11council postscost £842,000

South Ayrshire Council is taking action in the wake of a poor report on its plans for the future.

The council’s Leadership Panel agreed to a recruitment drive that will see £842k spent on 11 legal, communications, IT, finance and employee services workers over two years. In its recommendations to SAC, the Accounts Commission highlighted the insufficient skills and resources to carry out the necessary transformation of the council to meet future needs.

Finance chief Tim Baulk said that a number of new initiatives, such as the Ayrshire Growth Deal, along with Brexit, increased capital projects and the push to make the council more ‘digital’ had already placed pressures on the service, before Covid brought ‘unprecedented strain’ on them.

“Auditors,” he said “recommended that management consider the capacity within the finance team to help improve the timeliness of the provision of information during the audit process.”

The lack of capacity was also pinpointed as a ‘significant risk’ to achieving the aims of the ‘change’ programme.

Mr Baulks report continued: “The expectation is that this programme of change activity will expand in the coming months.”

This would not only improve services, he said, but also reduce costs.

He added: “This additional programme of change activity comes at a time when Corporate Support Services are already under considerable strain and pressure to provide support to services for normal council business.”

Depute council leader Brian McGinley said: “There has been significant increasing demands on corporate services over the last number of years.

“We need some flexibility to do that. These are temporary posts and this is a temporary solution.

“We need a much more long-term solution. We are buying ourselves some time but these are temporary posts.”

He added that the need to address the concerns raised in the likes of the Audit Scotland report meant that there would be ‘hard decisions’ to ensure they had the capacity in specific areas.

“It is a significant investment but it will be value for money as it allows us to develop a platform for the change agenda.”