Barry Lafferty: All aboard the gravy train

Hands up those who think they could resign from their job and then be immediately re-employed as a consultant by the same company.

The truth is if you work for a privately owned company it's unlikely a consultant would be engaged to replace an existing employee. But if you work for the Government or local council you're in with a chance to climb aboard this latest gravy train.

Believe it or not one government department is now hiring consultants to review the use of consultants ... don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out which way that review will lean.

Consultancy work is a growth industry, especially in Wellington where former public servants are being laid off and then re-employed on higher pay rates as consultants. Perhaps this is the public service's answer to the demise of performance bonuses. The word bonus has become a little tainted these days so why not create a consultancy smokescreen in order to keep feeding from the public trough of taxpayer dollars.

It seems that other tasty trough, ratepayer dollars, is also on the consultants' menu. Hamilton City Council recently released details of expenditure on consultants which revealed $16 million paid to them in the 2010/11 financial year alone. That equates to just over $300,000 per week or $60,000 per working day. Surely with the current elevated levels of unemployment it must be possible to find suitable employees to do the same work as expensive consultants. Three hundred thousand dollars per week would have paid 200 extra employees a weekly wage of $1500 each. But HCC chief executive Barry Harris says contracting out some of its work enables the council to go to the market for competitive pricing and access a wider range of expertise: "... you're not locked into maintaining the costs of those staffing levels", he was quoted as saying. Ever heard of short term employment contracts?

HCC uses a list of preferred consultants - a pre-approved group of professionals including architects, surveyors, engineers, lawyers, IT experts and financial managers. This group is known as the "professional services panel". It must be frustrating for those businesses not included on the preferred list but HCC does review membership of the panel every three years.

I guess it's a bit like taking your car to the same garage for three years before realising you could get a cheaper price for the same service down the road. Maybe council managers should be shopping around a bit more often; they might be amazed at how much of our money they could save.

Barry Lafferty is a Hamilton based writer and commentator who launched the popular Riversider publication. He now works as a freelance advertising and marketing consultant.