Calls for cash-strapped Northants council to halt £1.4m spend on highways contract consultants

A fight has begun to stop Northamptonshire County Council from spending £1.4 million on consultants for a new highways contract which may never be signed.

The authority, which will be disbanded in April after a financial collapse of mammoth proportions, agreed last month to spend the multi-million pound sum on consultants to draw up a new agreement which could see a highways firm given a long term contract worth hundreds of millions from 2022.

The current plan is to get all of the contract outline completed before April so that the new unitaries for the North and West will just have to sign on the dotted line.

But now the Liberal Democrat councillors on both of the new shadow unitary councils have put in motions to ask the shadow executives to halt the process. The motion says the consultancy appointment is premature and the option of bringing the contract in-house at the new unitary councils should be fully assessed.

It was debated by the West unitary shadow full council last night (Aug 18) and will go before the North unitary shadow full council tomorrow (Aug20). The motion will then be referred to the shadow executives, however it is unclear under the shadow constitution whether they even have to consider it.

Liberal Democrat Chris Stanbra said: “There isn’t any need for the contract to be sorted now. It should be left until the unitary councils can make a decision. So they can decide whether they want to spend £1.4 million on consultants. The option in the end may be that the unitaries do not want to contract out the service and deliver it in house instead. If so, that would mean that £1.4m had been spent un-necessarily and there could be a disappointed contractor who thought they may have been awarded the contract.”

Cllr Stanbra said he could not understand the rush to move ahead with setting up a new contract and it was difficult to avoid making the conclusion that the decision to go ahead with appointing consultants now was led by an ideological position by the county council’s current ruling administration about outsourcing of public services.

He said it had been openly admitted that the current contract, which has been run by KierWSP since 2008 and extended without reprocurement twice, had not been satisfactorily monitored in the past.At last night’s West shadow full council Liberal Democrat Cllr Jonathan Harris said the county council was taking an ‘entirely cavalier attitude’ to spending taxpayers money on consultants and said he had been contacted by residents who work in the industry who said the price being paid to the consultants to draw up a contract was far too high. Cllr Harris said it should not be a decision for now.

In response leader of the county council Matt Golby said the consultancy spend had been agreed by the leaders of the North and West shadow executives.

An extension of the existing contract until July 2022 was done behind closed doors last autumn.

£700,000 of the £1.4 million bill will come from this year’s NCC budget and the remainder will be billed to the new unitaries in the next financial year.

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