Agenda item

The Committee considered a report detailing the Council’s spend on temporary agency staff contracts via Matrix for quarter 4 of 2018/19.

The report set out spend on interims as identified from the Matrix spend report £3,472,580 (Quarter 4 2018/9).  Members were advised that spend registered outside of Matrix through the Council’s Agresso payments system for the same period totalled £1,104,472 for January to March 2019.  There were currently 250 interims employed but not all were on full time contracts.  This figure was down by 42 on the last report to the Committee.

As requested by the Committee the report also included information about tenure of agency staff over 1 year.

The Committee discussed the information in the report and noted that further work needed to be undertaken to:

·  Provide a breakdown of figures for interims employed to work on special projects as opposed to backfilling vacancies

·  Identify whether sufficiently robust procedures were in place to end contracts once work was completed

·  Provide a cost comparison/consideration between having interims versus employing a member of staff

·  Identify the feasibility of establishing a ‘pool’ of administrators across the Council – Members were advised that work was in progress on this.

The Committee requested that reports showed figures from the last meetings to allow the Committee to identify trends.

Resolved:

(a)  That the report be noted;

(b)  That the  report to the next meetings of the Committee include

·  a breakdown of figures for interims employed to work on special projects as opposed to backfilling vacancies

·  information on whether sufficiently robust procedures were in place to end contracts once work was completed

·  a cost comparison/consideration between having interims versus employing a member of staff

·  information on / progress made on establishing a ‘pool’ of administrators across the Council.

·  Figures from previous meetings.