Oops; Red-faced council got sums wrong
Red-faced council got sums wrong
Local authority forced to apologise after giving the incorrect information to union
Published: 10/06/2008
Council bosses were forced to apologise last night after it emerged that figures released by the authority in response to a freedom of information request were dramatically wide of the mark.
Aberdeenshire Council had been asked to provide details of the amount spent on agency and temporary workers in the last financial year.
The GMB union needed the figures for a dossier on similar spending by all the local authorities in the UK.
Aberdeenshire Council, after weeks of researching the amount, came up with a figure of just over £27.3million.
It prompted union leaders to hit out at a "horrific abuse of the public purse" and left councillors scratching their heads, pondering why the amount was so high — more than that spent by Edinburgh and just under Glasgow's total.
But yesterday — a day after the figures were released by the GMB — Aberdeenshire Council admitted it had got its figures wrong.
The total spend for 2006-07 was actually just over £4million — meaning Aberdeenshire should not have featured in the GMB's top 10 rundown of Scottish local authorities.
Aberdeen City Council made a similar blunder earlier this year when it said — also in response to a freedom of information question — that it had spent £29.7million on outside consultants over three years.
It later emerged that the council had used the wrong definition of consultants, and that the real figure was £1.688million.
A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council said last night steps would be taken to ensure similar mistakes did not happen in the future.
"Aberdeenshire Council has apologised for incorrect information that was issued to a research company under the Freedom of Information Act," he said.
"The council stated that money in excess of £27million was paid to agency workers in 2006-07. This was incorrect and the actual figure is £4,036,922."
He said: "This was down to human error where the cumulative figures for each month were added together, rather than individual monthly figures.
"We apologise for the error and will be tightening our procedures around checking details of freedom of information requests."
Despite repeated attempts by the Press and Journal on Sunday to clarify the figure, no one from Aberdeenshire Council was willing to discuss it.
A GMB spokesman said he found the figures submitted by Aberdeenshire surprisingly high.
"I couldn't work out how they had spent so much money," he said. "I think it's just crazy that they've gone from more than £27.3million to just over £4million."
It is the only local authority in the UK to have submitted the wrong information.
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