One Barnet Reality - Close a library or pay a consultant £12,900 a day

Barnet Council published their supplier payments for January yesterday. Sadly the Council's love affair with their One Barnet implementation partner shows no sign of waning. In January Agilisys were paid £270,719.50 or just under £13,000 every working day of the month.

In the year to date Agilisys have been paid £1.3 million and when coupled with the £642,050.64 they received last financial year they have now billed a shade under £2 million. That is £2 million to just one firm of consultants. There are many other consultants plying their trade at Barnet.

Trowers & Hamlins have also done well out of One Barnet billing the Council £152,641.57 in January.

Simply Performance Management Limited billed another £9,200 in January bringing their total fees for the year to date to £44,775. Now what is interesting about this company is that they specialise in Executive Coaching and have billed the Deputy Chief Executive's office. I wonder who needs that much coaching!

In the week when Councillors confirmed the closure of Friern Barnet library it sticks in the gullet of many decent people in Barnet that the council should be squandering so much money on consultants for a strategy which still seems both unproven and high risk.

Consultancy Spend

Looking through the supplier payments over £500 I note with interest that in December the Council paid invoices to Agilisys worth £300,718.80. I believe that Agilisys are the council's implementation partner for the One Barnet programme.

Now in the papers for the forthcoming cabinet meeting there is a rather disparaging remark concerning public consultation which says, "Although many correspondents suggested alternatives to reductions in the specific service for which they were campaigning, this was almost all disappointingly vague – back office costs should be cut before frontline services are touched and senior staff pay and councillor allowances should be cut. None of the suggestions came near to meeting the financial challenge facing the council or the need to make substantial year on year savings."

Well, from my perspective, there have been a number of very sound proposals to save money and cutting consultant costs was pretty near the top. I hate being told by the council that there are no alternatives when, to me, there are some very real alternatives to cutting front line services. It's all about priorities and in my humble opinion the council have got their's wrong.