£123 million was the total bill for consultants, agency and temporary staff employed by Jersey's government last year.

Long overdue data has just been published, showing a 5% percent, or £6.2m million increase on 2022.

£40m was spent on consultants, including expert advice for the new hospital, responding to the Haut du Mont disaster and digitising government services.

That was up from £33m on the previous 12 months.

The biggest increase was on Agency Health Care and Social Workers, up from £22m in 2022 to more than £37.5 million in 2023.

Following a States vote in 2019, the Chief Minister has to produce a six-monthly report setting out how much public money is spent on agency health and social workers, local agency workers, consultants, contingent labour and fixed-term contractors.

A new finance system brought in last year has delayed the release of the numbers for 2023, and both sets of biannual data have been published together this week.

The wait for figures prompted questions in the Assembly earlier this year, the answers to which revealed the previous government had spent £58m on consultants during its 18 months in office.

The delayed report on consultancy shows the government primarily spent on:

• Government Plan Major Projects - Emergency services, technology, the hospital project, healthcare, infrastructure;
• Government Plan Departmental Project - Westaway Court Refurbishment;
• Other Funds' Project - Biodiversity and Climate Emergency Fund Projects;
• Major Incident Response and Recovery - Haut du Mont.

The current Council of Ministers, brought in in early 2024 after a vote of no confidence in the previous government, has said it wants to 'curb' spending on third parties.

It says it has introduced a new policy and approval procedures, ensuring more control and oversight of outgoings across each government department.

It is also looking at ways of collating the spend data more quickly.

In March, the Comptroller and Auditor General said there was still a lot to do to make sure the use of outside experts represents value for money

Lynn Pamment looked at spending from 2019 to 2022, totalling almost £112 million.  In her report, she said:

"There will always be certain skills that are not available on island and skills that are not needed by the States of Jersey on a permanent basis.

READ: Government Told To Address Use Of Consultants

“Where consultants are used, there is a need to ensure robust processes are in place to drive value for money. My review has identified that such processes are not in place on a consistent basis across the States of Jersey.

"As a consequence, value for money from the use of consultants cannot be demonstrated consistently."