LIVERPOOL council bosses are spending £12,000 on sessions for councillors and senior officers to play “Guess Who?”

The project is aimed at improving relations between councillors and officers.

The programme includes workshops in which the council’s top executives have to guess who councillors are from their silhouettes and photos – with sources telling the Daily Post many failed on most counts.

But, while pressure groups like the Taxpayers’ Alliance condemned the spend, city leaders have defended the scheme, saying it is vital to improve relations, although they were keen to stress that the atmosphere is not as bad as certain high-profile spats between the professional staff and elected members have suggested in the past.

Cllr Paula Keaveney, executive member for ethical governance, said there was evidence that officers and councillors did not always understand each others’ roles. She added: “One of the issues that sometimes is difficult, regarding relations, is when people don’t really understand the roles the people they are relating to are doing.

“Perhaps this would be different if they actually knew the reality of the roles they hold.”

Cllr Keaveney added that she accepted it was not possible to quantify value for money with such a scheme.

She added: “The only way we can properly judge this is by improving the atmosphere in which people work.

“We will never be able to get a measure on this.”

She added that it did not cause her too much worry that the most senior, most qualified officers seemed to be the ones with the least knowledge of who the councillors were. “It might be that, when you are very senior, you are often very senior in a particular speciality.

“When you are more junior, you might come across certain people more regularly.”

Liberal group leader Cllr Steve Radford said: “These kind of gimmicks are not the way to spend money or improve relations.”

A spokesman for the Taxpayers Alliance added: “Hard working people pay council tax for real services, yet some managers think paying for consultancy workshops is a legitimate use of taxpayers’ money.

“Ordinary families are being forced to look carefully at their budgets, and it’s time that councils did the same.”

A council spokesman: “Bids to run the project were received from eight companies. The workshops are part of a wider programme.”