More than £600,000 of public money was spent on plans to reshape Parliamentary boundaries, according to figures obtained by Labour under the Freedom of Information Act.
By last month £617,231 had been spent on the boundary review which would have seen the number of MPs in Wales cut from 40 to 30.
The plans, drawn up by the Boundary Commission for Wales, are now considered by many to be dead in the water.
Last week, Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister of the Coalition UK Government, said his party would no longer support plans to cut the total number of MPs to 600 from 650.
This was in response to a rebellion by Conservative MPs over Lib Dem-backed plans for House of Lords reform.
Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Wales Owen Smith MP said: “This is one of the hidden costs of Coalition incompetency. For each of the government’s u-turns – totalling almost thirty so far – there’ll be a cost associated with work that never saw the light of day.
“And what’s worse is that, however much that is – in this case £600,000 wasted on a disgraceful attempt at gerrymandering the results of the next general election – it’ll be nothing compared to the cost of failing to grow our economy and taking us into the deepest double-dip recession in over fifty years.”
Caerphilly MP Wayne David, who is also Labour’s Shadow Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, said: “This is a disgraceful waste of public money. David Cameron ought to read the writing on the wall and end this farce as soon as possible. The Liberal Democrats have decided to select their parliamentary candidates on the old boundaries and this confirms that the Boundary Review is stone dead.
“And let’s be clear: when these proposed changes are withdrawn, the Green Paper on the Welsh Assembly’s boundary changes will also fall. The two are inextricably linked.”