Consultants tasked with solving the London borough engineer recruitment crisis are planning to drive down the cost of agency staff. Paul O’Neill, TRM director and project manager of the BETTER Partnership, a ‘virtual agency’ set up by the Association of London Government (Surveyor, 17 November) wants to get greater consistency in the cost of agency staff. There is typically a 10-30% fee on top of temporary staffs’ salaries, he told Surveyor. It would – apeing the increasingly common practice in the private sector of outsourcing human resources departments – aim to ‘lever better value for the boroughs’, said O’Neill. This would entail agreeing standard rates with what would become the approved list of recruitment agencies.