Understaffed departments and a reliance on temporary staff

A budget monitoring report being looked at by the council’s executive later today sheds some light on the long talked about staffing issues at the North unitary

By Sarah Ward

North Northamptonshire Council is relying heavily on agency staff and is also hugely understaffed in some key departments, analysis of its latest budget report shows.

The latest financial monitoring report for the authority’s first operating year has shed some light on what the issues are within the authority.

For several months there have been concerns, with members of the Conservative administration’s own party saying the situation is dire, but it has been kept closely under wraps, with even the council’s finance scrutiny committee having to wait many weeks for answers to know the true extent of the vacancy situation.

NN Journal now understands the vacancy number to sit at around 700 posts - attempts to clarify the actual numbers through the council’s own communications department have proved unsuccessful for the past two weeks.

But details in the financial report now give a closer indication of where the problems lie:

• The authority is overspending by £366,000 in its plannin…