Cash-strapped County Hall spent £22m on consultants
NEW figures published today reveal Northamptonshire County Council spent £22 million on external consultants in the last financial year.
The findings, uncovered by the Liberal Democrat group at County Hall, show the cash-strapped authority spent £8.53 million on agency staff alone in 2009-10 together with £7.9 million on so-called technical advisors, understood to be specialist consultants brought in for expertise on specific projects. In addition, £5.3 million was spent on consultancy and £700,000 on legal advisors.
Councillor Brendan Glynane, Lib Dem group leader at County Hall, said “The Conservative leader, Councillor Jim Harker, claimed he would get a grip on this, but these figures tell the truth. Once again the Conservatives have shown that they can’t be trusted with your money. It is simply astonishing they have been handing out public money to consultants on this scale. Everybody knows times are tough and public spending will have to be scaled back, but the task at Northamptonshire will be that much harder if the Conservatives insist on wasting so much cash on consultants. They need to stop this wasteful spending so we can protect services for the most vulnerable.”
A year ago, Councillor Harker admitted the council was reviewing all expenditure on temporary staff and consultants at the authority, by far the biggest employer in Northamptonshire. At one stage in 2007, it was spending a million pounds a month on outside help.
Councillor Bill Parker, cabinet member for finance, said: “We are continuing to review all of our spending including that on external help. In an ideal world it would be good if we could call on our own staff for the relevant expertise, but the fact remains that situations do arise when we need to call on external help. That said, I would be surprised if the figure is not lower again in 2010-11.”
Agency staff were essential in adult social care in particular, while technical expertise sometimes needed to be called upon for specialist projects such as highways, he added. He said external consultants had been hired to find ways of reducing costs in adult social care while examples of external legal help included assistance in unusual cases such as the high profile deaths of Jean and Derrick Randall.
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There are 5 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
vwcampervan
Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 07:25 PMWell done NCC -wasting more of OUR money, this at a time when NCC and the wonderful Mr Blantern have slashed my wages from £16K to £12K with no consultation,dire appeal process and the ability to bury its head in the sand at the first opportunity. An open invitation to Mr Blantern -Come and spend the day doing my job.I would love to show you my world. Still I'm only a mere employee what do I know.??
mack80
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 05:32 PMThe people in charge at Guildhall awarded themselves large pay and expenses increases why do they then have to have these kwangos to monitor the work that needs to be carried out (sorry forgot that some high paid official could not work out the drainage for the fountains on the Market Square )
Damocles
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 10:25 AMYes we are entitled to know. We pay for it and there is no reason we should not be told.
willi eckaslyke
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 09:41 AMAre we allowed to know who these specialist advisors and consultants are... and how many there are....and where they hang out?
Damocles
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 09:39 AMThe Chron should now ask what some of these ''interims'' (fancy senior temps) cost. One alone is reputed to be costing as much if not more than having another chief executive. Either these Councillors know and not telling- or they don't know.
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