City of York Council is to cut back on agency staff amid concerns about the rising cost of employing them.

The authority spent almost £9.5 million between June 2021 – May 2022 on agency workers, the latest data shows.

Anywhere between 319-480 agency staff were employed during a given month in that period.

Councillors have been warned that the council and Work with York, the council’s preferred recruitment agency, face employing more agency workers, for longer periods and at greater cost due to the current job market.

But there is also an “exercise being undertaken to reduce, challenge and review agency spend and the number of agency workers” by council officers.

The council is looking to make cutbacks in its ‘people’ directorate in particular.

The report noted that agency staff are useful for providing “short term resource solutions” and that Work with York’s charge is “not too excessive when considering pension and NI (national insurance) costs.”

The council has recently hired a number of agency workers to help Ukrainian refugees settle in York, for example.

Sickness absence, maternity cover or staff for short-term, funded projects are more typical examples of the need for agency staff.

Agency workers should not normally be hired for longer than three months unless there is a specific business case, the report said, but this is not always happening – again partly down to the current recruitment market.

There were 99 assignments which exceeded 12 months over the past year.

York Conservative group leader Cllr Paul Doughty said reviewing agency working was an “absolute basic of prudent financial management”.

He added: “Between 300-400 agency employees sounds a very high amount bearing in mind the additional fees added by agencies on top. Of course there are variables that will determine what’s best value for the council taxpayer, which should always be the basis of decision.

“Any review should include what has been learned from previous years as it strikes me that we hear the same issues repeated year in, year out in some of the finance and outturn reports and no apparent active action.

“There is also the question of whether senior staff, some who live away from York, are spending sufficient time at the ‘coal face’ for proper oversight.”

A separate report to the staffing matters and urgency committee revealed that 1,600 council staff – 66 per cent – were now classed as hybrid workers who combine home and office working.

There is no set home/ office split for hybrid workers.

Just under 30 per cent are community-based workers, while the remaining five per cent are permanently office-based.

According to the report: “Hybrid working allows efficiencies in the ways that we work, for example, less travel for our workforce and more productive attendance at meetings and training with online offers.

“A hybrid working offer also means that York is attractive to a wider net of applicants than those in the immediate employment market area.”

The two council reports had been private, but were later made public in redacted form after requests from councillors on that staffing matters committee.