PAN1580 - Agency Staff Managed Service

Leicester City Council has appointed a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to meet our temporary staffing requirements. Due to the diverse nature of our temporary staffing requirements, working in a wide range of sectors to strict timescales, we require a "high touch" MSP to work with the Vacancy Management Team to provide our requirements.

Leicester City Council is a fourth generation MSP user and has a dedicated Vacancy Management team which ensures robust demand management and governance controls are in place and adhered to on the use of agency staff. Spend on agency workers reduced by £1.2m (a 10% reduction) compared with the previous year (2015/16).

This cost reduction was achieved despite increases in Living wage costs (3%) and worker pay rates (1%). Leicester City Council's spend on agency staff in the financial year 2016/17 was £10.9m.

The table below shows how this was spread across the different job classes used. Admin & Clerical 5% Manual Labour 14% Trades and Operatives 14% Qualified Social Care 43% Unqualified Social Care 8% Qualified Education 3% Unqualified Education 0% Qualified professionals 3% Part qualified professionals 2% Interims and Senior Management 3% Legal 3% IT 1% We have a high reliance on agency workers in the qualified social care arena, particularly children's social care.

It is essential that any MSP is able to offer a high touch service to manage this requirement and provide suitable resource in a timely and compliant manner. The MSP needs to be fully conversant with providing qualified social care staff into an authority with similar demographics to Leicester City Council. It is also essential that any MSP is able to access specialist management and professional staff across the diverse roles within a unitary local authority, where it does not make financial sense to retain/recruit staff as part of the substantive workforce.