Cumbria council paid £4.5 million for consultants in last year
Last updated at 09:47, Friday, 06 November 2009
Cumbria County Council has spent £4.5 million on consultants in the past year.
Figures released following a Freedom of Information request by The Cumberland News show that 278 consultants were used over the last financial year to advise on legal, recruitment, research and human resources issues.
The largest single amount was around £750,000, spent on the Carlisle Northern Development Route – a £176m five-mile road linking the A595 to the M6 to ease traffic through Carlisle and link west Cumbria with Scotland and the north east.
Other substantial amounts included £491,751 spent on the Shanks project – a multi-million waste scheme to reduce the amount of rubbish sent to landfill – and £483,843 on the county’s academies and a court case involving a waste company defrauding the council.
The county council argued that it was more efficient to ‘buy in expertise’ than attempting to do it in-house.
A council statement said: “By outsourcing these functions rather than employing people to do them directly we have saved Cumbrian taxpayers millions and delivered key projects that would not have happened without specialist help. These include the Carlisle Northern Development Route and our new 25-year waste disposal contract which will see a far greener and cost-efficient way of disposing of our waste rather than sending it to landfill.”
The consultants employed include accountancy and professional services firms such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, KPMG Corporate Finance and lawyers Dickinson Dees.
Many of the 278 payments were for less than £10,000, the council said.
Figures from the city council showed that it spent around £600,000 over the same period. The largest amount was nearly £250,000 on VAT advice that enabled it to claim back £1.2m from central government.
“We did not have the specialist knowledge in-house as they were specialist areas we claimed for that only expert VAT advisers were aware of,” a spokesperson said.
“We were also time-constrained in order to get the claims in before a 31 March 2009 deadline.”
The city council spent a further £109,170 on advice about asset management, followed by £52,312 on a feasibility study for the Lonsdale building and £56,437 on planning matters.
Other amounts ranged from £272 for tourism issues and £350 for sports development, to £16,598 for property surveys/valuations and £12,269.42 for architects fees for the travellers site at Ghyll Bank.
First published at 05:24, Friday, 06 November 2009
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk
We obviously employ a lot of people who are unable, or not competent enough, to do the work that we pay them for. Get rid of them and replace them with people who have the right skills and qualifications, doing away with the need to employ 'consultants' at great cost year after year.
It would be more 'efficient' if they employed the right people at the start rather than using outside resource day after day.It's common sense, so why can't they see it and why won't they do something about it?
Doctor to diva 
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Its funny how they need consultants but are putting at risk 500 staff when Capita contract comes to an end. Does the County Council have a plan in place as they have only had 10 years to plan and from meeting minutes it looks like they werent prepared with a plan to take back or let the contract for Highways etc that Capita currently does.
Posted by Bob on 10 November 2009 at 21:24