Residents today blasted Richmond Council after it emerged the authority spent £3.4m on refurbishing its offices amid the recession.

The council spent more than any other London council on transforming the civic centre into an open-plan office, according to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

Hounslow spent £2.9m, while Bromley spent £2.7m and Lewisham spent £2.38m, figures released yesterday showed.

Richmond Council spent £701,000 redoing the ground floor of its civic centre, £728,000 on the first floor and £1,981,000 on the second and third floors.

After the Government’s spending review in October Richmond Council said it would need to make savings of £35m over the next four years and could cut up to 300 jobs.

Residents were left unimpressed by news of the spending on the makeover, between 2008 and 2010.

Retired Sandra Houghton branded it a “total waste of money” and Patrick Lownds, 40, an IT consultant, of Gloucester Road, Twickenham, said it was “pretty poor”.

One full-time mum, of Popes Avenue, Strawberry Hill, said: "It is absolutely disgusting. It sounds like a tremendous amount of money."

But Kit Withnail, 22, a part-time student, of Wellington Road, Hampton Hill, said: “It's probably not as big as it seems.

“The decision was also probably taken before the spending review and Richmond was one of the least affected councils anyway. Still a case of councillors feathering their own nests though."

The council defended spending the money during the recession.

Councillor Tony Arbour, Richmond Council’s cabinet member for performance, said: “This money was part of a project to rationalise our office space which began back in 2005 and it has been funded primarily from our use of capital funding generated by the prudent sale of land and building assets.

"By changing our civic centre to a modern,open planned working environment,the number of staff that could be accommodated has risen by almost a third.

“This has enabled us to move out of office space in Regal House which the Council was renting from a private landlord at cost of over £700,000 a year to the local taxpayer. “This revenue is now available to be spent year on year on hard pressed frontline services."

Since 2008, councils in London have spent more than £29.8m on their town halls and civic centres, the FoI obtained by the BBC showed.

Charlotte Linacre, from the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "It is appalling that London councils have spent millions of taxpayers' money on refurbishing their own buildings.

"What is even more disgraceful is that this spending was during a recession, when they were pleading poverty."