THE county council is not learning lessons from recent outsourcing oversights and is in danger of repeating them, a full financial review has found.

In its annual audit letter, Worcestershire County Council’s external auditor Grant Thornton said lessons are not being learnt from recent outsourcing fiascos including the much-delayed Evesham Abbey Bridge project and the council’s HR contract with Liberata, and has told the authority it should be listing the potential disadvantages of outsourcing before making decisions.

The auditor said the authority has “fully embraced” the idea of being a commissioning council – with over 75 per cent of its services now provided externally – but did not challenge some of the contractors as well as it should have and was instead driven by a desire to become a commissioning council.

The letter said: “For the contracts we examined, the key driver for putting them out to tender was to fit with the agreed corporate objective to become a commissioning council.

“As a result the potential disadvantages of providing these services from outside of the council was not considered in reports to members.”

The auditor said the problems were included in a 2015 report on the council’s commissioning – when it said the advantages and possible savings were listed but there was ‘limited discussion’ of the risk – and have yet to be addressed properly.

The letter continued: “There is no clear evidence that the lessons learned from major contracts are being considered and included in the appropriate training for officers engaged in procurement activity and as a result there remains a risk that further issues could be encountered with other major contracts.”

Michael Hudson, chief financial officer for the county council said: “Our external auditors identified there were lessons to learn not that we were not achieving value for money.

“We are working closely with our external auditors at Grant Thornton to continually improve all areas of our financial and procurement processes going forward.

“We have strengthened our governance and support for all contracts and how we do commissioning.

“That will include the way we challenge and measure how we get value for money. Our governance will also ensure consistency from all levels, across the council and build on both the findings and the progress made in the last audit.”