City council spending more than £110,000 on temporary legal staff

NOTTINGHAM City Council is spending more than £110,000 on temporary staff to work on selling its buildings due to a shortage in its legal department.

The authority expects to sell around £74 worth of its property as it continues to battle a financial crisis.

The effective declaration of bankruptcy by the Labour-run authority in November saw its leader being unable to completely rule out the sale of assets like Wollaton Hall and Newstead Abbey, though he stressed that such sales would be unlikely.

Recently, the council was given £65m in support by the Government, which will allow it to use money from selling assets for day-to-day running costs.

The council has just approved the spending of £110,686 on temporary legal staff.

Explaining the reason for the spending in its decision document last week, the council said: “There is insufficient capacity in the legal team to fully support the asset rationalisation programme on top of business as usual work. “The currently engaged locum is fully au fait with the council’s systems and continuation of their engagement is a pragmatic solution to the resource problem.

“Steps will still be taken to try and secure suitably qualified directly employed staff on temporary contracts but this has previously proved difficult in a challenging employment market.”

The authority says it has a predicted pipeline of assets worth £74.3m that will be sold from the ongoing financial year that started last April up to April 2026.

Despite this, the authority says it is most likely that the sales will generate £32.2m by April 2026.

The authority says this is because a risk adjustment is applied to each asset “based upon the complexity of the sale and the distance from completion”.

The council’s programme of selling assets has already been under way for some years, with sites sold so far ranging from car parks to former leisure centres.

A total of £64m has been generated since the 2021/22 financial year.