Sandwell Council spending almost £4.5m on agency staff

Sandwell Council spent £4,419,846 in 2013/2014 - up just over £300,000 on the previous year. The authority also spent just over £700,000 with various consultancy firms.

Council Leader Darren Cooper said agency spending is a necessary price although the council is looking to reduce its spend in the coming year.

Councillor Cooper said: "We try to keep what we spend on external agency workers to a minimum and in 2013/14 this was less than 1.4 per cent of our total employee bill.

"We are always working hard to reduce what we spend on external agency workers and we expect this to fall to around one per cent for the current financial year.

"The figures also include sessional workers – for example some youth support workers, cleaners and care assistants.

"However, there is some work that needs a specialist – and either we have not been able to recruit our own employee or maybe an employee has just left and we are in the process of recruiting a replacement.

"In 2013/14, changes in our children's services department meant we had to rely on agency staff for maintaining essential support to our most vulnerable children while we recruited new, permanent managers and social workers. The number of agency social workers in children's services has fallen from around 100 in 2013/14 to under 20 today.

"So an agency worker can help us fill the gap, or maybe the work only comes up occasionally and we don't need to employ someone full time to do it, so it's cheaper to employ someone externally when we need to."

The council also employed the services of several consultancy firms.

Between 2013 and 2014, the council paid B3 Burgess Ltd, a Welsh architectural firm, just over £41,000 for mechanical and electrical design consultancy services.

It also paid out more than £46,000 to London-based iMPOWER Consulting Ltd and around £70,000 to the University of Wolverhampton, which provided school improvement advisors.

The biggest payout by far however was to Ernst & Young LLP who received almost £185,000 for providing support for the council's Better Care Fund.