NO more money should be spent on consultants advising the county council on how it could save up to £58m a year, according to a senior Labour councillor.

The county council has already spent £2.1m on external staff advising it on how to streamline its work as part of its Fit for the Future programme.

Earlier this year, PricewaterhouseCoopers staff found council staff spent 15 per cent less time delivering services than other authorities' and that they have to struggle through more than 400 IT systems.

But the leader of the council's Labour group, Liz Brighouse, said she felt employing an expert within the authority would be more beneficial than paying for PwC's help.

Mrs Brighouse said: "The Labour group will not support any further money going out to consultants in relation to trying to develop [Fit for the Future], particularly whenever it's going to be money taken away from services that we're currently operating."

But the council's cabinet member for finance, David Bartholomew, said signing up to a 'framework' for PwC work would be beneficial.

In the last eight years, the council has had £300m cut from its budget and lost nearly a third of its staff. About 40 per cent of those were managers.

Mr Bartholomew said: "In the ideal world, if we had lavish support facilities, we would be able to do this ourselves.

"But [a council report] is quite clear, change and transformation could be delivered in house. However the expertise, capability and capacity is not available to undertake in all areas that is likely to be required.

"Business as usual work would compromise internal service, availability and speed of delivery. The officer view is clearly there is not the capacity to do the work."

But at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Mrs Brighouse said that while she accepted the council needs to be 'beefed up', its officers should be 'empowered' to assist with the changes.

The cabinet decided to approve signing up to what Mr Bartholomew said was 'a menu' of potential services that the county council could select from PwC.

The council's director of finance, Lorna Baxter, said the framework was a good deal. Set up four years ago, she said prices from 2014 remain the same so advice is likely to be cheaper than from other contractors.

In March, the council's assistant chief executive Maggie Scott said things had to change and transforming services was the best option.

She said radical changes would be better than 'salami slicing services'.