Council's £8m bill for outsiders' help

By rault

FEES paid to consultants are being reviewed after it was revealed Stoke-on-Trent City Council paid out almost £8 million over the past year.

Consultants were recruited to help the authority in all manner of roles, from £139,960 paid to a firm for financial advice, to £100,225 paid to Mike Maunder during his six-month term as interim assistant chief executive.

Much of the cost of hiring external consultants came from outside sources, such as North Staffordshire Regeneration Partnership (NSRP), but £1.8 million of the cost was still met from the city council's already overstretched budget.

At the end of December there were 33 individual consultants working in directorates and 52 firms of consultants commissioned to provide services for the council.

The authority has refused to provide comparison figures detailing how much was spent on consultants in previous years.

Councillor Mike Barnes, pictured, who raised the issue with the city council, said: "We are going through the budget at the moment and there are a lot of problems, with people being made redundant.

"My main thrust was how many individuals have been paid more than £500-a-day, which I think is 17. Anyone on that is being paid more than the chief executive.

"One name on the list, Mike Maunder, was only there for six months and yet he got paid £100,000. Is that value for money? Should we be paying consultants that amount of money to provide cover?"

Councillor Peter Kent-Baguley, who has joined a working group formed to look at consultancy fees, said: "There is a role for consultants, where we don't have the experience, but recently it has got out of hand. It has become the easy option.

"There's quite a bit of use for project management which is not justified.

"The other danger is where we have made redundancies. I don't think those roles should be filled by a consultant."

The city council had planned to axe 240 jobs to go someway towards plugging a £10 million hole in the budget. However, only about 150 staff agreed to accept voluntary redundancy packages in December.

Colin Walton, convener of the city council branch of Unison, said: "Always there will be skills that are not easily obtainable and, yes, we need consultants in those roles.

"But we remain to be convinced that the skills are not in-house.

"We seem to use consultants an awful lot for things like advice and restructuring, when in the past we had our own in-house people do that.

"But efforts are being taken to reduce the numbers of consultants used."

Councillor Ross Irving, leader of the city council, said: "The city council uses consultants to provide a range of specialist services to support work on one-off projects.

"We use consultancy firms for projects where the council does not have the expertise needed in-house and where it would not be practical or cost-effective to recruit permanent staff.

"Specialist firms are assisting the council in driving forward many of the city's major building and regeneration projects, including the Central Business District, the University Quarter and the refurbishment of the Mitchell Memorial Theatre.

"Most of the cost of using consultants is met by the council's partners and not the council taxpayer.

"The council has made a priority of reviewing its use of consultants. A group of councillors is working with officers to make sure the whole process gives value for money."