The ‘Return of the Consultant’ in easyCouncil

The ink is barely wet on the redundancy letters and members are contacting the branch to say that staff who have been made redundant are now back working as Consultants!

Unfortunately this is not a new phenomena in Barnet, over the years this has been almost an unofficial policy.

I have raised this issue with councillors and senior officers. During this year’s Budget consultation Barnet UNISON raised it as in our Budget proposal which you can view here

Here is what we said about the use of consultants

“The issue of Consultancy and Agency spend has been repeatedly raised at previous Council Budget consultations. Over time promises have been made that this information would be provided. It is true that information is produced but it is the robustness and quality of the information that is of concern to the Trade Unions as it is to the local tax payer.

The issue which appears to challenge the Council is providing a definition of a consultant and an agency worker. Each year we have offered to put together a policy which we could jointly agree. It is important that during consultation the Employer seeks to provide easily understandable and accessible information to the Trade Unions in order to ensure all attempts have been made to mitigate making staff redundant.

The Council through its industrial relations machinery produces Agency figures, more often than not these are repeatedly inaccurate. The reasons behind the inaccuracy of the agency data have changed over time but the problem remains the same.

“How can an organisation afford not to know how many Agency workers they employ?”

Furthermore, since the publication of the Council spend over £500 we have requested confirmation about Agency & Consultancy spend in the understanding that there was likely to be a high number of redundancies this year.

We carried out an exercise whereby we extrapolated the Consultancy spend data based on figures released in August; the result of which the Council was looking to spend £38,733,307.98. We carried out the same exercise in relation to Agency workers and found the Council was looking to spend £8,309,206.92. These two figures when understanding that staffing spend takes up a large part of Council spend are not insubstantial figures.

Recommendation

The Council undertakes as a matter of urgency a review of all payments to staff not employed directly by the Council.

Furthermore we recommend that the Council refer to the HMRC Guidelines in particular the advice to be found here that explains that “It’s your responsibility to correctly determine the employment status of your workers – that is, whether they’re employed by you or self-employed. This depends on the terms and conditions of your working relationship with each worker.

It’s important to get your workers’ employment status right because it affects the way tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) are calculated for them. And it determines whether or not you have to operate PAYE (Pay As You Earn) on their earnings.”

Read full details here

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/paye/employees/start-leave/status.htm ”

Needless to say we did not get a response to our report. Feedback from members would be most welcome.