Herefordshire Council managed to trim the amount is spent on agency staff in the last financial year – but the figure remains stubbornly high.

The council’s total cost for all agency staff it employed in 2023/24 was £16,077,840, a spokesperson said.

That compares to a total figure of £17,233,065 for the previous financial year, marking a 6.7 per cent fall since.

RELATED NEWS:

However the figure is still well above earlier years. The council spent just £3.55 million on agency staff in financial year 2020/21, rising to £8.77 million in 2021/22.

The council intends that one million of the £2.5 million it aims to save this year in its children and young people department, the main cause of its budget overspend in 2023/24, is to come from reducing the number of agency social workers it employs.

But by May of this year these still outnumbered permanent social worker staff, by 70 to 61, according to an internal report.

What are your thoughts?

You can send a letter to the editor to have your say by clicking here.

Letters should not exceed 250 words and local issues take precedence.

The council’s response to a recent freedom of information request meanwhile revealed that its chief executive Paul Walker received gross pay of around £165,000 in 2023/24, up 3.8 per cent on the year before.

But when asked for the “gross pay bill for the top 18 highest earning members of staff including temporary, agency or interim employees”, the figure given by the council was nearly £2.7 million, or just under £150,000 each, indicating it is still spending heavily on individuals in the latter category.

It also spent £522,000 on “severance payments excluding redundancy” to staff in 2023/24 – more than the two previous years put together.

OTHER NEWS:

The council did manage to trim its overall payroll by 1.5 per cent, to £158 million. But pay still accounted for nearly four-fifths of the total £202 million the council spent in the year to April, an overspend of £8.7 million.

As a consequence its “earmarked reserves” have dropped from £81.8 million to £73.2 million.

The council has yet to publish a forecast for its likely spending in the current financial year based on its actual spending in the first quarter (April to June).