By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter
More support costing upwards of £150,000 is needed to help Nottingham City Council deliver a balanced budget.
The Labour-led authority has been spending large sums of money on external support due to a lack of internal capacity in its own workforce and a staff “exodus” amid better pay in the private sector.
The latest spend is shown in delegated decision documents and amounts to around £157,000.
It is needed “to provide supplementary resource (due to lack of internal capacity) to the Improvement and Transformation Portfolio, to support the identification of further strategic opportunities to ensure a balanced and robust Medium-Term Financial Plan and services delivering best value.”
The council’s Medium Term Financial Plan sets out its budget for the next four years.
A firm financial plan must be set out as a requirement from the Government, and an improvement board is continuing to keep watch over the council’s progress following the collapse of Robin Hood Energy.
The authority has already faced further Government intervention, with the Government-appointed improvement board’s chairman, Sir Tony Redmond, being given greater powers to direct the council if needs be.
It narrowly avoided commissioner intervention in favour of Sir Tony being granted these powers to make sure the council sticks to a strict timeline of improvement.
These powers are expected to remain in place until at least September 2024.
Since the improvement journey began, the council has been forced to spend millions of pounds on external support and consultants to assist.
While it had successfully applied to the Government for £15m of funding, which has helped the council create a ‘transformation reserve’ through which it has been paying for support, the need for even more expertise as time goes on continues to prove costly.
One of the most recent and significant spends included the enlisting of the help of consultants at a cost of up to £6.5million to help improve the council’s ‘inadequate’ children’s services.
Other contracts in the past included an interim director for transformation and improvement, Richard Grice, who was paid more than £1,000 per day over four months.
Of the latest spend, the council said: “This cost will be allocated from the Improvement and Transformation fund.”
The City Council will bring its latest Medium Term Financial Plan to the Executive Board for discussion soon, and a decision on any further Government intervention looks set to be announced by the end of January in the new year.
