An “urgent investigation” into a council department, accused of over spending by at least £200,000, has been called for by a Three Rivers District councillor.

David Sansom said the ICT Service was in “crisis” and called it over budget, poorly managed and not well enough represented by the council.

The ICT Service is shared between Three Rivers District Council and Watford Borough Council, and provides network support, IT Training, and strategic advice.

He said the department has spent more than £200,000 over budget this year, after paying wages for expensive agency staff plugging permanent positions.

Councillor Sansom said: “This council seems to have assumed because the service is shared that we don’t need to pay to much attention to it.

“The ICT service has some serious problems. The reason for the overspend this year is that permanent staff have left and have been replaced by agency staff at a much higher cost.

“I can assume why they left but I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else in the council knows.

“Shared Services has a lack of democratic management, we have three councillors on the Shared Services Committee one of which is the chairman ever other year, no representation on the Three Rivers Executive and no portfolio holder.

“If you contrast this with the leisure committee which has nine councillors on the committee, a chairman, a vice chairman, a portfolio holder and a seat on the Three Rivers Executive.

“If things go wrong the Leisure Committee have time to consider policy options and to carry out the scrutiny function. These are luxuries that shared services does not have.”

Councillor Sansom said that other shared services were suffering, with not savings for Human Resources until 2013 and agency staff called in to Revenue and Benefits to clear a backlog of work.

He called for an “urgent investigation into the reasons for the crises in the ICT service” at the last council meeting.

He added: “The Liberal Democrats all voted against saying that everything was fine, they agreed that it was going over budget, that some staff had left and had to be replaced by expensive agency workers and admitted there were problems but claimed to see no crises.”

All four Labour councillors voted for the motion.

Matthew Bedford, executive member for resources, said changes had been made which would bring savings next year, but were not yet visible in the budget.

He said: “It is true that the ICT service is not working as well as we would like. This is something that the council is focussing on, and we have implemented an action plan to improve things.

“This includes considering whether some or all of the service should be outsourced, achieving savings next year.

“Because we are not yet sure of the size or timing of the savings, we have not included these additional savings in the budget.

Councillor Bedford said many of David Sansom's allegations were “inaccurate”.

He added: “It is not true that we have budgeted for an overspend next year, we have reconfirmed the original budget. It is not true that many staff have left, two staff have left ICT in the past year.

“All vacancies in ICT have been filled with contract staff, this is a deliberate decision because we are considering outsourcing - we do not feel it would be fair or sensible to appoint permanent staff when we are considering transferring staff away from the council in the near future.”