Post office cuts consultants paid £300 an hour

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ult131.xml

By Christopher Hope, Home Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:06am GMT 31/10/2007

Consultants are being paid more than £300 an hour to advise the Government on how to shut more than 2,000 post offices, ministers have admitted.

The disclosure infuriated opposition parties who said it was a "total disgrace" that ministers were spending hundreds of pounds an hour on the controversial closure plan.

Unions said the consultants were paid 44 times more than the £7.24 hourly rate handed out to the highest paid customer service adviser in the Post Office.

The Government confirmed in May that around 2,500 post offices will be axed over the next 18 months, cutting the total from 14,300 to about 11,800.

Pat McFadden, a minister in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, yesterday confirmed that consultants who advised on the closure plan were paid a "combined average hourly rate" of £318 an hour.

Mr McFadden refused to provide a breakdown of hourly rates paid to individual advisers because it was "commercially confidential information".

Lembit Öpik, the Liberal Democrats' shadow business, enterprise and regulatory reform spokesman, said: "Wasting this much money on consultants while ministers are masterminding the closure of thousands of post offices is a total disgrace.

''Millions of pounds of taxpayers money could be being thrown down the drain.

"Rather than wasting time and money on its sticking plaster solution to the Post Office's problems, ministers should instead work towards putting the business on a genuinely sustainable footing."

Postal unions were outraged. Andy Furey, an official at the Communication Workers Union, said it was "disgracefully unfair" that postal workers were facing a pay freeze when the Government "wasted" vast sums of money on advisers and consultants.