You’d think after a year of subsidy slicing, the Department for Energy and Climate Change would run a very tight ship. Not so…

New figures show Amber Rudd’s department blew a total of £1,299,729 on “Non-consolidated performance related payments”, aka bonuses, in 2014-15. A whopping £284,586 was earmarked for just 108 “Senior Civil Servants”, meaning these departmental mandarins hooked themselves a median average of £9,800, with some payouts going as high as an austerity-busting £14,700. This is despite an average salary of £109,490 per year. The average private sector bonus for UK workers last year was just £1,500…