SOMERSET County Council spent more than £1,000,000 on seeking external legal advice last year, it has been revealed.

For the financial year 2016/17 the council spent £1,040,948.47 seeking advice 52 times. This equates to an average cost of around £20,000 each time advice is sought, or £20,000 a week.

The previous financial year, £715,827.77 was spent seeking advice 37 times.

Between 2007/08 and 2014/15, the cost never exceeded £516,470.58 and even went as low as £243,278.31.

The council sought the most help in 2013/14, when external advice was asked for 164 times, costing £301,703.82.

Meanwhile, the council is paying between £399,000-£513,000 a year on the equivalent of 11.4 solicitors for its in-house legal team.

The figure only includes solicitors employed by the council, and not paralegals, admin or other support staff.

The average salary for a council solicitor ranges from £35-40,000 a year, but the cost can increase by an extra £5,000 if the position is particularly difficult to recruit for. This could be in areas such as child protection.

The authority says spending the money on external help is needed for ‘complex’ or ‘multi-faceted’ cases.

A Somerset County Council spokesperson said: “Our legal services team consists of 11.4 full-time equivalent solicitors who advise on any legal matters affecting the work of the council.

“This can be vast and includes legal matters regarding our children and adult services, contracts and procurement.

“We limit the use of external legal services as much as possible, tending only to use them if the legal matter is complex and multi-faceted or requires more than one specialism and therefore cannot be dealt with by our own team.

“For example, we use external legal services for employment tribunals and insurance claims and the majority of our section 106 agreements are supported by external legal advisers, the cost of which is paid for by the developer.”

John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said the amount spent raises some questions.

He said: “This will certainly raise eyebrows and taxpayers will wonder what this legal advice was in aid of.

“Councils need to do all that they can to keep costs down and only seek external advice when matters cannot be resolved by internal staff.”