An accommodation centre for asylum-seekers, which was never built, cost tax-payers £29 million.

In all, £6.3 million of the total spent on plans for a centre in Bicester, Oxfordshire, went on consultants - with £1.1 million of that paid to two consultants for less than three years' work.

As revealed by the National Audit Office last November, the total amount spent on the project to build ten accommodation centres was £33.7 million.

The Bicester project was cancelled and the Home Office had to pay contractor Global Solutions Limited nearly £8 million in termination fees, on top of £7.6 million the company had already received for design work.

MPs who reviewed an auditor's report on the scheme - launched by former home secretary David Blunkett in 2001 - concluded there had been a "startling absence of common sense" in the Home Office's preparation for the pilot project.

Over a five-year period, the total amount spent on wages was £1,864,300.

Within that, £614,300 was paid to a financial advisor and £497,900 to a procurement advisor, who were hired from an agency because the Home Office did not have suitable workers in-house.

Neither consultant was named in the report by the Commons' all-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

The financial advisor's annual salary was more than three times the amount paid to the project manager, who was a civil servant.

PAC chairman Edward Leigh said: "The Home Office project to build on a site at Bicester embodied lack of foresight, poor business planning and a startling absence of common sense.

"No development has taken place on the site, which is lying semi-derelict, and the taxpayer has lost some £29 million."

He added: "A proposal to build an asylum centre, especially in a rural location, is always going to provoke opposition in the local community.

"The Home Office's business case inexplicably took no account of this probability - nor of the strength of feeling against the centre from national and local refugee groups.

"No effective contacts were established with local interest groups and MPs.

"The serious risk of planning delay was never recognised and so never managed."

Last month the Home Office announced plans to build an immigration detention centre on the Bicester site, although it will not be open until 2012 at the earliest and will require planning permission.

© Independent Television News Limited 2009. All rights reserved.