Private firms or public waste?

The public sector, not just in Sussex but across the country, spends hundreds of million pounds a year on private consultants.

At local level, councils and the health service are their biggest clients.

Whether it is plans for public buildings, reviews of working practices, or projects like new schools or services, you can bet a pound to a penny a private consultancy will have been asked - and paid - to give its assessment.

But this culture of calling in consultants means the expertise of local authorities - who are already paid to draw up and implement policies in our districts, towns and cities - gets by-passed.

The waste of money is several million pounds a year in all.

We employ people like planning officers and environmental officers who are quite skilled at doing technical work on many of the issues.

There are occasions when we have got all the information, then we get a consultant in at huge expense to confirm what we know already and how we're going to do it.

Whether it is smaller issues or the much bigger things, consultants tend to get called in for most private finance initiatives when you've got perfectly good people in-house.

It is all a product of the strict requirements central government places on local authorities when putting in flagship schemes.

You get a lot of money to build a new school, for instance - but on the proviso it has to be built by a private contractor. There's a restriction saying you can't do it yourselves.

That means you're putting council taxpayers' money into the private sector when you could sometimes do it yourselves a lot cheaper.

With some of it you can understand why.

Sometimes you have to engage specialists to look at a site.

But the first response seems to be to bring in consultants from outside - when often authorities like county councils have their own experts who could be seconded in.

With PFIs, the whole contract has to go to one firm.

Sometimes you could have done a lot of that work yourself and saved a lot of money. There's no reason you couldn't do the preparatory work, the consultancy work, yourselves.

It is not just in PFI schemes and it is by no means just in Sussex.

This goes on all the time. My colleagues in other councils, like Newcastle and Liverpool, are highly critical.

A handful of big consortiums always seems to land the big contracts.

It costs you more because you have to pay them at their rate.

Big business and government tell local councils what to do.

Usually they are charging at the rate the private sector charges while we wouldn't have to if we were doing it ourselves.

Of course there are areas well suited to the private sector - perhaps where they are better suited to do work than local authorities. But most of them have no connection to the area where they are working.

That means they simply cannot have the same sense of responsibility - and accountability - to the community that staff on councils feel.

They have no interest, other than their professional interest, in what is best for the area.

The private sector is probably often a worse option than local government in that sense - and local authorities could adequately do most of the work themselves. One example that stands out for me is Falmer High School.

It was obvious to everybody concerned that one of the school's main problems was its Fifties buildings.

What it needed was the current buildings upgraded.

But what the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) decided was that it should be an academy - and have brand new buildings costing £25 million.

In the end, we're fixing a problem by spending £25 million when a couple of million might have done it.

If the council had asked for £2 million to do the improvements in the first place they would have been turned down - but we'll spend £25 million on a brand new school because the DfES will pay the money to the people who build it.

That is the nub of the problem Central government's attitude to local government is: "You're not good enough to do it. We're giving it to the private sector."

Someone up there in Whitehall or in the Government has a deliberate policy to exclude local councils and local people from these issues or decisions. The attitude is that if it is a big project, the private sector must know best.

Another example is the regeneration of London Road and Lewes Road.

When consultants were called in from London to report on proposals for improving the area, they lacked even basic local knowledge.

Community groups found themselves explaining what would be obvious to anybody with any experience of the area.

The consultants had no real idea of where London Road fits in to the grand scheme of things.

Why did the council think an outside agency would have a better grasp of the area's problems, or better ideas for the future, than its own staff?

In that sense, you do get the impression taxpayers' money is being used inappropriately on occasions.

Why would you pay the money out when you have got people here who can adequately do the job on your own staff?

But over the decades, the whole of local government and probably the health service has been pushed down in terms of its responsibilities.

Because it happens so often, in the end you get the assumption that that is what you have to do.

It is no wonder taxpayers and community organisations get cynical.

How are their voices to be heard if outside agencies are the ones coming up with the options?

There are some projects, big buildings particularly, that councils simply cannot carry out on their own.

But if that approach filters down to every decision local authorities make, then they truly will be divorced from the people they represent.

What do you think about the use of private consultants? Leave your comments below.