How Labour's regional job agencies have become a £15bn gravy train

Regional Development Agencies have been 'riddled with waste and excess', according to the document from the TaxPayers' Alliance think tank.

Despite spending billions, it said job creation rates have slowed and the wealth gap between the south and north has widened.

Labour's regional job-creation boards criticised for wasting public money

The report said 39 RDA executives earn more than £100,000 a year and they have sent staff to pointless conferences, including a film festival in Dubai.

One agency boss spent nearly £54,000 in a year on taxis and cars.

The TaxPayers' Alliance called for the nine RDAs to be abolished and their funding to be used to encourage new businesses and jobs through a 4p cut in the small business rate of corporation tax.

RDAs 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 nine agencies have remained.

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

'RDAs have become a symbol of wasteful bureaucratic excess.'

The agencies spent £2.3billion of taxpayers' money last year with the aim of improving regional wealth. In total they have spent £15.3billion 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 rose 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 3 per cent.

In 1992 the regions outside London and the South East contributed 64 per cent of England's economic output. By 2006 that had fallen to 52 per cent.

The report said: 'The gap between the richest and poorest regions has grown over the past decade, not diminished.'

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

The report cited agency spending on travel it considered wasteful, including £191,000 spent in 2005 so staff from the South East England Development Agency could attend a trade fair in the south of France at a cost of £191,000.

'Judged on their performance, the RDAs are a failure,' the report concluded. 'Abolishing the agencies would have no negative impact.'