I have just had a response from Barnet that the information is now available again. You can see it here. Having checked the data, the overspend on waste collection service remains the same at £2.029 million.
On 14 March I asked a series of questions relating to the round reorganisation of Barnet's waste collection service. I expressed serious concern that not only had the rounds reorganisation not saved any money but in fact it had actually cost a great deal more. The reason for me making this assertion was based on information issued at the Financial Performance & Contracts Committee a few days earlier on 11 March. At that meeting it was disclosed that the waste collection service was significantly over budget and that the year end forecast showed the service would be £1.75 million over spent and that this overspend had jumped £1.189 million since the previous month. I raised this at the Environment Meeting but received no clear response as to when we would get a clear understanding of what the reorganisation has actually cost.
On 1 April Barnet published the Period 11 financial figures which also set out how the latest forecast on the waste collection service had worsened. Luckily I took a snapshot of this report. On the 2 April I tweeted about the significant increase in costs but as of 12 noon today the information has been removed from the website - it looks like it was removed on 2 April, possibly as a result of my tweet.
The problem is that street scene are massively over budget because of the botched #bingate fiasco. The latest figures show that waste is £2m over budget, up £283k since 11 March figures. I suspect managers are franticly making cuts to balance budgets without consulting Cllrs. pic.twitter.com/YBaQKT9fws— Mr Reasonable (@ReasonableNB) April 2, 2019
The figures show that between the figures published on 11 March and those published on 1 April the revised year end forecast had increased by another £283,000. That is a huge increase in short a short period of time. Much worse is that they were forecasting for the last three months of the year in the period 9 figures. To have to make such a large adjustment in period 11 suggests that cost have rocketed at a time when I was told repeatedly at the Environment Committee that the problems with waste collection were reducing. It is now apparent that the reason the problem are reducing is because so much more money is being thrown at them. I have set out below a comparison between the two sets of figures including the one that has now been removed from the Council's (not very) Open Data website.
I have asked Barnet why they have removed these figures and I will update this post once I have a response. What is clear to me is that the round reorganisation of the waste service has been a financial disaster and the risk is that other cuts to services will now be made to offset this massive overspend.
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