It's Official - I've Been Gagged. Why Capita's dismal performance must not be discussed

Last night Barnet Conservatives voted in favour of restricting public participation at council committee meetings. Cllr Melvin Cohen proposed the motion stating that the £42,000 a year they spend dealing with residents questions is money wasted. The report was factually incorrect stating the period in question was 5 months when it was in fact 6 months and over stating the number of questions asked by 100. But in Barnet facts don't matter, just say something often enough and people will believe it.

Cllr Cohen said that in Barnet they were far too generous in the time they gave to residents to ask questions and make comments so they had benchmarked themselves against the worst councils and were happy that the very restrained new rules were acceptable. Cllr Cohen said this would be a chance for more residents to ask questions. How he arrived at this twisted take on reality is beyond the logic of any sane person. The old rules allowed as many questions as could be dealt with in 30 minutes each person submitting a question got their chance for a supplementary question and only when everyone had asked one question would a second question from an individual be allowed. The new rule is one resident one question per agenda item. More than two residents asking about the same agenda item and their questions will be rejected - first come first served.  So when we get an agenda item about libraries across the borough which may be affected in different ways only two questions will be allowed. Same for the any budget cuts. There might be 20 different areas in the budget that residents want to ask about but 2 questions will be the limit. In terms of making a public comment, previously residents were allowed to speak for 3 minutes and had to give notice on which agenda item they wished to talk about. That has now been banned. You can submit a comment in writing of 100 words but you can't speak at the committee and most importantly councillors cannot question he speaker. It is also important to note that the comment counts toward one of the two questions per agenda item so if two residents submit their 100 word comments ahead of you then no questions will be allowed.

So why have Barnet Tories taken such desperate measures to gag Barnet's engaged and questioning residents. The truth is simple. Barnet residents scrutinise what the council does; they ask probing and difficult questions, they can see through spin and flim flam and they aren't willing to settle for a badly run council.

It is true that I ask a lot of questions. Like my fellow bloggers Broken Barnet,  Mr Mustard, Barnet Eye,  and Brent Cross Coalition, and engaged resident, Barbara Jacobson,  we all challenge Barnet and for very good reasons.

Yes there was one meeting where 158 questions were submitted but it was an exception. Eleven different residents submitted questions which included items such as:

• The review of the Capita contracts - a unanimous committee decision had asked officers to prepare a business case for a range of options to bring services back in house. The reason for so many questions is that  residents were rightly concerned that officers had ignored the request and pressed ahead with their own plan and no business case.
• The Brent Cross Cricklewood funding and delivery strategy - Brent Cross is a vast project which will disrupt many locals. The transport strategy has not been well thought through and Barnet have had to go to government with a begging bowl for a bail as we were on the hook for the construction cost of the Thameslink station after Hammersons scaled back their expansion plans. Residents were rightly concerned about the risks of the scheme.
• The annual procurement plan which set out spending commitments that had not been discussed or approved by committees.
• The medium term financial strategy - which set out the need for £68 million of budget cuts over the next 5 years.
• The strategic performance report - which showed the 5 consecutive year of overspend on the outsourced legal contract.

None of the items were insignificant but the Capita contract review did attract the majority of the questions. If I look at another meeting cited in the report, the Audit Committee where 68 questions were submitted, again there was a very good reason for that situation. This was the first Audit Committee where the findings of the investigation carried out by Grant Thornton into the £2 million fraud were heard in a report published by the Chief Executive. The Grant Thornton report was a damning indictment of Capita's failures to enforce even the most basic of financial controls that allowed the fraud to take place. It was also critical of Barnet Council's poor scrutiny process so it is hardly surprising that residents had lots of questions. Another item on that same agenda related to the internal audit rating of "No Assurance", the worst possible rating, on the interim and agency contract administered by Capita. You can read the report here but it makes shocking reading.

Set out below is a chart showing all the questions asked during the period mentioned in the report and the issues that were raised at each of those meetings.

Now you may start to see a common theme developing and that is about the dismal performance of Capita and how they have failed to deliver in Barnet. That is not just me saying they have failed but the Council's own senior officers who commission services from Capita.

I spend a lot of time reviewing Capita's performance and how much they charge and that by its very nature generates a lot of questions. Take for example the performance of Capita on Pensions Administration. This has been a disaster with fines from The Pension Regulator and just last month the serving of a Draft Improvement Notice, which if Capita fail to deliver, could result in a £50,000 fine. Just 2 weeks ago Internal Audit gave Pensions Administration a "Limited Assurance" rating.

