Leeds council under fire over ‘wasted’ £800-a-day fee for consultant

Leeds City Council is currently carrying out a review of its youth services – on which it spends about £5m a year – and a report is expected to be presented to senior councillors next month.

Council chiefs opted to hire a consultant to assess the current service and look at how it could be improved.

But the move has been fiercely attacked by Coun Alan Lamb (Con, Wetherby).

He claimed the decision to spend £20,000 for 25 days work was a waste of money and had told the council nothing that it did not already know.

Coun Lamb said: “The consultant was brought in to look into the problems facing the youth service and following the initial report back appears to have succeeded only in identifying the same problems that a cross party working group of elected members had found previously.

“The use of the consultant was not widely known and opposition councillors were not informed and were not made aware of the £800 per day costs.

“I am outraged that the children’s services department has wasted £800 per day to tell us all what we already knew.

“The money would have been better spent on providing the support young people and their communities badly need from the Youth Service.

“The fact is many elected members are well aware of the problems in the youth service and we don’t need a massively expensive consultant to tell us how this service needs to be improved.

“It is a pity that yet again the ruling administration is not prepared to listen and has instead wasted this money that could be used
to provide key frontline 
services.”

He was also disappointed that at a recent youth review meeting, councillors were presented with only a two pages of bullet points based on the consultant’s findings.

Coun Judith Blake (Lab, Middleton Park), executive member for children’s services, said: “We came into administration in 2010 and recognised we were going to have to address some issues in the youth service.

“It’s fair to say there has been concern about the effectiveness of our youth services and we want to do our best for the young people in the city.

“Given the sheer scale of the restructure, which involves procurement, commissioning and working with other partners, we felt we needed the expertise of a national figure to give us independent advice and assessment
to help us bring in radical changes.

“The work being carried out is also helping to make sure we can continue to provide youth services at a time when some other local authorities have stopped them.”

Consultancy spending has been a bone of contention for Yorkshire councils in recent years, as they seek to operate on ever tightening budgets.

Last year the Yorkshire Post reported how Bradford Council had come under-fire for spending millions on consultants for regeneration projects which had failed to come to fruition

Projects aimed at reducing the number of young people in the city not in employment, education or training (NEETS) and specialist work with youngsters at risk of falling into criminal behaviour are also included in the review.

Coun Blake said the bullet points had been presented to the youth review meeting to give people a final chance to comment on key issues raised during the course of the review.

She added: “We are in the process of drafting the final report. It will go to the scrutiny working group and then to the executive board for a decision in November.

“I am deeply disappointed in Coun Lamb’s superficial analysis of the situation, given that he was involved right at the start of the process and has had plenty of chance to comment.”