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A very interesting response from Cornwall Council to Wednesday's blog about spending on consultants:

"The Council introduced a new coding structure from 1 January 2011 and it appears that some of the payments made to contractors for large capital projects such as new school buildings and roads have been wrongly allocated to the consultants budget. We are carrying out a detailed analysis of the situation but early indications show that at least £2.5 million of the amount coded to the consultants budget between January and March actually relates to payments to contractors."

Consultants, contractors - who knows? I don't suppose this answer was actually designed to boost confidence in the council's accounting procedures. The key question, which I have also asked, is how the year-on-year spend compares with 2008/9 and 2009/10. I fear the answer might take a while as we wait for the finance department to do the "detailed analysis" to gets its codes in order.