One of the country’s most controversial councils has handed out free mobile phones to nearly two out of every three of its own workers, it was revealed yesterday.More than 7,000 town hall staff in Manchester have been given mobiles, with the bill of more than £1.2million a year paid by the taxpayer.
The number of mobiles for council workers went up by nearly a third last year and the cost of providing them rose by more than ten per cent, according to details released under freedom of information rules.
The wide distribution of phones to the authority’s 96 councillors and the majority of its 11,500 staff came in the depths of the recession and just before it launched a programme of large-scale cutbacks in its services to the public.
Labour-run Manchester is currently cutting back lollipop patrols, swimming pools, leisure centres, homes for the disabled, libraries and public toilets as part of an attempt to deal with £170million in reductions in grants from the Treasury.
Its leaders have piled the blame entirely on the Coalition and cuts. Ministers, however, say the city could maintain its service if it improved efficiency and spent less on wasteful bureaucracy.
But at the weekend its leaders were revealed to have £95.2 million sitting untouched as cash reserves.
The council spent more than £1.2million on mobile phones for its staff in the financial year that ended in April 2010, according to the figures obtained by the council tax protest group Is It Fair?
The bill was 10.6 per cent up on the £1,095,734 paid for staff mobiles the year before.
It supplied workers with 7,032 mobile phones and 232 BlackBerry devices, up from 5,451 mobiles and 111 BlackBerries in the previous year. Read More
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