TAUNTON Deane Borough Council has defended the amount of money it spent on consultants last year, saying the Firepool and Coal Orchard projects are where they are because of the council’s expenditure.

The council has also defended its £670,537 outlay on agency staff during the last financial year, saying they were employed to fill temporary vacancies, and the council had employed nearly 90 people over the past 12 months to try and address staff shortages.

The County Gazette posed a number of questions to the council following the results of the Freedom of Information Act request, and here is its response:

County Gazette: Why does the council spend so much on consultants?

Taunton Deane Borough Council: The council employs consultants to provide exper - tise that is not available in- house – for example specialist legal advice. As Taunton Deane is a Borough Council with an ambitious growth agenda, there is a need for this expertise. The level of expenditure should be seen in the context of what comparable local authorities spend. It would be too costly and wasteful to employ full-time officers with this level of expertise.

CG: Why has the council spent so much money on projects such as Firepool and Coal Orchard?

TDBC: Costs relate to a variety of specialist areas of advice essential to bringing the scheme forward, including master-planning and design, advice on acquisition of third party land on site, negotiation of commercial terms relating to occupiers (including the new apartment block recently completed on the south side of the river) and advice on commercial terms of potential occupiers.

External advice and expertise on such matters is sometimes necessary. It would not make financial sense for the council to recruit permanent staff on areas where input can be very restricted to highly specialised and time-limited areas of expertise.

A fresh planning application for Firepool is imminent, expected this month.

The Coal Orchard application has already been submitted and will be decided by plan- ning committee this spring.

Firepool, with a development value of £105m, and Coal Orchard, are important schemes and they are being progressed as quickly as possible, bearing in mind their complexity and importance of delivering high quality and viable proposals that make the most of our riverside and town centre retail, leisure and cultural offer.


RELATED: Click here to see how much Taunton Deane has spent on agency and consultancy fees


CG: Is there an element of frustration within the council that so much has been spent on Firepool and Coal Orchard, and they’re still no closer to being started?

TDBC: It is misleading to suggest that the schemes are ‘no closer to being started’.

Had the council not carried out the work that it has (planning, land acquisition, design), the schemes would not be in the position they are today - with a planning application for Firepool about to be submitted and an application for Coal Orchard to be determined shortly.

CG: What were the consultants used for on SW1 and Transformation?

TDBC: The consultants engaged in respect of SW1 provided specialist commercial and HR expertise in relation to the council’s management of and exit from the SW1 contract.

The consultants engaged in respect of the Transformation Programme are providing specialist support to help develop and refine the business case and implementation plan. 

CG: Does the council intend to spend the same amount on consultants next year, or does it hope to reduce/increase the costs?

This would depend on the ambitions of the council. If it plans to continue its ambitious growth programme, it would continue to need consultants for their technical and specialist expertise.

CG: Why are so many agency staff employed by the council? Is the council actively looking to fill vacancies?

TDBC: In the last 12 months, we have engaged agency work- ers to fill vacancies within building services while the service has been restructured, in the cleansing service while it was being tendered and to provide cover for staff on secondment to different internal projects. This is in addition to engaging agency staff to cover maternity leave or long-term absence and temporary peaks in workloads.

We continue to actively look to fill vacancies and have recruited 89 new starters in the last 12 months on either permanent or fixed term con - tracts.

Cllr John Williams, leader of TDBC, said: “It’s disappointing when you get accused of not being commercial, and then when you try to apply commercial methods, you are criticised.

“There’s an absolute need for specialist planning, valuation and design advice and part of the costs are for a design review panel, that protects the community from adverse de- velopments.

“The Firepool planning application not being approved last year demonstrates the democratic and planning processes are working. We thought it was a sound scheme, but the planning committee disagreed with it and told the developers they had to come up with what hopefully is a better scheme that will satisfy the planning committee. It demonstrates the impartiality of the system.

“The over-riding thing is we are talking about a development at Firepool that costs £105 million, and Coal Orchard at £50 million, and the consultancy costs compared to that are miniscule.