Council chief defends spending increase

THE leader of Warrington Borough Council has put forward a detailed defence of the authority’s increased spending on consultants and agency workers.
Using consultants is essential if the council is to deliver the “massive” projects it wants to when the economic situation improves – and the use of agency workers has been necessary and “hides” savings of £350,000, according to Coun Ian Marks (pictured).
Agency spending has risen has risen from £1.93m in 2007-8 to a projected £4.62m in 2009-10.
Over the same period, the council’s wage bill has risen from £188m to £206m, which means agency spending has risen from 1.02 per cent of the total to 2.24 per cent.
Spending on consultants has risen from £5.31m in 2007-8 to £7.61m in 2009-10.
But the bulk of the increase has been on capital spending arising from a substantial transformation agenda, involving major projects.
In the revenue area, spending on consultants has remained consistent over the past three years.
Coun Marks said most of the increased spending on agency workers was due to an extra £1.6m in Children’s Safeguarding.
But the council had achieved a saving of £350,000 in procurement costs by moving to a single company to provide all its agency needs.
He said he had discussed agency workers with the leaders of other councils and, interestingly, they were all seeing similar increases because of changes in local government they were all experiencing.
Increased spending on consultants was almost entirely on capital projects.
” This is necessary if we are going to deliver the massive projects that this council is proudly providing for the benefit of the people of Warrington,” he said.
He pointed out that for the Building Schools for the Future programme, which is providing new or completely modernised schools across the borough, the council was required by the government to have six different consultants – programme management, education transformation, technical advice, legal, financial and ICT!
Coun Marks added: “It is not just local government who has to pay for consultants. National government suffers too and you may have heard of a book published a while ago called ‘Plundering the Public Sector’ with the caption of ‘How New Labour are letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money'”