Transport for London is paying millions of pounds a year to staff without roles.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance has discovered TfL’s redeployment unit for staff who are being kept on, rather than made redundant even though they have no formal role.

Staff are still paid a salary on average of £44,000, and the TPA have estimated in total the unit has cost £3.5m since 2004.

TfL define their scheme as: “a Unit, [for employees] who have been displaced and transferred prior to securing an alternative role in TfL or leaving the organisation”.

The maximum time an employee can be in the Redeployment Unit is supposed to be four months.

In many cases these surplus employees are kept on for months before taking on other roles then returning to the scheme for a second time.

The TPA revealed there are 19 employees who have been on the scheme for more than 500 days on an average salary of around £44,000. That is likely to have cost more than £1.2 million.