Yesterday, after some chasing, Capita published their Customer Service performance figures for the last nine months. What this showed is the abysmal performance of call answering in Barnet. Some calls receive an automated response which can prove exceptionally difficult to get through. However there are two areas where performance has been consistently bad throughout the term of the contract, call to Council Tax and calls to Housing Benefits. Set out below is a chart showing how many calls are answered within the 60 seconds service level agreement target (the red line). The target is 80%. The other element shows how many calls were abandoned - people who hung up after a prolonged wait to get through. The maximum queue time for calls to be answered in May was 50 minutes and 48 minutes in June - those are for the people who didn't hang up.

What the chart above illustrates is that in the last 15 months Capita have only met the target of 80% of calls answered within 60 seconds twice and in 6 of the months the figure was below 50%. What is also shocking is the number of abandoned calls which in March 2019 hit 2191. Now to be clear that isn't all calls to the Council just those calling about Council Tax.

Calls to Housing Benefit are equally poor again only just meeting the service level agreement target in 2 out of the last 15 months (they failed in every single quarter) and with large volumes of abandoned calls.

Indeed in the most recent quarter April - June 2019 there were 12,288 abandoned calls and the 80% target level was not met for any single service area. It is clear to me that Capita's performance is not getting better and to many it seems to be getting worse, even after 6  years of running the contract.

We can't escape the other massive issue and that is the cost of the Capita contract. In the first 6 years of the contract we have paid almost £146 million more than the original contract sum.

Capita's failure to perform and Barnet Conservatives ideological support of outsourcing mean that they hate people questioning both Capita's performance and their own failure to manage the contract adequately. In any other business Capita would have been sacked long ago but not in Barnet.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of other things the council does that are just as bad and not directly linked to Capita. The downsizing of the libraries, the failings of children's services which have taken 2 years to recover, the on-going budget cuts, but one way or other they all link back to Capita and the culture it has imposed on the operation of the Council. Complacency and arrogance, a focus on money not service, a silo based culture where secrecy is the default and a disregard for residents seem to have become norm in Barnet.

Several, Conservative Cllrs have asked me why I bother asking so many questions and my response is because they don't ask enough or even any questions. If scrutiny was in good shape I wouldn't spend hours reading reports, preparing questions and travelling all the way over to Hendon to speak for three minutes when I could be at home with my family. I am sure the same is true for all the other people who regularly question the Council. Unlike Cllrs, we don't get paid for all the time we devote to making the council better.

Last night's decision to gag residents was simply a further reflection of this poisonous culture that have invaded what was a well run and respected Council. It has lost loyalty and trust and that will not change until there is a change of regime and a realisation that the culture of the council is inappropriate for a public service organisation.

Not good enough - the verdict from Barnet's Audit Committee

Barnet's Internal Auditor has given the council a "Limited Assurance" rating for the second year running, something which was discussed at last week's Audit Committee. We had a new chairman, Cllr Rohit Grover. I have never seen him at an Audit Committee before but he assured members that he had listened to the tapes of previous meetings and was aware of what had been discussed.

We had the 30 minutes of comments and questions from myself and @BrokenBarnet.  you can read the questions here. One of @BrokenBarnet's questions was linked to the limited assurance rating given to the Capita run Pensions Administration  and related to an error in the  qualification age of Barnet pensioners.  The response to the question was that following a review it was found that 1,880 members had an incorrect normal retirement age. Now this represents nearly 20% of the total pension membership and could have financial consequences on the pension fund. The records were amended on 11 April but we were told that on 1 April that there were only 953 live errors. This is an issue that was subsequently picked up at the Pension Board and raises serious questions about whether Capita have really got to the bottom of the data quality problems.

The speech I gave is at the bottom of this blog but I focused on the Code of Governance and how the culture of the council seems to have a blindspot when it comes to scrutiny and challenge of Capita, a theme that recurred throughout the three hours of the meeting.

