FOI Request - External Consultants Spend

Request 101004012555

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I would like to request the following information from your organisation:

1. How much money was spent by the authority on external consultants in the financial year 2025/26?

Response 06-07-2026

1.Capital projects often include a range of costs, including design, engineering, project management and other professional services, which are not consistently recorded separately from wider project costs within the financial system. Identifying consultancy elements within capital projects would require a detailed manual review of individual project records and invoices. The figures provided therefore relate to consultancy expenditure identified from revenue budgets and centrally recorded consultancy spend.

To ensure a consistent approach has been applied across services, consultancy expenditure has been interpreted as external professional or advisory services engaged to provide specialist expertise, technical advice, project support, feasibility work, reviews or strategic input. For 2025/26, external consultancy spend was £563,000