£54,000 on taxis and film festival jaunts: What Labour job-making boards did with taxpayers £15 billion

While Regional Development Agencies have squandered billions, job creation rates have slowed and the wealth gap between the south and north has widened.

The agencies have been 'riddled with waste and excess', the report produced by the Taxpayers' Alliance think tank said.

Faliure: The Regional Development Agencies were set up by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1999

It said 39 of their executives earn more than £100,000 a year and they have been spending money on sending staff to pointless conferences, including one in the south of France and a film festival in Dubai.

One agency chief racked up nearly £54,000 in a year on taxis and cars, the report said.

The Taxpayers' Alliance called for the nine RDAs to be abolished and the money that funds them used instead to encourage new businesses and jobs through a four pence cut in the small business rate of Corporation Tax.

The Regional Development Agencies were set up by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1999 as part of his drive to create regional assemblies in England.

While Mr Prescott's hopes of elected regional governments foundered because of public hostility, the agencies have remained in operation, free from scrutiny by local politicians.

The report's author Ben Farrugia said: 'They have failed in their core mission to narrow the gap between the economic performances of England's regions.

'At a time when businesses are increasingly over-regulated and over-taxed, RDAs have become a symbol of wasteful bureaucratic excess.

'They should be abolished before the Government hands them even greater powers.'

The nine agencies spent £2.3 billion in taxpayers' money last year in the cause of improving the wealth of their regions and narrowing the big economic gap between better-off and poorer parts of the country.

Costly: SEEDA chairman James Braithwaite spent £53,803 on taxis and cars

In total they have spent £15.3 billion since 1999 - or £600 for every household and family in the country.

Yesterday's report said that in the five years between 1995 and 2000 the number of jobs in England went up by 9.5 per cent.

But in the five years between 2000 and 2005 - after the agencies had been set up - the number of jobs increased by three per cent.

It added that in 1992 the regions outside London and the South East contributed 64 per cent of England's economic output.

But by 2006 that had fallen to 52 per cent, barely more than half the amount of wealth produced.

The report said: 'The gap between the richest and poorest regions has grown over the past decade, not diminished. Local inequality within the regions has got worse too.'

Jobs that have been created have been mainly in the public sector and at taxpayers' expense, the report said.

Public sector employment has gone up faster than private sector employment in every region but the North East, it said. In the South West more than half of all jobs created since 1999 - 50.8 per cent - have been in the public sector.

The report cited spending by the agencies on travel that the report said was wasteful.

In 2005 13 staff of the South East of England Development Agency went to a trade fair in the south of France at a cost of £191,000. The following year, Yorkshire Forward sent 15 staff to a film festival in Dubai.

Expense claims for staff were more than £8 million in the financial year that ended in March 2007, the report said.

SEEDA chairman James Braithwaite spent £53,803 on taxis and cars. The North West Development Agency spent £400 on a car to send its chief executive to Cardiff for the 2005 rugby league cup final, and, the report said, in 2005/06 it spent £57,000 on cars and taxis, mostly for the chief executive.

The report said: 'Judged on their performance, the RDAs are a failure.

'Abolishing the agencies would have no negative impact on the regions. Their 2009/10 budget of £2.19 billion could then be used to pay for a four pence cut in the small business rate of Corporation Tax, from 22 pence to 18 pences.

'This would create new jobs, boost existing businesses, make life easier for people starting businesses and give the regions an economic leg-up: exactly what the RDAs were meant to do and have failed to achieve.'