When discussing the Chief Executive's report Cllr Arjun Mittra questioned the change in public participation rules that will be ratified by the council on 30 July and asked the External Auditor for their opinion. The response was both surprising and very positive. The External Auditor reminded members of the principles of public scrutiny introduced by Lord Pickles and said that this is the only council where  you have a strong armchair auditor presence and that he positively welcome members of the public telling him of their concerns. He said they wanted to know about these things, real nuggets of information they can follow up on. It sounded like a ringing endorsement of the public questions and comments to me but whether Conservative Councillors will listen is another matter. This is the second time in a week that Lord Pickles presence has been felt in Barnet, the previous time as reported here by Broken Barnet.

Normally the co-opted members of the audit committee sit in silence but at this meeting both spoke out regarding the limited assurance rating given to the Council. Richard Harbord who is a former Council Chief Executive and a regular contributor to 151 website which focuses on local authority finance, said he was surprised a council such as Barnet should have received a Limited Assurance rating two years running and that a lot of work would be necessary to turn the situation around. He also said there was a there was a period when scant regard was being paid to internal audit reports, something I have been saying for several years. I just wish Mr Harbord had expressed those views in audit meetings before now. The other co-opted  member Geraldine Chadwick also noted that she was disappointed how few individual "Substantial" ratings (a good rating) the council had gained in the year (just two) and that she would have expected Barnet to have received more.

A senior person from Capita was present at the meeting and was asked to come and explain the poor performance of the pensions administration. Yet again we had someone who is new to the company, he has been with Capita since January, so distanced himself from the historical problems but promised that things would get better. He said that for a number of years the focus in Capita "had been on financial metrics", that they must refocus on staff, that staff salaries "were probably substandard" and that they wanted to lift the standard and professionalism of their staff. This is a staggering admission of failure and while it is good that they have at last admitted their failings, it provides little comfort given that we are six years into this awful contract. When Cllr Kathy Levine asked about the difficulties of communication between payroll and pensions (which are highly dependent on each other for information) the man from Capita said there was "a culture of silence in Capita", again another shocking admission. He talked about Capita's transformational journey but that provides me wit little comfort as they are changing their company on our time. It is also important to point out that we pay Capita millions each year to help with the "transformation" of Barnet. I serious worry that they can't deliver transformation in Barnet adequately if they are so focused on transforming their own organisation.

Interestingly Cllr Laithe Jajeh challenged the man from Capita saying that every meeting he had attended for audit he had heard promises from Capita staff  but that "things just hadn't been good enough at all"   He said it takes up a significant amount of time dealing with missed deadlines and promises that haven't been delivered, that time and time again deadlines are missed and how could he have confidence they would be delivered this time. Cllr Jajeh also talked about the progress with Capita being one step forward one step and sometimes two steps back. He also talked about Capita giving the council false hope. All I will say is well done Cllr Jajeh for saying what everyone knows to be true but other Conservative Councillors are afraid to say. Capita is without a doubt a classic example of emperors new clothes and for once we were hearing a Conservative councillor calling it as it is.

Ironically the man from Capita said "what we have now is a transparent relationship". Transparent to whom, certainly not the public in Barnet.

My Speech to the Committee

“Further improvements are required to improve the adequacy and effectiveness of governance and control compliance”

 “Gaps in delivery or governance oversight”

“As in the previous year, governance issues were noted across a number of audits,”

Those quotes comes from your internal auditor yet when I read The Code of Corporate Governance it seems to have been written about a completely different borough. 

Apparently, “Shared values that are integrated into the culture of the organisation, and are reflected in behaviour and policy, are hallmarks of good governance”. When I read the Internal Audit report it suggests the hallmarks of weak and inadequate governance.  Shared values are not integrated into the culture of the organisation. In fact the culture of the organisation is seriously flawed. It is a culture that refuses to recognise and address failure and now wants to prevent any form of public scrutiny especially when it comes to Capita.

Capita consistently fail to perform,  even when given second, third, and fourth chances. If council staff behaved like this they would be sacked yet Capita appear exempt from censure.

The governance statement says you will set appropriate KPI’s yet you admit that Capita have failed some critical KPI’s every year since the contract started 6 years ago.

It says you are “Ensuring that there are structures in place to encourage public participation”. Laughable when, from 31 July, you intend to gag residents and prevent them from participating and scrutinising the council. No one will be allowed to comment in person at this committee and I can ask only one question per agenda item unless a couple of people get in first in which case any questions I submit will be rejected.

So why is the Code of Corporate Governance so out of line with what the Internal Auditor is saying in their reports?

