COUNCIL bosses spent almost £3million paying agency staff in the last four years.

New figures show that North Ayrshire Council forked out a total of £2,904,720 to pay the salaries of employees off the books.

Agency staff have been used at Cunninghame House to help manage workloads in the short term.

For the year 2015/16, £592,292 was paid to agency employees - a fall of £371,869 compared with the £967,161 handed out in 2014/15.

But the 2014/15 figure was a rise from the two previous years where £535,858 and £806,409 were paid in total to agency staff in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

The Place department has dished out the most money on agency staff in all years spending £421,708 (2012/13), £563,460 (2013/14), £322,497 (2014/15), £322,144 (2015/16) respectively.

The council's Health and Social Care Partnership has seen a huge drop in agency staff payments going from £248,030 in 2014/15 to £97,147 in 2015/16.

Finance and Corporate Support, however, has seen an increase in the last financial year from £140,088 to £162,523.

Staff numbers have dropped since 2013/14 when 106 agency staff were employed, for 2015/16 36 were employed by NAC.

The figures were revealed after a question by Largs Councillor Tom Marshall at last week's full council meeting.

Councillor Ruth Maguire, cabinet member for finance, corporate support and welfare reform, provided a table of figures at the meeting.

She said: “The table below summarises the number of and cost of agency staff since financial year 2012/13.

"The number of staff does not represent full time equivalents but the number of staff employed, durations of employment will vary.

"The use of agency staff can be for a number of reasons. The need for flexibility in managing workloads in areas where demand is variable.

"Short term specialist roles often aligned to specific projects, areas where gaps in service are not desirable or exposes the organisation to risk. Short term resources pending service redesign.

"Relative to the total payroll bill expenditure on agency staff is modest, in 2014/15 this was less than 0.5%. Agency staff are used by services only where it is essential and is usually time limited.”