Is anyone monitoring Capita?

Barnet's supplier payments for February have been published and as usual I have gone through them in some detail. One set of payments jumped out of the spreadsheet which was to Capita. There were 14 payments and two small credits amounting to a total of  £1,321,887.55 which were designated as "CSG Services Contract Payment".

So what you may say? Well, on 15 November 2016 Councillors agreed to make an advance payment to Capita of £26.9 million to cover CSG contract payments for 2017 and this formed part of the £39 million paid to Capita on the CSG contract in December. This was supposed to generate a saving of £500,000 which is due to be paid on 3 April (based on a response to a specific question I asked in February).

So we have paid £26.9 million up front, we haven't had the savings payment yet but nevertheless we still paid Capita another £1.32 million. To my mind this is unacceptable. No further payments should have been made to Capita on the CSG contract until the entire £26.9m advance payment has been exhausted. It also rubs salt into the wound that we still haven't been credited the £500,000 saving yet.

I would also point out that within the Re contract payments, which are also made to Capita, there is a payment classified as "CSG Services Contract Payment" for £167,500. This should have either been included under the Capita payments or has been incorrectly labelled. Either way it is poor practice.

What I want to know is who is monitoring these payments (other than me) and why are these payments being made? Maybe one of the many readers within Capita or Barnet Council who visit my blog daily would care to give me an explanation.

So far Barnet have paid Capita £273 million on the two contracts. That is £102 million more than the contracted value yet everyone maintains these contracts are saving money. I can't find those savings!

The other long running sore is the contract for interim and agency staff with Comensura. In February Comensura billed £1.68 million bringing the year to date total to £18.3 million with a month still to go and an estimated year end cost of a shade under £20 million. That equates to £400,000 a week from which 4 separate organisations take a commission.

  Barnet have now conceded they can't run the council without all these agency staff as was disclosed during the budget setting meeting. Cllr Jack Cohen had put forward an alternative budget which included significant cuts to agency staff but had those savings capped by Council Officers at just £129,500 for the entire year or just 0.6% of the annual cost as he was told the council couldn't operate without those staff. That does not strike me as an efficient organisation.

Barnet's Supplier payments in April

April's supplier payments over £250 saw large lumps sums paid out to the usual suspects.
Capita received £6,173,867.16 for both the CSG and Re contracts and Comensura received  £1,268,593.60 in just one month. Last year Comensura billed over £15 million for interim and agency staff and based on this invoice it looks like they will hit a similar target this financial year.

In addition there were a few of the usual suspect who seem to have been paid rather a lot in April. City Suburban Tree Surgeons were paid £303,266.17 which in one month represents 30% of what they were paid in the whole of 2014/15 (£1,003,311.80). Perhaps this is an area where officers should be looking to make savings.

NSL the Council's parking contractor was paid £292,000.51 in April. I am sure Mr Mustard will be scrutinising their payments in some detail. Again the overriding question is, have they really saved money?

We seem to have paid out £32,527.96 to Gatenby Sanderson, an executive recruitment agency, for employee expenses. I don't know if this is payments for interims or simply their recruitment fees, but did we really need to spend it?

Old 'friends' Impower who along with Agilisys were paid over £8 million to implement One Barnet are back advising the council and in April were paid £32,743, a modest sum based on past experience but are they really needed?


I am still waiting for Barnet to take up the challenge of showing where the savings are buried because to date I haven't found them.

£11 million down the drain - Barnet's Blue Bin Failure

Back in 2013, Barnet convinced everyone that a shift to blue bins for recycling was the answer to driving up recycling rates. Previously we had a presorted curb side collection which generated high value waste that could be easily and effectively recycled. Convinced that co-mingled waste was the way to drive up recycling from the then level of 35.99% as reported in council documents, see below, the council spent £11 million buying new blue and brown bins, a huge advertising campaign, people to visit every household telling them about the change and a new fleet of bin lorries to accommodate the new bins.

Roll forward two years and what do we find? After the initial honey moon period, recycling rates are now slightly lower than before the blue bins were introduced see below.

I wonder if Councillor Cohen will be trying to explain why after such a huge £11 million investment we are back to where we started?

Barnet pay Capita £5.35 million in October

Barnet Supplier payments for October are out and the usual suspect feature large.

Capita were paid £5,353,300.61 on both the CSG contract and the Re contract. I still cannot understand how we can be paying so much money to Capita when this contract is supposed to be saving us money.

To add insult to injury, Specialist Computer Centres were paid £380,007.32 for software licenses and support. That is in addition to the £16.1 million we paid up front to Capita to install new computer systems.

Comensura who provide agency and interim staff were paid £982,152.64 in October, a huge amount given that so many staff have been made redundant and the latest plans are to make a further 2,500 staff redundant leaving only 332 staff to run the whole of Barnet.

North London Waste Authority were paid £1,887,386  which again seems a great deal considering the council spent £11 million last year to introduce the new Blue Bins.

Barnet Lighting Services, the street lighting PFI was paid £510,195.76 a shocking waste of money when you understand that the key driver was to improve street lighting yet 26,000 of the 28,150 street lights have been dimmed.

Conway Aecom who carry out road repairs were paid £977,453.13 in October. I don't know if it was them who resurfaced Crescent Road in East Barnet but whoever did it di a lousy job with recessed gratings and manhole covers meaning that when you drive down the road it is a bit like going down a cobbled lane. With a "thin client" where contractors monitor themselves poor service is perhaps an inevitability.