Maybe because there is a blind spot in this council when it come Capita, a cataract that blurs their failures, their underperformance and their cavalier attitude.  A comforting haze means you cannot or maybe do not want to see  who is to blame for the failures around you like the massive fraud, the pensions admin chaos, the failure of Highways. They hold a status that appears to be untouchable and defies most of the objectives within this document. Governance statement? No. A cut and paste job that bear no relation to what is happening in Barnet. Please do your jobs and start challenging the quality of governance in Barnet or we risk much greater problems in the future.

The Tail Wagging the Dog: Capita and Barnet

A Joint Blog from the Barnet Bloggers

Barnet's Conservative led administration has never been so divided.

Since the local elections last May, new members of the Tory group have been confronted with the legacy of their longer serving colleagues’ failure in office: the crisis over the Capita contracts, a massive budget deficit, and the exposure of fraud by a Capita manager, enabled by a failure to put in place any adequate system of financial controls.

Members of the previous administration appear not to have grasped the seriousness of the situation, or at least are reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the problems facing this borough.

After receiving payment of a paltry £4 million from Capita in ‘compensation’, Tory councillors have now voted to delay any immediate severance of ties, in favour of a long drawn out process of assessment, during which time Capita will continue its contractual partnership with this borough, and our services will continue to be left in their control.

We believe this is quite wrong, and, it seems, so do some Tory members.

At last week's Audit meeting, for example, it was revealed that BDO, the authority's external auditors, are now obliged to visit Capita's offices in Darlington, where their administration of Barnet's Local Government Pension Scheme is based. This extra work will incur an additional charge on top of the audit fee. Capita continue to administer this scheme, despite very serious concerns about standards of performance.

Also at last week's Audit meeting, there was discussion about why new systems that should have been implemented following the £2 million fraud by a Capita employee were not in use.

Grant Thornton, Internal Audit, Senior Council Officers and Capita’s Partnership Manager in Barnet had all agreed these control systems should be implemented immediately. A Capita employee, however, based in Chichester, where these payments are handled, had taken it upon themselves not to implement this critical system, a failing only identified when Internal Audit carried out a follow up check.

At least one of the Tory members had grave misgivings about the continuing partnership with Capita.

Councillor for Hale, Laithe Jajeh, said at the meeting, “I find it really worrying that someone from Capita (can do this)..it’s almost the tail wagging the dog …’ He also commented on twitter that assurance from Capita on implementation of Grant Thorntons’ recommendations was ‘not reassuring whatsoever …’

He added that Capita’s performance was not good enough and that he was not confident that promised dates for completion would be met.

Implementation of GT recommendation 15 was not completed due to a Capita employee instructing its’ staff not to undertake the instruction to do so from Cllrs, officers etc. As I put it to the Chair this evening, the tail is wagging the dog. Absolutely not good enough from Capita

— Laithe jajeh (@Laithe_Jajeh) January 31, 2019

At a further point in the audit meeting it was identified that 51% of the internal audit recommendations were not completed, the majority of which were the responsibility of Capita. Labour councillor Alison Moore suggested that such a high level of actions not implemented was a sign of an unhealthy organisation. The Head of Assurance said it was a very serious matter from the officers’ perspective.

The Committee Chairman, however, wanted to take a ‘positive’ view of the situation and suggested that we do not look at criticisms. There was a clear consensus, however, that Councillors, both Conservative and Labour, were not satisfied.

At last there is an acknowledgement, at least from councillors who were not involved with the original outsourcing exercise, that the partnership with Capita may not be the great panacea we were promised, under the lure of ‘Better services for less money’.

We are facing a review of the contract in February, yet there is a very real concern that decisions have already been made.

The dispersed structure of the contract, with Capita offices situated all around the country, makes it hard to implement change, hard to control, and hard to monitor. Different reporting lines in different organisations mean that it is difficult to pin down responsibility for actions or inaction. This exacerbates and complicates the failure in accountability between the management of local services, and the local community itself.

We call upon the council to make the outsourcing review as open and unbiased as possible, held in public, with full and meaningful consultation with residents - and with key roles for some of the new Conservative members such as Cllr Jajeh, and Cllr Prager, who seem to have a more clear sighted view of Capita’s performance - and we urge all members to look at how quickly services can be brought back to Barnet, where they can be properly managed, monitored and controlled. 

Derek Dishman

John Dix

Theresa Musgrove

Roger Tichborne