Congratulations – Folkestone & Hythe District Council For Setting Yet Another Record
They’ve done it and with two months to spare. We said they would, we knew they would and they didn’t let us down.
Folkestone & Hythe District Council have spent more money on Temporary Staff in 2019/20 than in any other previous financial year.
In 2017/18 the Council spent £1,043,789 on temporary staff. That was a record.
In 2019/20 between April 1st and Jan 31st, the Council has spent £1,094,222 on temporary staff. This is an increase of 72% on the previous year’s spending, 2018/19, on temporary staff. This is the second time the council has broken the million pound barrier on temporary staff.
We anticipate the final spend total will be in excess of £1.2 million by the end of the financial year on March 31st, 2020. If this happens, as we suspect it will, Dr. Susan Priest – Head of Paid Service of FHDC and Cllr David Monk will carry the ignominy long into the future.
Temporary staff have been deployed across most Council departments such as finance, planning legal services, garden maintenance for example. Some departments inevitably need temporary staff, but to justify spending a million pound plus when you’re in the middle of an efficiency drive and the council have spent over half a million on redundancy costs makes little if any economic sense.
However, savings do not require that efficiencies be recorded net of up-front investment costs i.e. if you spend money to save money, you count the money saved but not the money spent in the process. By this logic, scrapping posts and hiring in consultants and temporary staff counts as a total saving and this is something our Council like many others will continue to do. As such, we expect to see temporary staff costs to fluctuate for a few years yet.
The Shepwayvox Team
Not Owned By Hedgefunds or Barons
If they have access to Boris’ money tree why are council taxes rocketing. It must be the influx of non Tories to blame, why were they invited?
They are sacking frontline staff in every dept, the few that remained untouched previously are going through the same now. There is nobody to do basic stuff so they piss our money away on temp staff at a much higher cost and still do a crap job regardless. Well done moronic council🙄
Have you also considered that by denuding the Council of loyal and experienced staff and using temporary staff instead the Cabinet and senior officers are less likely to be challenged particularly if their actions are of dubious legality.
A longer term possibility is that the Cabinet would like to merge administrative and other functions with a neighbouring local Council e.g. Ashford and that is far easier to achieve when one only has temporary staff whose services can be easily dispensed with and who will not be eligible for redundancy payments.
By way of contrast if senior officers were at some future date to be made redundant following a merger with a neighbouring Council they would be entitled to very generous payoffs. If anyone finds this far-fetched I can advise that Richmond and Wandsworth Councils have already done this.
“A longer term possibility is that the Cabinet would like to merge administrative and other functions with a neighbouring local Council e.g. Ashford”.
Actually there was an ‘administrative merge’ with Ashford BC way back in the late 1980’s when they merged the HSIS (Housing) and HBEN (Housing Benefits) computer systems – it went wrong in so many ways.