Cash-strapped Wolverhampton Council runs up £14m bill through employing agency staff

The figure was revealed by finance boss, Councillor Andrew Johnson, who said the authority was taking 'significant' steps to reduce the figure.

The councillor, who looks after medium-term financial planning, announced that £13,994,000 was spent employing temporary staff across the council and schools in 2014/15. Of that, £3.6 million went on employing temporary staff at schools.

It was also revealed that between April 1 and July 9 this year, £2,986,700 was spent on employing temporary staff, which Councillor Johnson said indicated that the council were working hard to lower the figure. He said: "The figures do seem large but the figure is for essential staffing and we are working very hard to reduce the cost of employing temporary staff going forward.

"We have our Yoo Recruitment agency, which has been extremely successful in providing us with staff who we can employ without paying the traditional agency costs.

"I am also pleased to say that hopefully we will be reducing the number of temporary agency staff in children's services after two highly successful recruitment drives. We believe we can reduce the amount of agency staff we employ going forward and the sample of this years expenditure shows that we are on target to do that."

Councillor Wendy Thompson, the city's Conservative leader, said the bill was 'much higher' than it should have been and that the council should 'think very carefully' in the future about the accumulative cost of employing agency staff.

After asking for the figures at a full council meeting, she said: "I thought the answer I got was much too high. When you employ people through an agency there is always going to be a cost with them being a middle organisation. This comes out of the taxpayers' pocket and I think the council have been far too happy to bring in people from an agency for roles, which is reflected in this cost.