Globe-trotter Prescott lands taxpayers with £500,000 expenses bill

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Taxpayers were hit with a £500,000 bill from John Prescott's office for travel and hospitality last year, official figures reveal today.

They show that even after Mr Prescott was stripped of his departmental role as Deputy Prime Minister, the public were still paying hundreds of thousands of pounds towards his and his staff's globe-trotting.

Mr Prescott has also still not moved out of his grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House in Whitehall.

The travel, subsistence and hospitality bill for the Deputy Prime Minister's Office was £507,000 in 2006/07, with overall office costs being £2.5 million.

This financial year, Mr Prescott embarked on a "farewell tour" of the US and Caribbean, estimated to have cost about £15,000.

Shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles said: "It's a scandalous waste of money."

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Put in the picture: Mr Prescott receives a gift of art during his Caribbean tour from Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller

But Philip Cox, who was Mr Prescott's principal private secretary, defended the expenditure, publishing a list of the Deputy Prime Minister's work on climate change, the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade and community cohesion.