Local authorities are paying more than double to secure the services of much-needed agency staff compared with what they would pay to a full-time equivalent, LocalGov.co.uk sister title Surveyor has learned.
The claim, based on research by senior transport consultant, John David is based on a scenario of each authority having at least 10 agency engineers in a design team who are paid £40 an hour.
Based on an eight-hour day, figures indicate that authorities would typically be paying £16,000 a week for the 10 engineers – which is up to £8,000 a week, or £384,000 a year more than what it would cost to employ 10 full-time engineers for the council.
Mr David’s research forms part of a campaign, supported by Surveyor, to encourage more young people into engineering, and to put a focus back on in-house training which would lead to authorities ‘growing their own’ engineers.
Mr David said: ‘I recommend these figures are independently audited. The outcome of this will lead to clearer identification of the scale of losses we are, and have been experiencing for a number of years.
‘At the expense of offering up efficiencies, the first casualty has often been training. We need to work together to address this major resource issue. This is an opportunity to design a more robust and sustainable future, and stop looking at quick fixes. It is perhaps for this reason we should resist the temptation of lifting visa restrictions for overseas workers, as this will reduce our commitment to grow our own talent.’
One source working for a county council confirmed that these figures were accurate – a fee of £40 an hour was common practice. He told Surveyor that his biggest challenge was still ‘quality of staff available’.
He said: ‘At a previous authority I worked for, we felt it was more cost effective to use agency staff because we couldn’t recruit experienced staff. The cost was the recruitment process – potentially £8,000 a time, with no result. How long would it take to get skill levels up to the point where authorities can be confident ‘kicking-off’ a recruitment process?’
He went on to say that the other issue was the flexibility agency staff gave local authorities. ‘A lot of agency staff are used not because authorities can’t recruit but because they are being brought in for one-off projects.’
Another authority told Surveyor it had recently spent ‘many thousands of pounds’ on a recruitment process which yielded no full-time staff.
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