Nottingham City Council is to spend an additional £100,000 on legal aid as it continues to be plagued by an inability to recruit permanent staff members. The cash will go towards a solicitor over the course of a year as it seeks to become financially stable.
The Labour-run council had been under the scrutiny of an independently-chaired improvement board after it lost £38m in taxpayer cash in Robin Hood Energy. And after further financial mishaps were uncovered, with an estimated £40m from its Housing Revenue Account wrongly spent, the Government said it was minded to now send in the commissioners.
So far the council has managed to decrease its debt levels from £1.2 billion to £900 million, primarily through the success of its asset rationalisation programme through which it has been selling off property assets it no longer needs, however its progress has come at a cost, too. The council has been struggling to recruit permanent roles and it lacks the required expertise in a number of areas.
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As such it has been employing consultants and external support, some of whom charge upwards of £1,000 per day, to fill this void. Council documents state the £100,000 will go towards a locum solicitor within the Legal and Governance directorate to support ongoing work.
According to job advertisements on the council's website, fixed-term solicitor jobs offer roughly £40,000 per year, meaning it is paying considerably more for a locum solicitor. For senior roles the salary rises to around £44,000.
The city council says: "The work undertaken by the locum property solicitor supports a key deliverable for the council under the Together for Nottingham Plan. There was, and remains, insufficient capacity within the existing permanent staffing establishment to deliver the disposals required under the Asset Rationalisation Programme, which is an ongoing scheme of high value to the council.
"The temporary locum solicitor was engaged through an agency provider in January 2021 and has contributed positively to this agenda. As there remains to be insufficient resource internally to deliver this work, despite a number of fixed-term recruitment attempts, it is now proposed to extend this arrangement for a further period of up to 12 months to enable this work to continue."
Explaining why such costly experts are being employed City Council leader and Dales ward councillor, David Mellen, added: "The Government’s non-statutory review of the council places a requirement on the council to improve, with a focus on financial and governance arrangements. We are making good progress on this, but we need external expertise at this early stage of our transformation, with changes required at pace.
“We made a request to Government for capitalisation, allowing us to borrow up to £20m against capital assets, which has helped us to create a transformation reserve. Some of this reserve money is being used to appoint external experts and set up new business support and customer service arrangements to drive the transformation activity that’s been identified is needed at the council. This does not impact on our budgets for running day to day services."
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