A TINY local authority struggling to keep its head above water is having to shell out hundreds of thousands of pounds on professional fees every year, it has been revealed.

North Dorset District Council Independent councillor John Tory has hit out at a system which spends enormous amounts on analysing and auditing every aspect of the council's activities at the expense of services to the public.

"You don't actually fatten a pig by weighing it," Cllr Tory said following a North Dorset District Council meeting which scrutinised sums spent on outside consultants.

Cllr Tory told the meeting he had trawled through the budget and found £116,000 earmarked for fees for planning and £14,000 for corporate management in last year's budget.

The council would be paying £100,000 to the Audit Commission this year, he added.

Speaking to the Daily Echo, Cllr Tory said: "We can't afford to keep people with skills right across the board and have (in-house) experts on this, that and the other."

The services of the Audit Commission were worth £4 of the council tax, he said.

"It's obviously huge and by and large the cost of finding the information has got to be borne by us," Cllr Tory added.

"They do land us with a huge amount of work and at quite a senior level. It's taking officers out of delivering what we have to deliver to do constant analysis."

North Dorset was famously capped for raising its council tax by 36p a week for a band D resident.

The re-billing alone will cost around £100,000 out of the council's overall budget of slightly under £6 million.

The district council's finance chief, Barry Marshall, said £76,000 had been clawed back from the £116,000 earmarked for fees in the planning budget when the Lower Winterborne windfarm appeal was withdrawn.

But that money had been swallowed up in the savings forced by capping, he added.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said there were a number of authorities across the country the same size as North Dorset facing exactly the same consultancy fees which still managed to deliver excellent services.

First published: August 16, 2005