A long-serving North Ayrshire councillor has been forced into withdrawing remarks he made regarding questioning the productivity of the local authority workforce, avoiding possible punishment.
Former Tory Leader Tom Marshall made the comment at full council after asking for a comparison of the numbers of Scottish Government Civil Service employees compared with the North Ayrshire Council staff numbers.
He revealed that the numbers of government workers had gone up by 80 per cent – from 5,120 to 9,222 between 2015 and this year and asked what were the comparable figures for North Ayrshire.
Cabinet Member for Finance, Christina Larsen, said: “The headcount for the council in 2015-16 was 6,778, now in 2023-4, this is 7,595, which is a rise of 12 per cent.
“This demonstrates an increase of 818 members of staff in 10 years during a time when council services were diminishing. Can the member explain why we have increased staff by such a number or is it just that staff have been less productive?”
She said: “Can I thank cllr Marshall for the supplementary, however I do take offence from him saying our staff are not productive.
“In terms of the increase, the Health and Social Care Partnership has seen a significant growth in the workforce over the period, particularly in more recent years through investment in front-line care roles to respond to service demands or investment aligned to Scottish Government priorities.
“This includes for example investment in social worker roles, children’s family support and Child Protection and Care at Home services.
“Furthermore during this year the remainder of care at home services in North Ayrshire transferred to the in-house care service.
“During 2021-2 2 we received £4.6m of investment for multi-disciplinary teams and care at home teams and this resulted in an additional circa of 120 posts.
“In terms of teachers in early years there are some key drivers of these changes over this period, primarily from August 2021 and entitlement to funded early learning and childcare in Scotland almost doubled from 600 to 1140 hours per year, this had a significant impact related staff requirements.
“The Scottish Government figures show that workforce changes occurred across Scotland where a step increase in the local authority workforce is observed between 2016 and 2017 and 2020-21 with the numbers becoming more stable from 2022.
“Changes to our teacher workforce in recent years are largely a result of additional funding from the Scottish Government to mitigate the worst impact of the covid pandemic.”
Chief Executive, Craig Hatton, then asked Cllr Marshall to withdraw the last part of his sentence in which he criticised staff as it constituted a breach of the code of conduct.
Cllr Marshall said: “I am happy to withdraw that although it is quite common in other spheres of life for lack of productivity to increase the number of staff but in this case I withdraw it in relation to the council staff.”
Cllr Marshall was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Scottish Standards Commission back in February over a planning application.
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