Another bumper month for Capita in Barnet

Barnet's monthly supplier payments are out and yet again Capita have done well. On the CSG contract they were paid £2.04 million, including employee benefits, and on the Re contract they were paid £5.07 million. Now remember this is just the payment for October. In the chart below you can see the running total for the contract period is now at £445 million, £169 million above the contracted value.

The review of these two contracts was due to be discussed on 16th December  but because the papers would have to be published before the election Barnet are claiming that under purdah rules they cannot hold the meeting and as such the contract review process will not be discussed until the end of January. That means we are unlikely to get the contract review results before September next year by which time many millions more will have been paid to Capita.

The agency staff cost which have been on a downward trend saw a large jump in October to £1.76 million. I have continually raised my concerns that we aren't seeing a clear picture of the agency staff costs and this seems to be the adjustment I was anticipating.

There was also a large jump in the spending on security provided by Blue 9 Security who were paid £161,768 in October. I wonder how much of that is being spent on security at libraries to replace the librarians who were made redundant?

I will keep watching Barnet's spending.

Barnet financial year end shows a bumper year for Capita and Comensura

Today sees the publication of March 2015 supplier payments and marks the end of the financial year. Unsurprisingly Capita have picked up a large chunk of revenue. In total in 2014-15 Capita have been paid £51,787,011.34. According to my reckoning we shouldn't be paying more than £36.56 million plus inflation which as we know at the minute is zero %.

The other beneficiary is Comensura who supply interim and agency staff to Barnet. In March they billed the council a whopping £1.9 million bringing their grand total for the year to £15,538,090.25. This is without a doubt a contract entirely out of control rising inexorably at a time when agency costs should be plummeting. Not one Conservative councillor has done anything to rein this contract in. Indeed Cllr Shooter foolishly planted a question back in July last year about how the Comensura contract was declining. Sadly he was told a whopping great lie.

In 2012/13 Comensura billed £12.5 million, In 2013/14 it rose to £13.8 million and this year, 2014/15 it has jumped again to £15.5 million. Instead of cutting libraries Barnet should get a grip of this contract and start saving money.

More updates on the financial year end to follow.

Christmas cheer for Capita as they bill Barnet £16.69 million in December

Barnet's supplier payments for December reveal £16.69 million paid to Capita even after two credit notes for a total of £1.5 million. Barnet keep saying these payments are in line with the payments schedule but I am at a loss to see how they can have billed so much in just one month.

It also brings the running total of payments to Capita of £102.9 million a staggering sum and one which I do not believe can be reconciled against the contract that we were all told would save money.

In addition, Comensura, the company that provides agency and interim staff to Barnet billed £2.66 million in December, a vast amount and more than double the average month spend. It includes a single invoice for precisely £1.25 million billed to the Customer Support Group run by Capita. Such a large round figure looks to me like a separate payment not the reconciliation of agency and interim staff invoices. Cllr Mark Shooter raised the issue of Comensura cost back in July and was told they were going down. Well Cllr Shooter they aren't - they are rocketing and something stinks.

I remain concerned that having handed over the running of the council to Capita  no one is actually keeping an eye on just how much money is being spent. Where is the scrutiny, where are the checks and balances who is actually checking Capita and Comensura?

Another day another £10.68 million for Capita - The cost of Barnet outsourcing continues to rise.

The supplier payments for June have just been published and at £45 million they are up considerably on the previous two months.

Capita received £10,687,650.86.  £4.23 million was for the Re contracts (planning trading standards, environmental health etc) and £6.45 million was for the CSG contract (call centre, finance, council tax collection, housing benefit administration etc). I am assured that Capita payments are thoroughly checked by Council staff, but when dealing with so much money to just one supplier I think a greater degree of public transparency is vital.

Comensura, who Cllr Shooter was asking about at the last council meeting http://reasonablenewbarnet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/is-councillor-shooter-getting-straight.html were paid £1,329,285.59 in June, a rise of £271,477.11 on May's payments. So any suggestion that this is a reason for back slapping and congratulations seems a bit premature.

Other payments included £3.66 million to Transport Trading a subsidiary of TFL, £676k for Barnet Lighting for all those new street lights many of which were replaced entirely needlessly. Ridgeland Properties is the company owned by the Comer Brothers and is for rental on Barnet's offices at North London Business Park. A further £186,250 was paid out to a company called Dancastle Ltd which represents the rent on Barnet House in Whetstone.

£866k was paid out to Fremantle for the care some of our elderly residents, a company who have been the subject of blogs by the formidable Mrs Angry  http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-death-of-yuk-kiu-lee-barnet-council.html

NSL the council's outsourced parking contractor received £320k this month. I wonder if Barnet really are getting value for money on that contract?

The top 25 payments by value are below:

The council also paid out £18,777 in subscriptions to CIPFA Business Limited the business arm of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy. It may be that this is for subscriptions to services such as benchmarking but these days of austerity should mean that all subscriptions come under the closest scrutiny.

It is also interesting to see that Barnet Council paid Saracens £3,819 especially as in today's Barnet Times it say that Saracens owe several hundred thousand pounds to Barnet.

I still think that there needs to be much greater external and independent scrutiny when signing off over £45 million of payments in just one month but this is Barnet where proper scrutiny remains a wish not a reality.

Money for consultants and new bin lorries but not for the elderly or disabled?

Barnet's October supplier payments are out and as readers will know I read through them carefully.
The bin lorry saga continues. Last month Barnet put through £2million worth of invoices for the new bin lorries. I requested these invoices under FOI and found that this was only a PART PAYMENT. This month a further £4 million of invoices for the new bin lorries was put through and I understand there may be another £2million  worth of invoices still to appear. Some have said that we had to buy new lorries because the old contract had come to an end. However it is common practice to purchase usable equipment at the end of a contract for a written down value. EU statistics in 2011 showed that the average age of heavy duty vehicle fleets has increased to 11.5 years. People are running their cars longer and to my mind that seems like a sensible strategy so long as the vehicles remain reliable. However the culture in Barnet seems to be spend, spend, spend if there is a budget for it. That is neither frugal nor prudent.

And speaking of spend, spend, spend, our friends at Agilisys received a rather sizable £198,947.40 whose bill for implementing One Barnet is now over £8 million. I would have thought that now the One barnet contract has been let we would have seen an end to this massive spending but clearly that is not the case.

Legal advisors Trowers & Hamlin billed the council £385,648.74 in October, long after the judicial review is at an end, so I wonder what this is for?

And as for Capita or RE Ltd to give them their Barnet DRS trading name, they billed a cool £5,177,323.95 in October. When this contract was being discussed I specifically asked if Capita's bill would be broken down or whether we would simply get a single massive bill for their charges. Well yet again I was misinformed, misled or otherwise deceived into believing there would be complete openness.

With two massive outsourcing contracts in place I had foolishly assumed that the bill for agency and interim staff would have come down. Not in Barnet. In October the Council spent £1.22 million with Comensura  who handle all temporary or agency staff payments yet at the same time hundreds are staff are in the process of being made redundant. This seems utterly wrong.

All of these massive payments need to be set in the context of the cuts that are taking place to adult social care and children's services. Anyone who watched the report from the Task and Finish Group into the changes taking place at Your Choice Barnet cannot failed to have been moved by the plea to reinstate services for those with real needs yet we are still wasting vast amounts of money on professional fees.