The director of people and policy for Cambridgeshire County Council has told Recruiter he “wouldn’t like to be a recruiter right now”.

Stephen Moir, also president of the Public Sector People Managers’ Association, said that as the drive for local authorities to be more efficient gathered pace, recruiters supplying local authorities faced a difficult and uncertain future.

This stems from the fact that the government is requiring local authorities to achieve 3% cash efficiency savings year-on-year.

Moir accepted that the use of vendor managed service providers (VMSPs), prefer - red supplier lists and central procurement teams by local
authorities squeezed recruiters’ margins.

Moir added: “If agencies are undercutting each other’s margins that’s great as far as I am concerned. It makes for a much more mature
market. It’s public money at the end of the day and paying over the odds doesn’t sit comfortably with me.”

Moir said his priority was ensuring that public money was used effectively on services. “Spending a lot of money on agency staff is the last thing we want to be doing,” he added.

“I don’t have a problem in agencies making a fair profit, but I do have a problem in them making disproportionate profits, when it means taking money away from the rest of the community.” However, Moir didn’t define what he saw as a ‘fair profit’.

“The world has changed,” continued Moir. “Agencies might have to work harder to keep their customers happy, and customers will be working harder to squeeze the best possible margins.”

Dean Kelly, chief executive of teacher and social worker recruiter Synarbor, told Recruiter that “local government has taken its eye off quality and gone for price”. As a result, “cracks are starting to show through”, he added.

Kelly attacked local authorities’ use of VMSPs, in particular, for supplying staff who are “available and cheap rather than the best person for the job”.

Kelly said he estimated that the cost of rectifying the problems caused by having the wrong person in the job, such as re-hiring, as well as the resultant inefficiencies, were 10 times the initial cost savings of using VMSPs in the first place.