SOUTHAMPTON MP John Denham has admitted his former Whitehall department was wrong to spend more than £70,000 on a staff tranquility room.

But the ex-communities secretary insisted that forking out an even larger sum to pay for an annual press cuttings service was a good use of public money.

Labour came under fire from Prime Minister David Cameron after it was revealed that Mr Denham’s department for communities and local government, along with acting leader Harriet Harman's equalities office, spent £72,614 on a two-storey meeting pod as part of a £2.4m central London office refit.

During Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, Mr Cameron quoted from the department’s staff magazine, which described the pod as “a 21st century ... space of quality, air and light, where we can ... relax and refuel in a natural ebb and flow”.

Mr Cameron said: “We have been having a good trawl for the stupidest piece of spending that they undertook, and I think we have found it ... [Labour] have gone from peaceniks to peace pods, and bankrupted the country in the process.”

Last night, Mr Denham conceded that critics of the meeting pods were “right”, but insisted it was not his decision to build them.

The Labour MP for Southampton Itchen told the Daily Echo: “Ministers wouldn’t have been told about or asked about this. I’m not going to justify that.”

The major refit took place after his department got rid of three office buildings and moved staff to a single headquarters.

Vanity exercise Mr Denham said: “They promised staff they would make the new building a decent place to work. Some of the spending was over-the-top but it came about because ministers had told the department to save money. There were people who were not as careful about public money as they should have been and I set about changing the culture.”

However, the MP refused to accept criticism of his department’s payment of £120,000 a year to media firm Durrants, for press cuttings.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles “hit the roof” after hearing of the contract and cancelled it immediately, a source describing it as a “grotesque vanity exercise”.

But Mr Denham said: “The press cuttings service was for the whole department, for ministers and a huge range of senior officials and press officers, and meant I could challenge officials on matters reported in the press that I might otherwise know nothing about.

Mr Denham said the press cuttings, were a sensible investment of public money, in order to save a lot more money.