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HOW much does it cost to change a lightbulb? Well, it seems more than £1,000 for one North council.
That’s the amount dim bosses at the cash-strapped local authority forked out for an art expert to jet into the region twice – to help put up then take down this string of lights at a modern art show.
Middlesbrough Council – which made £6.8m in cuts and savings earlier this year – paid £532 for an “art courier” to spend one day and night on Teesside last March to help install the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show at the town’s mima gallery – and £142 of that was for “refreshments”.
The same expert returned four months later, at the end of mima’s A Certain Distance, Endless Light exhibition, “to oversee condition checking and de-installing” of a piece of art called Untitled – a string of dozens of lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling.
That two-day trip cost the public purse £529.80, meaning £1,060 was spent on the courier’s two trips.
And just seven months later Middlesbrough Council announced plans to make £52,700 of savings by slashing working hours at the Central Square-based gallery.
Charlotte Linacre, Campaign Manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “It’s increasingly difficult for local authorities to plead poverty with a straight face when they’re prepared to spend so frivolously.”
Mike Hill, regional organiser for UNISON, added: “’UNISON has consistently asked employers to review all unnecessary expenditure and waste in order to achieve efficiency savings and off set job losses and reductions in Terms and Conditions of service. This includes the use of expensive consultants, external contractors and unnecessary travel costs both within and outside the UK. In some areas we are winning the argument, but it is clear that in others the employer needs to look a little closer to home.”
The bill forms part of a whopping £316,919 spent in two years by North councils on overseas trips in which council executives have journeyed all over the globe for conferences and meetings. The Sunday Sun acquired details of all trips paid for by 11 North authorities in 2009 and 2010, using the Freedom of Information Act.
As well as spending £1,060 on flights, hotel stays and refreshments for the art courier, Middlesbrough spent £342.96 on a flight home to Prague for a “service user”.
And artistic forays abroad accounted for £7,158 of the £23,494 spent on overseas travel by Middlesbrough – 30% of the whole amount.
That includes £3,144.82 on a nine-day trip to New York for two officers for ‘acquisition and collection development’, and a further £400 on sending an officer to Dublin “to make relationships with Dublin based galleries”.
http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/news/north-e ... -28739445/
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/media/2011/05/22