Birmingham's Labour leadership has come under fire for spending £1,000 per day on outside consultants to carry out work which should be handled by staff.

The attack from opposition Conservative Meirion Jenkins says that the council taxpayer is being ripped off while an army of business, legal and IT consultants cash in.

Cllr Jenkins, the shadow cabinet member for efficiency, said that some of the work should be part of the day to day running of the council, within the capabilities of staff without bringing in expensive outsiders.

He said: “The city’s legal department engaged outside lawyers to draft amendments to the city’s constitution – saying they didn’t have time to do it themselves. If expensive in-house lawyers, who should be experts in local government law, cannot even draft simple amendments to the constitution, then why are we employing lawyers at all?

“Even the work these external lawyers did produce fell short of the standards we would expect, with the ‘final’ version still containing basic typing errors and even missing out important changes that had been agreed at the previous meeting of full council.”

He also highlighted the recent IMPOWER report into school transport for special needs children, compiled at a cost of £27,000 and dismissed as ‘nonsense’ and advocating cuts which proved unworkable.

Cllr Meirion Jenkins

“These same consultants have raked in nearly £4 million from the council since the start of 2014 to support children’s services improvement activity that the Government and Ofsted have acknowledged has not gone far enough or fast enough.”

Cllr Jenkins (Sutton Four Oaks) added that consultants were paid £300,000 to advise the council on its Service Birmingham IT contract - when the council is a 15 per cent shareholder in the IT firm anyway.

“The Labour administration rejected a Conservative call in on this decision, arguing that the consultants will deliver more savings than they cost but that’s not the point – we are already paying officers to do this work. It also leaves one wondering for how long we haven’t been getting our full entitlement if this course of action is now deemed necessary,” he added.

In May the Labour council appointed Majid Mahmood to the newly created cabinet post in charge of efficiency and value for money.

Cllr Mahmood said: “I am reviewing our use of consultants and particularly the issue we have with officers taking redundancy and leaving the council then coming back to work as consultants.

“In some cases their use is justified, such as where we do not have the in house expertise - for example over the health service transformation, or STP, programme.”

He said that in the Service Birmingham case the consultant had cost the council £300,000, but saved the taxpayer £800,000 on the IT contract.