Civil servants have cost the British taxpayer over a hundreds of thousands of pounds clogging up their own loos.
Government buildings have suffered more than 7,000 blocked toilets and urinals in the last two years, data from the Cabinet Office and other departments have shown.
Toilets used by new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, Bridget Phillipson and Michael Gove have all gone out of order, with the Department for Work and Pensions being the biggest culprits.
The cost of plumbing jobs to fix civil servants’ toilets and urinals has hit at least £100, 396 since 2023, with the Cabinet Office alone spending £73,800 pounds to fix government loos across the country.
Civil servants have complained on Reddit of the issues they face in their workplace’s restrooms.
One said: ‘I need two hands to count the number of toilet-related incidents I’ve experienced working in one particular department’
Another said: ‘In our office the women’s toilets have had issues for years where they smell like s*** and the smell is so bad it wafts into the corridor and offices. It’s ridiculous.’
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The shadow chancellor is pushing the government to tighten its finances, but while Mel Stride was in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) there was plenty of leaky washroom plumbing.
The DWP reported 5,000 toilet and urinal faults and blockages in the last two years, the most of any department Metro has data for, as well as a staggering 24,400 since 2018.
The data, received by Metro after freedom of information requests to multiple government departments, shows that Esther McVey, Therese Coffey and Liz Kendall have all had to call in the plumbers while they led the DWP, although the department are unable to say how much was spent fixing their thousands of plumbing problems.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), however, reported that a far lower 135 incidents from 2023 to 2024 cost them £25,120 to address.
DEFRA, which is in charge of Britain’s sewage, has had to fork out £75,707 to fix its own department’s waste management since 2019, with 266 blocked toilets reported in that time.
The House of Commons, which has received thousands of complaints over stinky plumbing as Parliament waits to be refurbished, revealed 269 toilet clogs in the past two years.
What government department has had the most blocked loos?
- Transport – 246 incidents costing £1.413.87
- Cabinet Office – 1,968 incidents (since June 2023) costing £73,862.09
- DWP – 5,147 incidents (no cost reported)
- DEFRA – 266 incidents costing £37,163.26
- Transport – 246 incidents costing £1,413.87
- Commons – 269 incidents (no cost reported)
MPs and their staffers using Commons’ facilities, as well as tourists, have also been responsible for a total 681 bog blockages since 2018.
Michael Gove, who once got stuck in a toilet in the House of Commons, was in charge of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs when it was faced the highest number of blocked bogs in the past five years.
He was in charge of the Department for the first seven months of 2019, and from 2019 to 2020 DEFRA has revealed there were 292 bathroom issues, costing £23,041.
Alongside reports from the DWP, DEFRA and the House of Commons, the Cabinet Office provided the rest of the data on toilet faults in civil service buildings through the Government Property Agency (GPA), which manages government buildings and facilities, including of many departments, across the UK.
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