£1.5m for this?

Published: 1 July, 2011

• COUNCIL leader Colin Barrow claims “We are cutting officialdom” (The dead hand of Whitehall June 17) so can he please tell Westminster council tax payers why he has decided to spend nearly £1.5million on five “transformation and change management” consultants?

Despite the council employing 14 staff on salaries of over £100,000 a year and a further 40 staff earning between £80,000 and £100,000 a year, the council says these consultants are needed because the council’s “Senior leadership team will require strong change management support and will need to learn and apply the new behaviours they will require to drive through change at a pace that they have not previously been used to”.

Westminster Conservatives just don’t get it. Residents are already paying eye-watering salaries to huge numbers of back-office council staff and now another £1.5million is to be lavished on five highly-paid “transformation” consultants to do jobs that should already be done by the council’s existing workforce. And all this is happening when 300 staff have already been fired and a further 500 experienced and hard-working middle ranking and junior staff have been told that there is no money to pay them, including more than 70 weekend street sweepers whose jobs have been axed. Westminster Conservatives are closing St James’s Library, cutting back on services to vulnerable adults and allowing the streets to remain dirty, yet there is plenty of money to bring in expensive consultants.

The Westminster lunatics have finally taken over the City Hall asylum.

CLLR PAUL DIMOLDENBERG
Leader of the Labour Group