Why did Wirral Council spend £8,497,964.68 on agency staff last year?

                                                   

Above is one of the many weekly invoices Wirral Council received from Matrix SCM Limited for agency staff last year. Wirral Council spent £8,497,964.68 on agency staff with Matrix SCM Ltd last year.

Each invoice has an accompanying spreadsheet that shows how the total amounts on the invoice are calculated. The spreadsheets have a column titled units, which either represent hours or days for agency staff supplied.

Some agency staff are charged to Wirral Council at a very high hourly rate. For example the timesheet for invoice IN17589 shows that Wirral Council paid Matrix SCM Limited for 5 weeks work by a member of staff supplied by the agency at a daily rate of £817.91 + VAT a day (total including VAT over those five weeks £24,537.30).

This spreadsheet (which is a large file and may take some time to download) provides details of the breakdown of expenditure on agency staff by Wirral Council with Matrix SCM Limited for the 2016-17 financial year.

A story published on this blog two years ago about the same topic detailed just over £6 million of expenditure by Wirral Council on agency staff over 10 months in 2014-15.

This means Wirral Council last year spent even more on agency staff in 2016-17 than it did in 2014-15!

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