MORE than £7 million is still being spent on private consultants and agency workers by the city council, figures show.
The bill represents a reduction on the previous year, with the total amount spent on consultants' fees falling from £8.2m to £7.2m.
But former Lord Provost Lesley Hinds today said she remained concerned about the amount of money being spent on emp
loying private firms to carry out "day-to-day" tasks that could be performed by council employees.
Last year, Edinburgh City Council spent more than any other local authority on external consultants. A council report, which went before the local authority's finance and resources committee this week, found that only £2,158,848 of the total bill was on "bought-in expertise" which would not otherwise have been available.
The rest of the bill includes the use of agency staff, printing, and IT-related expenditure, as well as projects funded by bodies including the Scottish Government.
Of that bill, the biggest sum, £1,041,139, was spent by the council's city development department. Both the corporate services department and the services for communities departments spent close to £400,000.
Councillor Hinds had asked for a breakdown of the money spent on consultants. She said: "My concern was always for the number of consultants that were being used for the day-to-day jobs that could be carried out by staff.
"I will continue to scrutinise all these consultants and make sure we're getting value for money. There will always be projects that we need outside consultants for, but we need to get best value."
The report shows that among the costs, the council paid out more than £211,000 to specialist consultants Halcrow for a "consultancy framework service".
Among the other fees was a payment of more than £46,000 to HR firm Orion Partners for the creation of an HR service centre and £214,000 to New Thinking Ltd for developing and managing a project management office.
A spokesman for the city council said: "We will use consultants and agency staff where we need those skills or it is better value for taxpayers' money.
"We have identified savings compared to when we came into office but we will continue to drive down costs wherever we can."
The full article contains 389 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
