Feb 2010 09

Stoke “taking the easy option” and spending £8m on consultants4

Stoke-on-Trent City Council have come under fire for using £8m-worth of consultants in just a year, with 33 individuals and 52 firms commissioned to provide services at the end of last December according to The Sentinel.

Consultant The article states that the council refused to make comparison figures available from previous years.

In January 2009 the TaxPayers’ Alliance revealed that Stoke Council spent over £11m on middle management salaries (£50k+) in the year 2007/8, up from £9m the year before and just £530k in 1996/7. What’s more our Town Hall Rich List in April 2009 showed that the authority was paying no fewer than 7 executives in excess of £100k per annum, with their salaries totalling over £855k.

In short, Stoke Council have been paying a great many people very decent salaries for their skills – so why must they hire in so many consultants?

Cllr Mike Barnes raised the issue with the city council:

"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 is part of a group looking at consultancy fees seemed to agree that there is some call for concern:

"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”.

Leader of Stoke Cllr Ross Irving is disappointingly dismissive of these worries, bullishly asserting that consultants are only used when needed and insisting that the majority of the cost falls to the ‘councils partners’ and therefore not the council taxpayer. Cllr Irving refers mainly to the North Staffordshire Regeneration Partnership who foot much of the bill, with ‘just’ £1.8m of the £8m falling on the council. What he’s missing is that this quango is still fuelled by taxpayers’ money, so whether directly out of council tax or from our other taxes, the public are still paying the enormous wages of these often unnecessary advisors.

Stoke’s had it’s problems of late, but it really is time for the council to get it’s house in order and it should be a 2010 priority to slash this inflated wage bill and prove that the well paid managers and executives in place can run the authority without such expensive external help falling on residents.

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  • alan broomhead

    if these council chiefs worked in private
    industry they would have been sacked long
    ago,but as it is taxpayers money there is no
    incentive for them to be frugal,as they are so intent on wasting money they should have
    excessive spending taken from their over inflated salaries,this would encourage them
    to be more frugal with taxpayers money.as there is now no detterant they will still
    fritter money away in their cavalier way,
    untill some deterant is found,i bet if my
    suggestion came to fruition they wouldnt be
    so quick at wasting money unnecessarily.

  • K.Tromans

    Why do we need these grossly overpaid Council ‘Executives’ and ‘Senior Managers’ when the council executive’s secretary could employ the Consultants’ to make all the technical decisions.
    If these people are not capable of doing the job (for which we are paying their extortionate salaries) then sack them now and find a man who can. I feel the revolution is near.

  • Billy Jones

    Why dot also do a FOI on the amount spent on Common Purpose training, as here is where money goes down the gurgler at £5000 a pop

  • Lee Martin

    I chair a voluntary, community non-profit group in the city of Stoke-on-Trent who help other small community groups. In my 8 years of experiance in the third sector I have been shocked in the way the council, quangoes and other agencies have spent huge amounts of hard working taxpayers money on trying to create a form of artificial community. Anyone knows that a better sense of community can only come from the community itself and not the state. In a strange way the recession has been the only method to slow this rate of crazy spending. I have been tracking the way the council and Quangoes spend money in relation to sport and health in the city. It seems that when they have discovered that our problems are getting worse instead of being the enabler to help the community empower itself like helping community groups in areas that are not about money but in the areas of the growing burden in government regulation etc their solution is simply to pay for more consultants to carry out yet another social marketing exercise.