Plaid attacks Labour council over £20m bill for agency staff
PLAID Cymru has launched an attack on Labour-run Caerphilly council after it emerged that more than £20m had been spent on agency staff in the last five years.
Details disclosed to the authority’s opposition Plaid group show that a total of £20,671,685 has been spent on such staff since 2012.
Meanwhile hundreds of staff have been made redundant or taken voluntary severance between 2012-13 to the end of the last financial year.
Between April 2016 and January 2017, £3.94m has been spent on agency staff, around half of which consisted in staffing the council’s corporate services department.
The average number of full-time agency staff taken on has varied between 120 and 163 over the last five years.
Colin Mann, leader of the opposition Plaid Cymru group, said: “Caerphilly council under Labour has been spending almost £80,000 every single week on agency staff – and it has significantly increased by one third since they took over the administration [from Plaid and some independents] in 2012.
“In the last year of the Plaid Cymru administration just over £3m was spent.
“Employing agency staff is an expensive way of doing business. There will always be a need for temporary support, but costs have risen to more than £4m a year.
“If a Plaid Cymru administration is elected following the elections on May 4, we will carry out a review of the spending on agency staff to look at the opportunities to reduce this bill.
“At the same time agency staff have been employed, many hundreds of people have been taken off the council payroll in the last few years.”
A spokesman for the council said: “It is quite normal for local authorities to use agency staff and the amount spent in Caerphilly is not disproportionate to that of any other Welsh council.”
The council said the employment of agency staff was totally unrelated to the ongoing senior officers’ pay scandal, which has cost the authority millions of pounds extra in salaries and legal costs.
Chief executive Anthony O’Sullivan, his deputy Nigel Barnett and the council’s head of legal services Dan Perkins were suspended on full pay in 2013 after senior officers were given huge pay rises far in excess of inflation. Their absence was later changed to “special leave”.
A Labour group spokesman said: “Most of this expenditure was for staff employed on our Welsh Housing Quality Standard programme, which was previously costed to corporate services and is now costed to community services.
“We are rolling out a £210m improvement programme for our housing stock at the same time as house-building activities gather momentum after the recession. This has meant there’s a premium on skilled trades people (plumbers, bricklayers etc).
“Other agency staff are employed on refuse and cleansing to cover permanent staff absence. Our agency expenditure is actually much lower than other councils of similar size.”
The Labour spokesman added: “Plaid Cymru talk of reviewing agency expenditure if they are elected in the forthcoming council election.
“Our Labour-led Caerphilly council keeps all costs under constant review and is delivering jobs, investment in our local economy and valued services for our local community.”