Durham County Council spend £5.7m on consultants but deny children free travel to school (From The Northern Echo)

Durham County Council spend £5.7m on consultants but deny children free travel to school

8:54am Thursday 10th December 2009

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A COUNCIL has been criticised for spending £5.7m on consultants, while resisting calls to provide more children with free travel to school.

Durham County Council deputy leader Alan Napier revealed the council’s expected spend on consultants for 2009-10 during a full council meeting at County Hall, Durham, yesterday.

The predicted total is nearly double the figure for 2008- 9, which was £2.97m.

Coun Napier said that all well-managed authorities used consultants in appropriate circumstances and, although there was an opportunity to rationalise, they would still be needed.

He said consultants were used when the necessary skills were not available at the council, in areas such as ICT, finance and legal services.

Programmes such as Building Schools for the Future would not have progressed so far without using consultants, he added.

However, Coun Owen Temple, a Liberal Democrat opposition member of the Labourrun authority, suggested consultants were needed when councils lacked imagination and vision of their own.

And Coun Mark Wilkes, also a Lib Dem, said: “We’re spending £5.7m on consultants, but we can’t get the money to get people on the bus.”

His comments came after Coun Claire Vasey, cabinet member for children and young people’s services, spoke against a proposal by Conservative Becky Brunskill to cut the distance from school a child must live to qualify for free transport, currently two miles, to 1.5 miles for children under eight.

She said: “This isn’t acceptable or even sensible. It means young children spend the day at school tired or even don’t go as often as they should.”

However, Coun Vasey said the county council spends £13m-a-year on home-toschool transport, already runs more generous service than the law requires, and suggested Coun Brunskill’s plan could cost more than £1m a year.

Coun Simon Henig, the council’s leader, said opposition parties’ demands were completely incoherent and new schemes should be discussed during the budget process.

Coun Nigel Martin, the Lib Dem leader, called for a working group to investigate the costs of the scheme.

The council voted to defer the motion until its next meeting, in January.

The debate came days after the Government pledged to cut spending on consultants in half, as part of a clampdown on public sector waste.

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