Increasing amounts of taxpayers' money will be lost to corrupt foreign regimes as a result of the Government's 'ballooning' aid budget, a senior civil servant admitted yesterday.  Mark Lowcock, the highest ranking civil servant in the Department for International Development, also confessed that his department had no idea about the scale of public money already lost to fraud and corruption.

MPs on the influential public accounts committee said they were 'shocked' by the failure of officials to assess the scale of the problem at a time when spending on foreign aid is set to rise by 34 per cent in real terms to £12.6billion by 2014.

Tory MP Jo Johnson said he was 'shocked' to discover that DfID had only detected £459,000 of fraud in 2009-10 – just 0.01 per cent of its overall spending – and had recovered just £199,000.  He said: 'It beggars belief. It is so far off the scale of what one would rationally expect to be the case.'

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