Suppliers Payments for October - A very large bill this month

Updated 5 December see below in Red
The supplier payments for October are out and there are a few anomalies. First off is the size of the overall bill which is much higher than normal at £74.85 million. The lion's share of that is represented in a payment of £25.86 million to the Barnet Group and their Open Door subsidiary. I am not clear why they are receiving such large sums; it may be the continuing purchase of properties for temporary accommodation; it maybe something else but it is a lot of cash especially at a time when the budget is overspent and massive cuts are planned for next year.

Capita CSG received £1.45 million after a deduction of a credit of £420,000 (I wonder what that was for) and Capita Re received £2.39 million, not insignificant. Just for reference, Capita CSG did receive more than £8 million last month.

Comensura only received £0.8 million this month, much lower than normal and would given a year end forecast of £17.2 million.  However, I was surprised there were any Comensura bills given the contract ended on 30 September and a new contract with Matrix SCM was supposed to have started in October - so far there are no signs of any invoices from them.

Updated 5 December
Barnet's Open Data website has now published the Matrix SCM data (although they confusingly call it MCM). The data includes 4 Day's of November data but I have separated that out to get a clearer image of total costs for October. This adds another £975,002 giving a total cost for interim & agency staff for October of £1,778,816.83 and a year end forecast of £18.9 million, £1 million more than last year.

There are a few unusual payments which include PA Consulting who were paid £232,267 for IT services - I wonder if this is linked to the Mosaic problems; £48,000 for Grant Thornton, I suspect tied up with the Fraud report; £12,726 to Enterprise  for vehicle hire. Next month will be interesting when we get a clearer picture on the interim and agency staff costs especially as the new bin service started at the beginning of November and may have significant  Set out below are the usual charts. I will continue to watch spending in Barnet.