THE council spent almost £20 million on agency staff in the last financial year, the Advertiser can reveal.
In fact, that last bit is not strictly true; the information is already in the public domain, hidden in plain sight among tens of thousands of lines of data in a dozen spreadsheets on the council's website.
Three years ago, in what was hailed by some as a defining moment in the open data revolution, local authorities were encouraged to publish all items of spending over £500.
The move, led by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, was designed to increase transparency and lead to greater value for money.
Croydon opened its books and has published the results on its website each month since November 2010.
Each spreadsheet includes several thousand lines, under five headings, including supplier and amount, but other than listing the relevant department contains no explanation as to what the figures mean.
The Advertiser has produced a more accessible way to show how the council spent your money in the last financial year.
The result is an interactive graphic, which can be accessed on our website, in which spending can be broken down by supplier, department and amount, a tiny fraction of which is discussed elsewhere on this page.To view the interactive graphic click here.
It has allowed us to illustrate that the council paid £16.8 million to recruitment agency Comensura, as part of an overall spend on temporary or interim staff of £19.9 million, a 26.1 per cent increase on the previous year.
Its draft accounts were discussed at an audit meeting on Tuesday, but the documents contained little information about how much the council spends on agency staff and why.
It does mention the social care and family support division of the children, families & learning department went £1.2 million over budget last year, and that the majority of the overspend (£674,000) was due to agency staff covering a large number of vacant posts, maternity leave and sickness.
The Special Educational Needs (SEN) department spent what is described as "agency premium" of £23,000 to cover two senior posts, and sickness and other absences in the vehicle removal team cost an extra £43,000 in temporary staff fees.
Personal data, such as salaries, is not listed as expenditure over £500, so you would have had to check the draft accounts to discover that amid the increased agency costs (totalling nearly £55 million since 2010/11), some 119 people were made redundant by the council, at a cost of £1.8 million, including pension contributions.
The outlay included £213,000 paid out following the departure of one senior council officer earning between £200,000 and £249,000 a year, who the council, which has set aside a further £3 million to pay for further redundancies, declined to identify when asked by committee members.
Cllr Simon Hall, Labour's cabinet member for finance, said the Advertiser's graphic would make it easier for residents to put cuts to services such as lollipop men and women, of which ten posts are going to save £60,000, in context.
"It's the sort of thing the council should be providing in the interests of transparency," he said, "not just publishing a huge amount of raw data and the expecting people to have the time to be able to decipher it themselves.
"In principal everything should be in the public domain and the Advertiser's work is an example of making something very visual for anyone interested as to what is going on and how the council is spending its money.
"It gives people the chance to ask for themselves whether the council has got its priorities right.
"Everyone knows the council has faced huge cuts to its funding and continues to do so.
"But is it right to be cutting things like school crossing patrols or libraries, seeing voluntary groups fold for the sake of a few thousand pounds , or making it more difficult for children with special needs to the transport they need while spending millions on temporary staff or £200,000 to make one person redundant?
"I think it's a demonstration of the flawed priorities of this administration."
Deputy council leader Tim Pollard said: "I'm not going to say there aren't examples of waste out there, but there is an awful lot less than there used to be.
"The council uses agency staff in a number of different situations, including bridging the gap between filling posts. What no one ever mentions is how much it would have cost to pay someone to do that role anyway.
"I can understand why someone who has lost a service they use would make comparisons with other areas of spending but the council is a very large organisation with a lot of statutory obligations.
"What I can say is at a time when we are under significant pressure to make every penny count we are determined to stamp out every bit of waste."
With the Advertiser's new graphic, maybe you can help.
For further details of some of the most prominent pieces of expenditure click here
To view the council's draft accounts for 2012/13, including an overspend of £3 million, click hereThere are over 25,000 lines of data within our interactive graphic, so if there is a story you think we have missed, or you would like more information about a particular company, let us know below.
