Office of Fair Trading spent £80 of taxpayers' money on meal at Hooters restaurant

A staff member from the Office of Fair Trading spent nearly £80 on a meal at Hooters – a restaurant famed for its scantily-clad waitresses – using taxpayer funded expenses.

Hooters, a restaurant famed for its scantily-clad waitresses

The worker from the Government quango ran up a bill of £77.73 entertaining business contacts at the American-themed grill, where diners are waited on by busty female staff.

The meal at the Nottingham branch of Hooters in October 2009 is one scores of claims which left the OFT with a £38,000 food and drink bill over the past two years.

Figures released in response to Freedom of Information requests also show that OFT staff dined at a string of Britain’s top restaurants, including Patterson’s and Chez Gerrard in London, leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill.

Object, the pressure group which campaigns against the sexualisation of women, criticised the OFT for allowing a worker to dine at Hooters.

Anna van Heeswijk, campaign manager, said: "Hooters restaurants use women's breasts to market their burgers and they make it seem normal to view and treat women as nothing more than sex objects.

"What hope do women have for equality when it is seen as acceptable for a government office to use taxpayers' money to support a restaurant which is based on the sexual objectification and degradation of women?"

The OFT claimed the meal at Hooters was claimed by a junior official and that they had been reprimanded for the “poor choice of venue”.

According to the figures, obtained by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, OFT staff spent £1,440 at Patterson's and £1,064.47 at Chez Gerrard.

A further £100 was spent on dining at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, while a lunch for Japanese delegates hosted by the OFT's boss John Fingleton at Lutyens, near St Paul's Cathedral, cost £386.44.

In total, the OFT ran up an expenses bill of £572,458 between 2009 and 2011.

That included £10,000 on five-star hotels, such as the luxury Sunrise resort in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Cairo, Egypt.

The TaxPayers' Alliance uncovered the figures after studying payments made using the OFT's Government Procurement Cards – publicly-funded credit cards.

Campaign director Emma Boon said: "It's preposterous that staff at the quango in charge of ensuring we don't get ripped off have spent taxpayers' money in Hooters; it's an inappropriate venue in which to conduct business.”

The OFT said in a statement: "The OFT believes Hooters was a poor choice of venue and has relayed this to the junior official in question. The money was spent on food only, and staff are permitted to fund subsistence costs when travelling away from the office on business."