8:30am Monday 9th November 2009
By Melanie Vass
CASH-strapped councils looking to save millions of pounds are still hiring costly agency staff to fill vacancies, the Daily Echo can reveal.
A Freedom of Information request revealed that a service manager in the Youth Offending Team, who is working four days a week, costs £96,658 a year.
This agency payment is split between Bournemouth and Poole councils, the police and probation service but is vastly more than the £48,510 that an in-house worker would cost.
Bournemouth council also pays an agency £59,723 for a development control applications engineer – a job that would cost £45,559 if paid by payroll.
The examples come as Bournemouth council looks for a new transport services manager to replace an agency worker that originally cost more than £200,000 a year, when the job should have cost just over £50,000.
But there are rare occasions when the council can save money by going to an agency.
An interim human resources director recruited through an agency currently costs Bournemouth £58,278 a year, while an in-house director would earn £69,322.98.
Dave Higgins, of the Bournemouth branch of Unison, said: “Agency workers should be the first things they look at as they seek to make £8m worth of budget cuts over the next two years.
“They need to look at how they can promote from within or assist people in gaining the necessary skills to do these jobs.”
Bournemouth council stated that it is hard to compare agency payments with in-house salaries as agency workers often have less favourable terms ands conditions.
It added that the Youth Offending Team agency job was a temporary solution following the retirement of the current postholder and a permanent employee was being sought.
The post could not be left vacant, it said, because the service was being inspected this month.
The current postholder has more than 30 years’ experience and has worked in similar roles with other authorities.
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