Kerching! Barnet Council pays millions to one firm of consultants

Barnet Council published their supplier payments for March today and this means we now have the payments for the complete financial year. This month sees some large payments to various suppliers including:

Barnet Lighting £1,458,123.15
City Suburban Tree Surgeons Ltd £352,790.06
Civica UK Ltd £436,493.51
Trowers & Hamlins £171,562.09

However one number which jumps off the page this month is the payment to Agilisys, the One Barnet Implementation Partner. In March Agilisys were paid £619,656.75. That brings the total fees paid to Agilisys for the first three months of 2012 to over £1.1 million and over £2.8 million since they started.

I am sure that Agilisys do an excellent job but at a time when massive cuts are being made to the services of the most vulnerable, have Barnet Council got their priorities rights spending over £2.8 million with just one firm of consultants.

One Barnet is a project shrouded in secrecy. Residents are not allowed to discuss it at residents forums. How much longer can Councillors spend such vast sums of money without openly discussing this subject with the ratepayers of Barnet?

Consultation Barnet Council Style - What a BL***Y JOKE

The results of the frankly bizarre and utterly meaningless Barnet Council business plan, budget and corporate plan consultations have been published in the cabinet papers for 20 February. The on line budget consultation attracted only 25 responses. It does say that “Due to the small sample size the overall findings should be treated with caution”. Perhaps “chuck it in the bin” might be a more suitable response.

Then we come on to the corporate plan consultation. This consultation asked people to prioritise what services were important to the community and to themselves. At least this consultation attracted more response - 109 people. Yes out of the 350,000 residents of Barnet, the council managed to ‘engage with’ 109 people to fill in the consultation. To bolster the results they sent the consultation to the 1,000 members of the Citizen Panel of which 491 responded. So in total we have a total of 599 results, hardly confidence inspiring.

I criticised the survey when it was first published as being meaningless and I would suggest my forecasts were quite accurate. People were asked to pick the eight most important services provided by the council to them personally and to the community as a whole out of a list of 28 services. Not surprisingly people rated services that are important to the community very similar to the services that important to them personally.

Refuse collection was significantly the most frequently mentioned service as being important to the borough as a whole (54%), followed by community safety services (49%), repairs of roads and pavements (48%) and street cleaning services (41%). However, around half of respondents did not indicate that these services were one of the most eight important services for the Council to focus on for Barnet as a whole, indicating opinion was divided. So what on earth does that tell you. Absolutely nothing!

Much worse, it goes on to say, “Perhaps the most surprising finding is that many of the services that seek to support the most vulnerable were not reported as being of the highest importance by respondents. Namely, Support for adults with a physical disability (13%, ranked 24th =), Support to adults with a learning disability (13% ranked 24th =), Support to family carers of adults (12% ranked 26th) and Fostering, adoption and children in care (11%, ranked 26th).”

So what conclusion can they draw from that. Are these essential services for the most vulnerable to be dropped because 599 people didn’t rank them highly enough. I have an acronim for this type of meaningless question. SFW (So F****ng What).

Interestingly, when they asked people about areas where the council could save money the top answer was Review salary and expenses packages for 'top' and senior council Employees closely followed at joint third place by Review remuneration and expenses of councillors.

They also held what they call a deliberative event where 74 people from the Citizens Panel were invited to ‘deliberate’.

And at the end of it all, what conclusions did this extensive and probably very expensive consultation exercise. Ain’t got a clue and how on earth this can inform the decision making process I simply do not know.

Perhaps the council should stop messing about with these pointless, crass and utterly inconclusive consultations and just start engaging with the community. Try listening to people at residents forums – where we were forbidden from discussing the budget consultation and stop wasting our money.

Alternative Residents’ Forum - Cllr Gordon Seems a Bit Upset

I read in today’s Barnet Press a letter from Cllr Gordon talking about the “private forum” held on Tuesday. Firstly Cllr Gordon, it wasn’t private. It was open to the public and the press and I’m sure they can reassure you that no one was asked for the ID before being allowed to enter. Cllr Gordon believes that the Hendon forum is free from constraints and that a wide range of matters were discussed. Well that certainly wasn’t the case at the Chipping Barnet Forum where one of my questions requiring a simple yes or no answer was disallowed and where a number of people expressed concerns that we were not allowed to discuss matters of “Council Policy”. I was most interested in his comment that, “With firm chairmanship those individuals (people who he calls anti council agitators) are fairly swiftly subdued”. Frankly that sounds more like something Gaddafi would have said rather than an elected councillor. He notes that “it is unfortunate that they cannot find something for constructive to do with their spare time”. So we should just sit and accept everything Cllr Gordon tells us because of course he is a Councillor and he is always right.
Well Cllr Gordon, I can tell you that there are lots of unhappy residents of Barnet who are fed up being told what is best for them by a bunch of councillors who are both arrogant and out of touch with what many local people are saying. Ignore them at your peril!

“Channel Shifting” In Barnet - Isolating the least advantaged

In the papers for the forthcoming Budget & Performance Overview and Scrutiny Committee we start to see where Barnet Council is going with the outsourcing process and what will be required from the private outsourcing companies. They have included an example of the draft output specification for the new Customer Service Organisation, a service which currently costs a shade under £44m a year.

The output specification doesn’t tell the private companies how to deliver services. The council even states that it is “agnostic” about how they go about providing this service but it does set down some key principles one of which is something called "channel shift". It is a typical buzz phrase but in layman’s terms what they are saying is that they want to change the way people contact the council. They want to shift them away from calling the council on the telephone and or going to council offices to using email or the internet. The reason for this is quite simply financial. It is much cheaper to deal with an inquiry on the internet, which may be automated, than to pay someone to answer a phone or sit at an enquiry or reception desk.

Now in theory that sounds very plausible. However, it does not take into account the very wide diversity of people in Barnet and their very differing ability to access the internet.

Reading through all 797 pages of the very comprehensive Residents Perception Survey it sets out how people prefer to contact the council. Overwhelmingly, people prefer to contact the council on the telephone. Set out below is a brief summary of how people like to contact the council for different tasks:



The survey also breaks these figures down into range of different personal profiles.

I have shown a few examples below to illustrate how different groups access the council for advice and to request or apply to use a service.

First if we look at those people asking for advice or information.

• Overall 4% visit a council office whereas 13.5% of the unemployed visit a council office.

• Overall 24% use the web/email whereas only 12% of over 65 year olds use the web/email.

• Only 10% of council house tenants and 6% of housing association tenants use the web/email.

• 36% of Finchley Church End residents are use the web/email compared to only 14% in Hale ward.

If we now look at people who request or apply to use a service you see similar trends.

• 40% of 18-24 year olds use the web/email compared to only 14% of over 65 year olds.

• For the unemployed 76% use the telephone and 10% attend the office whilst only 13% use the web/email.

There are numerous other examples but what keeps coming out to me is that certain groups are much less likely to channel shift than others and often they are the least advantaged. If you are young, employed or living in an affleunt ward, that may be a great idea, but if you are old or unemployed or a council tenant, it may cause you real problems. Often these are the people who are most likely to need to access council services. A private contractor who is required to get people to “channel shift” (it is one of the key performance indicators) risks leaving a large section of the population disengaged from council services.

I wish the councillors would start looking at their own data in a bit more detail and realise that not everyone in Barnet has the advantages they enjoy. It also show how this outsourcing project could go horribly wrong.