Wirral Council defends spending £600,000 on external consultants in the last year

Nov 18 2009 by Liam Murphy, Liverpool Daily Post

WIRRAL Council last night defended spending almost £600,000 on external consultants over the last 12 months.

The authority had revealed through a Freedom of Information request that it had paid consultants hundreds of thousands and insisted it was "a good use of taxpayers’ money".

But Conservative group leader Jeff Green condemned the expenditure, saying it was "astounding, especially as the council will be telling us next it doesn’t have any money".

According to the spreadsheet released by the authority in the 12 months to September 2009, £592,020 was spent on consultants to advise on issues from delivering regeneration projects, support for the schools private finance initiative, mentoring for student learners and the New Brighton redevelopment scheme.

Cllr Green said he had been asking for information on the use of external consultants for "some considerable time" but had been repeatedly told it was not available.

He said: "Any information that you want has to be dragged kicking and screaming out of this council. They like to keep inconvenient truths hidden from the public."

Cllr Green said: "This list says they spent around £56,000 on consultants to prepare an outline business case for parks maintenance contract. We can’t get money to improve the parks, but they can spend £56,000 on consultants. This beggars belief.

"This council has 12,000 employees and it’s amazing there is not the expertise within the authority without spending hundreds of thousands on external consultants."