Provisional Dates for Judicial Review Appeal Announced - What's the Delay?

Today, Maria Nash's barrister has been informed of the provisional (although highly likely) dates of 7/8 October for the Judicial Review appeal. That seems like a bit of a way off especially as Maria's barrister and legal team are ready and waiting to go to court. Apparently Barnet's team cannot make an earlier date and rather than switch legal teams they are happy to sit it out till October.

I just hope Richard Cornelius doesn't  start blamestorming again - the delay is down to you and your team and no one else. I also hope that Capita are in the loop on this latest information as their temporary contract to assist Barnet Council while awaiting the appeal, expires on 21 June, so what happens after that?

And let us not forget we are in this situation because Barnet FAILED to consult.

Arrogance or Plausible Deniability - The sorry tale of One Barnet Scrutiny

Cllr Richard Cornelius is reported as saying that he hasn't read the 8,000 page contract nor does he expect any other Councillor to have done so. Is this arrogance or that well known political tactic of plausible deniability?  If it is the latter then when the One Barnet contract goes horribly wrong Councillors can say "Not me guv, it was those useless senior officers/consultants".

I think we have heard this before in Barnet. Didn't Councillors deny knowing all the details on the Icelandic bank problem and as a result it was an officer who got the sack. The Catalyst contract problems were blamed on officers and advisors and that ended up costing Barnet residents £10.5 million to sort out.

What makes matters worse is the footage I saw yesterday of the Business Management Overview & Scrutiny Committee on 20th November where Cllr Robert Rams said he didn't go on any of the site visits to learn lessons of how other councils had worked with outsourcing contracts. He said that he had learned it all from officers and desktop research. Not a great idea when so much is at stake and the decision is irreversible.

I will be attending the Overview and Scrutiny committee this evening and I genuinely hope that Councillors will give officers, consultants and cabinet members a grilling. I will be asking a few questions but I know that dozens of questions have been tabled by the public such is the level of concern about the risks involved with this contract. I just hope Councillors take their fingers out of their ears and start listening.

Has Governance been sidelined in Barnet?

Last night a number of reports were published by Unison which call into question the role of governance in Barnet. Two internal audit reports and a report by Local Partnerships demonstrate the risks attached to the One Barnet outsourcing programme. A few quotes from the reports include the following:

"The programme does not have a formalised and universally understood change control process operating either at programme or project level."

"There is scope to strengthen the programme governance arrangements, in particular clarifying the authority of the programme board and reviewing its participants."

"A programme level dependency log identifies dependencies, but it is not optimised to manage the dependencies. For example, there is no record of when a dependency was:
- Originally identified
- Last updated
- Discussed with the action owner
- Agreed."

"Without a fully effective approach to managing dependencies within the programme and between the programme and other parties, the following risks may affect some or all dependencies:
- They may not be delivered in line with the critical path
- They may not meet the quality requirements of the programme resulting in a compromised solution."

"The risk of running project boards without project board papers is that any decisions made within that forum may not be fully informed. Decisions made using incomplete information may be suboptimal."

"There is a great deal still to be done before starting the main dialogue stage and it would be a significant risk to the project to start the next stage prematurely or to decide that tasks and issues that should be completed prior to main dialogue are actually completed during the CD2 stage."

"Evidence from this review indicates that whilst many of these issues are recognised by the project team and in some cases the team have started work on them, there is a lack of clarity on when, how and by whom these issues are to be progressed."

"The RT (review team) feel that the project programme post close of CD2 is very optimistic. Milestones to achieve Contract Award by November 2012 and Service Commencement by April 2013 are possibly achievable in a best case scenario but are probably unachievable in all other scenarios."

"There are signs that the procurement process is being driven by the consultant rather than by Authority due to their much greater experience on the CD (competitive dialogue) process and clearly there are risks if that is the case.

"The programme does not have a defined and agreed issue management strategy.
This may mean that issues are not identified, managed or escalated consistently."

"Interviewees were not aware of formal thresholds for escalating risks from project level. We understand that the training pack provided to all project managers set out certain key criteria, but it was not clear that this control was operating in practice."

"For DRS, there were 17 risks categorised as “treat” – only six had defined control actions and for NSCSO, there were 37 risks categorised as “treat” – only one had a defined control action."

"Through our sample testing of risks we noted 14 out of 49 risks on the NSCSO Risk
Register did not have any scoring against them."

"Senior officers showed they were familiar with the defined internal framework to bring specialist resource onto the programme. However, project level staff did not show the same level of awareness with the contractual agreement. Increasing the awareness levels of this arrangement may lead to more effective use of key resources at critical points at project level."

At this stage alarms bells should be ringing loudly. What I want to know is why none of these reports were discussed or circulated at the Audit committee, the natural place to discuss two such critical internal audit reports on such a massive financial project.

I have been asking serious questions at the audit committee for the last two years about the One Barnet programme. This simply reinforces the immense concerns I have about the entire programme and, more importantly, the governance arrangements for the scrutiny of the process. If it transpires that these reports were withheld from the audit committee it must call into question who actually runs this council, Councillors or consultants.

Capita or BT, who is the winner in Barnet? Maybe Neither!

It is not yet clear who has been recommended for the massive NSCSO (back office) contract for One Barnet, but based on the activity on my blog and the search terms used I think I have a pretty clear idea. However, I will not be popping down to Ladbrokes and put on a very large bet.

The reason for my reluctance is that the winner of the evaluation process hasn't yet been formally approved and I think that every hour that passes the greater the likelihood that the wheels are going to come off this out of control undemocratic fantasy increases exponentially.

Electorally, the award of this contract will mean curtains for many Conservative councillors at the next election. It may even hit two of our sitting MPs because of their very close association with the project. Both Councillors and MPs would do well to remember the backlash against Brian Coleman at the GLA elections and against the Conservative candidate in the Brunswick Park By Election.

This is going to be a very interesting 48 hours coming up.