TWO Hampshire councils have paid more than £4m to consultants in the past six months, the Daily Echo can reveal.

Hampshire County Council spent around £2.7m on consultant fees while the bill at Southampton City Council was over £1.3m.

The Conservative-controlled councils have spent a further £4.7m on agency workers over the same period while they are preparing to lay off hundreds of staff in the face of funding cuts.

Unions and anti-council tax campaigners have called the amounts involved “outrageous” and “scandalous”.

Figures published this week under Government transparency rules show tens of thousands of individual items of spending over £500 between April and September 2010.

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Consultancy fees have been spent on everything from marketing to the counselling of children and concessionary bus fares for pensioners.

In addition, county architects spent about £1m appointing outside bodies for building projects, including some consultants.

World renowned architects WilkinsonEyre, the firm behind Southampton’s Sea City museum, were paid £316,105 in the past six months, on top of £338,149 the previous year.

Meanwhile, business outsourcing giant Capita, which has a ten-year contract with Southampton City Council to provide some of its back office services, was paid £23.9m in the past six months, some for consultancy work.

The Lawton Communications Group also received £173,508 for handling all the city council’s recruitment advertising.

Agency staff costing £3m in Hampshire and £1.7m in South-ampton have been employed to work in old people’s homes, provide home care, on highways, in children’s social services and to answer the phones at council call centres.

Most temporary staff for Hampshire County Council are supplied by Manpower which has a multi-million pound contract with the council.

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The county council’s spending on consultants and agency staff is about two per cent of its annual £359m wage bill, excluding teachers.

Christine Melsom, founder of anti-council tax group IsItFair, said: “It is scandalous. Hampshire County Council employs 42,000 people. Why does it need to spend millions on agency staff and consultants?

“We have highly-paid executives at the council. What are they doing? Why appoint consultants to do work that could be done within the council. The figures demand answers.”

Hampshire County Council is looking to save £30m over the next two years, including about £6m in staff costs – equal to the sum spent on consultants and agency staff in just six months.

The council has officially notified about 5,100 staff it intends to cut premium payments for overtime and working unsocial hours, for example weekends.

Steve Brazier, regional manager the Hampshire branch of Unison, the union, said: “It doesn’t take an economist to see before they start cutting services and attacking terms and conditions of staff they should review and reduce all agency and consultant spend. It is outrageous.”

The county council is looking to shed more than 900 jobs over the next 12 months through voluntary redundancies, retirements and a recruitment freeze. The wants to cut management costs by 25 per cent.

Southampton City Council reckons it faces a £40m to £50m funding black hole over the next three years and will have to axe more than 300 jobs. It has already asked all staff to voluntarily sacrifice their posts to cut its wage bill, which totalled some £113m last year.

The councils published their spending figures three months before being required to do so by the Government.

They hope the move will help the public better understand of how they spend taxpayers’ money.

Southampton finance boss councillor Jeremy Moulton said: “Use of consultants is kept to an absolute minimum. We only use consultants when there is a sound business case to do so. They must offer value for money and specialist expertise that will deliver excellence for the city.

“Our priority will always be to deliver the core services that our residents rely on.”

• The Daily Echo asked Hampshire County Council to comment but had not received a response by the time the paper went to press.