Congratulations – Folkestone & Hythe District Council For Setting Yet Another Record
shepwayvox
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.
