreme hypocrisy. Sadly, some people let them get away with it.

(In reality, I don’t think that this amount for tea and biscuits, and presumably coffee and sandwiches and Coke and orange juice, is that huge, considering the size of the bureaucracy behind ir. It’s the size of bureaucracy that I would expect the British to be furious about. Mostly this sounds like one of the most boring petty-sensationalist bits that The Telegraph sometimes produces.)

@ 4 GO

“The point, surely, is that no one is in a position to say whether these levels of spending are fair enough or not without knowing how many staff are drinking all that tea and using all those taxis.”

Bingo. Big numbers look dramatic but don’t tell you much out of context. I could find shocking stats on how many people are murdered in Britain EVERY YEAR! but it wouldn’t mean much without being assessed against the total population numbers, compared to equivalent rates in other countries, and so on.

@5

The amount being spent has declined under the coalition, from £194,000 for the equivalent period in 2010, to £137,000 in 2011, to that £109,017 figure now.”

That’s all very well but Tories Slash Biscuit Bill In Half is not much of a headline for LC is it?

Anyway it’s not enough. Why can’t they buy their own biscuits?

Do Sunny + Co realise how much respect they lose with such misleading titles?

Are are they happy to trigger the Tweets of those loyal followers who don’t want to read the real facts – and don;t care that they tweeted mis-information.

Tea and biscuits with the Conservatives? I suppose that would be known as Hobnobing with the rich and famous.

Ooh, Jon Trickett is Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office. So I bet he goes to lots of meetings with civil servants. Could I ask that one of those civil servant breaks protocol and tells us how many biscuits and beverages have been consumed by Jon Trickett MP?

Liberal Conspiracy is the Daily Express.

There is no excuse for flowers. How much did other depts under labour spend on flowers?

“Labour aren’t telling the whole story here. The amount being spent has declined under the coalition, from £194,000 for the equivalent period in 2010, to £137,000 in 2011, to that £109,017 figure now.”

Ha! “Coalition halves spending on tea – proof that dramatic reductions in public spending are possible without harming frontline services”.