Newport Council spent £19m on agency workers last year

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Newport City Council spent nearly £19 million on agency staff last year.

The council’s opposition leader has called for vacant roles to be filled with permanent hires.

Cllr Matthew Evans likened the council’s agency spends to football clubs signing lots of players on loan, rather than developing homegrown talent.

A spokesperson for the council said it used agency workers to “plug essential gaps flexibly”, and its approach to recruitment is “regularly reviewed and scrutinised”.

Around £10.3 million was spent on agency staff in the city’s schools last year, with the remaining £8.6 million spent on other council departments.

Cllr Evans, who leads the Conservative opposition group, said he had requested the figures amid his concerns about “huge amounts of money” being spent on agency staff.

“I accept a need, from time to time, for substitutes [but] clearly a much better outcome is with permanent staff,” he said.

“From an education point of view, Estyn has raised this before – the impact on education standards due to recruitment.

“You’re invariably going to have an impact on teaching, it’s an important consideration.”

Hiring and training workers on a long-term basis would be “good practice” and more beneficial for the council, he argued.

“You recruit the staff, you train them up and make sure they are looked after,” he said. “If you fill [the council] with agency staff, they are here one day and gone the next. It obviously impacts on the organisation.

“I’m sure all agency staff are professional but it’s a bit like borrowing a football player [on loan] for a few weeks,” he said.

The Conservative councillor added he was “not saying new jobs should be created”, but “where there are job vacancies that need to be filled, it would be much better to fill them with full-time staff”.

In response, a spokesperson for the local authority said Newport City Council “employs thousands of local people to support the delivery of hundreds of different services”.

“The council’s priority is to ensure we provide a consistent service, whether that be education for children in our schools, care for our vulnerable residents, or keeping our streets clean,” they said.

“With such a broad workforce there are inevitably going to be times when people are unwell or need to take the leave they are entitled to by law – such as annual, paternity or maternity leave.

“There may also sometimes be gaps in resource[s] when people leave for new employment.”

On education, the spokesperson said “around half” of the council’s agency spends are within schools, calling this “an example where we must have the right people in place at the right time”.

“It is also a cost that is expected, planned for and built into budgets, but we will of course always look for the most cost-effective options available to us,” they added.

When providing the figures Cllr Evans requested, Cllr Dimitri Batrouni – who leads the local authority – said that “following the introduction of a new agency contract, we continue to work to further improve efficiency in managing this expenditure”.