Fife Council has shelled out £2 million-plus in 10 months on consultants’ fees including almost a quarter of a million pounds on a consultant’s report on how to reduce the number of managers it employs.
Fife Labour leader Alex Rowley has quoted consultants’ costs to show what he called “the wrong spending choices of the SNP and Lib Dems”.
He has issued figures showing that in less than a year Fife Council spent over £2 million on consultants, and called the revelation “outrageous”.
“In the week the SNP and Lib Dem councillors will vote to cut frontline services we find out they have spent more than £2 million on hiring consultants in the last 10 months,” he said.
“It has also been revealed that the SNP and Lib Dems have paid almost a quarter of a million pounds to another consultancy firm to advise them on reducing the number of managers.
“It is clear there is a complete lack of political leadership in Fife Council. These councillors are like rabbits caught in headlights with no ideas, no vision and now resorting to paying consultants to tell them what to do.”
The council’s transportation service footed the biggest consultancy fee total, at over £780,000. Next came social work and development services, which both spent around the £212,000 mark.ExpertiseCouncil leader Peter Grant described Mr Rowley’s “antics” as an “embarrassment” to his group and to the council.
He said, “If he had spent half as much time working on a credible budget he wouldn’t be in the humiliating position of having to ask us to delay the budget on Thursday to give him time to get his act together.
“Most of the ‘consultants’ he dismisses so lightly include firms with specialist expertise in particular kinds of architecture, design work, project management and other skills that are essential for the successful delivery of a greatly increased capital investment plan that is delivering benefits across Fife.
“Are Labour saying, for example, they would rather see regeneration projects in the historic heart of Dunfermline overseen by a bunch of amateurs who got the contract because they could do it on the cheap?”
Mr Grant added, “Mr Rowley is screaming in protest at the £0.2 million one-off cost of reviewing the council’s management structures.
“He demands open scrutiny but he deliberately left out the fact that thanks to this investment we are in a position to take 200 management posts out of the organisation, leading to a saving of over £11 million a year, with no impact on service delivery. That’s a recurring saving of 50 times the once-only cost of the work.”
He continued, “The most embarrassing own goal for Labour is … the fact that when they were in power the council spent more on consultants than we’re doing this year.”