Executives paid at the taxpayer’s expense are enjoying record salaries, huge bonuses, job security and perks that are the envy of those in the business world.

The list identifies 387 people earning more than £150,000 a year. Half of them earn more than the prime minister, who is paid £189,994. Four receive packages totalling at least £1m.

James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), the agency charged with introducing the ID card, enjoys a home-to-work travel allowance of £11,000, equal to the salary of an office junior in many firms. The public even has to fork out for the 40% tax on this perk.

Hall, 54, has need of the allowance as the owner of Barlaston Hall, an 18th-century pile in Staffordshire which is 160 miles from his office in Whitehall.

Hall’s total remuneration rose by almost 11% – three times the average pay increase – last year. He now receives a total of £195,000. Hall is already a millionaire, having sold the last of his shares in Accenture, the management consultancy where he worked, last year.

Bernard Herdan, 61, a fellow IPS director who lives in a former Victorian rectory in the Bedfordshire village of Swineshead, received a £10,000 home-to-work allowance as part of his £150,000 package.

The IPS said: “Travel allowances for two members of the board were negotiated at the time of the individuals joining the IPS and are approved by the Home Office.”

The public sector rich list has been drawn up by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a pressure group. It is likely to grow even more next year. While some of Britain’s biggest companies are announcing redundancies, an extra 50,000 public sector officials will have been recruited in the six months to the end of the year.

Topping the new table is Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail, who saw his total remuneration rise by 51% to £1.24m from £823,000 last year. This includes an annual bonus of £306,000, a longer-term incentive payment of £205,000, a pension contribution of £169,000 and benefits of £25,000, including life insurance cover.

Coucher gets the shared use of a chauffeur-driven Lexus hybrid car to help to travel between his flat in Marylebone, central London, and the Northamptonshire farmhouse where he lives with his wife Tanya and their children. He owns a silver Aston Martin DB9, capable of doing 165 miles an hour, but he misses out on free train travel because he joined the railways after British Rail was broken up.

Network Rail insisted last week that it should be regarded as a private company, even though it is funded largely by the government. The taxpayer also had to pick up the bill when it was fined £14m by the Office of Rail Regulation for the disruption to services caused by overruns in engineering works last Christmas and new year.

Gerry Doherty, general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, which has 30,000 members, said: “Why should taxpayers fork out such amounts for failure?”

Andy Duncan, 46, chief executive at the government-owned Channel 4, enjoyed a salary leap of 95% from £622,000 in 2006-7 to £1.21m last year. The package includes a “golden handcuffs” bonus of £450,000, which he agreed would be paid only after he had worked for the broadcaster for three years.

The payment helped him to leapfrog Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, who received a total of £816,000.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance calculates that senior executives in the public sector enjoyed an average remuneration increase of 10.9% in the last financial year, more than three times the rise in the private sector.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, said: “While ordinary families are suffering in the financial crisis, the public sector elite are enjoying record pay packages.”

There is evidence that vigilance pays off. Last year The Sunday Times highlighted 11 executives from Ofcom, the telecoms and broadcasting regulator, in the top 100 of the public sector rich list. This year there are just four and some have seen their remuneration reduced by as much as 36%.