Westminster Tories to spend nearly £1.5m on “transformation consultants”

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Westminster Tories to spend nearly £1.5m on “transformation consultants”

By Westminster Labour ⋅ June 20, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment
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Westminster Conservatives have agreed to spend £960,000 on five ‘Transformation and Change Management’ consultants from PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the next 12 months, with the option to extend the contract for a further six months bringing the total cost to Westminster Council Tax payers to £1,440,000. Labour Councillors have attacked this decision at a time when the Council is making £60 million of cuts, half of which are to front line services, including the axing of services to 3,000 elderly residents with moderate care needs, the closure of the St James’s Library in Victoria and the cutting of over 70 weekend street sweepers in the north of Westminster. In addition, the Council plans to close its three ‘One Stop’ service points in Victoria, Church Street and Paddington at the end of 2011.

Despite the Council employing 14 staff on salaries of more than £100,000 a year and a further 40 staff earning between £80,000 – £100,000 a year, the Council says that the PWC 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 will require to drive through change at a pace that they have not previously been used to”.

Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg, Leader of the Labour Group, said; “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 £1.5 million 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 over 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.”

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