Wirral Council paid a day rate of over £700 a day for some agency staff!

                                    

During the public inspection period I requested copies of a number of invoices from Matrix SCM Ltd to Wirral Council for agency staff. An example of one of those invoices for £308,534.18 (which doesn’t state much detail) is above.

Agency staff are provided by Matrix SCM Ltd to Wirral Council on either an hourly rate or day rate. In addition to this there can also be claims for mileage, parking and tunnel tolls.

The timesheets (which I link to as a zipped file as there are 62 of them) provide more detail on what the payments to Matrix SCM Ltd are for.

Seven years ago, a legal change meant that creating a job at Wirral Council on a salary of over £100,000 has to be voted on at a public meeting to which all its councillors are invited. A salary of £100,000 assuming 5 weeks 3 days holiday a year equates to a day rate of £431 a day.

However many agency staff were paid a day rate higher than this. For example the timesheet for invoice 311 shows sixteen agency staff paid at a day rate ranging from £472.50 + VAT a day to £817.91 + VAT a day.

On the timesheet accompanying invoice 90, Wirral Council is invoiced for a member of agency staff working in Wirral Council’s Children in Care section out of the Wallasey Locality Office for 36 hours work at £39.31 plus VAT an hour (total £1,415.18 plus VAT). However for the same member of agency staff a mileage claim for the same week was submitted for 1,800 miles at 45p a mile + VAT (which comes to a total of £810 + VAT)!

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