Shepway District Council Spend Data Under the Magnifying Glass.

A picture they say, is worth a thousand words, well we have seven pictures/graphs for you. All these graphs are made from Shepway District Council’s payment to suppliers covering the period April 2012 – Sept 2016. So 54 months, or four and half years, worth of data.

Graph 1

So SDC have spent £123.32 million and their average spend is £ 2.28 million pounds per month. Why did SDC spend over six million in May 2016? And on what did they spend it? We don’t know. Is there a plausible explanation?

Graph 2

We can see a growing reliance on temporary staff  costs with significant rises in payments from April 2015. The largest recipient of monies from SDC for temporary staff is Recruitment Solutions (Folkestone) Ltd. We know over the last few years there has been a mass cull of permanent staff by SDC to save on ‘costs’.

Why have SDC become so reliant on temporary staff?

Graph 3

We have spoken about the SDC’s B&B bill several times before but how and why has it jumped from a mere £950+ bill in April 2014, to just over £78,000 in May 2016?

Graph 4

These are the suppliers who received much of that £1.755 million. The Salisbury Hotel has now closed and was sold in the latter part of 2015.

Graph 5

We do not know what Miscellaneous Contract Payments means. It is that non-descript bureaucratic language so loved by civil servants, which is vacuous and tells you nothing. But £33.429 million surely deserves a much clearer explanation, wouldn’t you agree?.

Graph 6

This should be pretty self explanatory. This is who SDC pay out money to for supplies and services. The top 20 suppliers have received 66.5% of SDC’s £123.32 million between April 2012 – Sept 2016

Graph 7

Here are the top 20 small suppliers – defined as suppliers not billing more than £1,000 at a time.

If these graphs raise any  questions for you, please do email the following people for an explanation.

Chief Executive SDC – Alistair Stewart – alistair.stewart@shepway.gov.uk

Finance Officer SDC – Tim Madden – tim.madden@shepway.gov.uk

Elected Leader of SDC – David Monk – david.monk@shepway.gov.uk

Cabinet Member for Finance – Cllr Susan Carey – susan.carey@shepway.gov.uk

Leader of the Opposition – Cllr Len Laws – len.laws@shepway.gov.uk

or you can write to your SDC Cllr for your ward asking them to make sense of SDC’s spending behaviour. Their details and email addresses can be found here.

Shepwayvox