The British government has spent around £750,000 on tickets for the London 2012 Olympic Games, it was confirmed today.

It has also been revealed that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has purchased 8,846 tickets to the Games.

The allocation includes 213 tickets for the opening ceremony costing almost £200,000, with 143 tickets to the closing ceremony and tickets for high-profile events such as athletics.

"The first point to make is that this is less than 0.1% of all tickets and none of them are going to be given away to civil servants or politicians," Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, told Sky News.

"A small number of those tickets will be made available to people who have been working hard on the project for the last five years or so but they have to buy those tickets at face value and because they're popular they will have to go into a ballot to get them."

Roughly 1.9m people applied for London 2012 tickets, with just 700,000 of them being successful.