Eversheds, the lawyers were paid £167,029.83 so plenty of money for them but not for the libraries.

Almost 4 years ago in January 2011 I entered a pledge on the Barnet Council Pledgebank website which was as follows:

“I will pledge to give up 4 hours of my time every month to scrutinise and challenge all invoices over £10,000 to help the Council reduce unnecessary spending so long as five other people will make a similar time commitment to sit on the panel and that Barnet Council will genuinely participate in the process and listen to the advice and opinions given.”

The pledge still holds good - someone needs to scrutinize the payments if we are to drive down costs.

Kerr-ching! More money for Capita on the One Barnet Contract

Back in October 2012 Cllr Hugh Rayner spoke some prophetic words:

"I let out contracts myself to various customers and what I learnt in the contract is the word change or variance, because I know they are tied into me for the contract and this where I make all my profit and make up for the low price at the beginning"

And so it is proving true for Capita's contract with Barnet. Buried away on the Council's decisions page is a notice of contract variation which states:

"This contract variation will increase the Contract Charges by £301,508 in Year 1 and £152,072 in Year 2 (Total £453,580) and will be reviewed after 2 years against the revised Contract Baselines in line with the Payment Mechanism set out in Schedule 4 of the Contract".

The variation includes libraries calls, along with children’s service duty rota and fostering calls, although I imagine that the vast majority of these calls are for libraries. The increase charges will fund:

• Year 1 of the contract - additional 7 FTE to be put in place within the service.
• From Year 2 this will reduce to 6.0 FTE

Although this decision was made in May 2014 it was only published on 10 November. This causes me great anxiety that we have to wait 6 months to find out what the council is doing.

More to the point what benefit does provide for the people of Barnet? Having called to ask about book availability I went through to the main Capita call centre. Could they help me with my enquiry - absolutely not. After much faffing around they put me through to East Barnet library who I had wanted to speak to in the first place where my enquiry was dealt with quickly and efficiently - no, the book was not in stock at East Barnet but there was a copy at Chipping Barnet library.

Was my experience a one off  - well no actually because according to the Capita call centre performance data for September 2014 only 29.8% of library calls dealt with by the Coventry call centre were resolved.  I have always questioned why so many library calls are routed through the Capita call centre in Coventry when actually the people I want to talk to are in the actual library. Now we know that it is costing us £453,000, including a nice mark up on the salary costs. To my mind that is money wasted that could have been used to support our libraries instead of closing them.

When will Barnet Councillors wake up and realise just how wasteful this One Barnet Contract really is and start questioning the underlying principles of outsourcing everything.

Waste and Bureaucracy at Barnet Council

Papers for the forthcoming council meeting set out, amongst other things, the members allowance scheme and the responsibilities of key committees.

When the Council was considering changing from a cabinet system to a committee system there was much talk about how it would give backbench members more of a role. The reality appears to be giving more Conservative councillors the opportunity to gain a special responsibility allowance. This is the allowance paid on top of a basic councillors allowance of £10,597.  The Leader Cllr Richard Cornelius receives an additional allowance of £34,000 which is probably fair enough given that the role does take up a great deal of time. The deputy leader Cllr Dan Thomas receives an extra £27,000 which does seem excessive but that has always been the practice. Where I start to have a real objection is the number of chairmen (they are all called Chairman regardless of actual gender) and vice chairmen who now get an allowance.

• 17 Chairmen receive a special allowance of £15,333
• 5 Chairmen receive a special allowance of £8,852
• 3 Chairmen of the residents forums receive a special allowance of £2,368
• In addition the Vice Chairmen of 8 committees also receive an allowance of £2,368

Given that the Conservative group have always held all the Chairman  and Vice Chairmen posts, this means that it will be possible to allocate a special allowance to every single one of the 32 Conservative councillors.

Looking at what councillors have to do for this special allowance, the work load does seem to vary. For the Residents Forums the Chairmen have to chair 4 meetings a year which means that for each meeting they receive £592 for a committee which lasts a maximum of 2 hours. The area sub committees also meet 4 times a year immediately after the residents forums. The chairmen of these committees, Cllrs Sowerby, Old and Gordon therefore receive £2,213 for each meeting they chair. That strikes me as completely over the top.

We then look at the highest paid chairmen. For example, Cllr Davey chairs the Housing Committee which meets 4 times a year. While accepting that there is some work to be done outside the committee meetings, £3,833 per meeting does seem completely out of proportion given that it is on top of the £10,597 basic allowance.

From my perspective this entire exercise has been about jobs for Tory councillors and exceptionally well paid jobs to boot. These councillors may claim they are running the council but in reality there is a team of highly paid senior executives earning six figure salaries to do that job.

What also strikes me as bizarre is the fact that for all the committees holding meetings most are simply talking shops with virtually all the power resting in just one committee, Policy and Resources details of which you can read here.

On a day when local authority workers are striking over low pay, it does seem rather offensive that so many Conservative councillors are planning to reward themselves with so much for so little.

Two days till the voters decide - It's all about the money

In the run up to the elections on the Thursday I thought I would revisit so of the key issues that have cropped up over the last four years. Today I want to focus on the issue of money and in particular how Barnet have spent our money.

As readers may be aware, I pay close attention to the supplier payments over £500 which the council are required to produce by law every month. Over the last four years this has been a source of very valuable data and an insight into how the council operates. Back in 2010 I raised the issue about the cost of supplying councillors with new and very expensive tablet computers which with all the add ons cost £1600 each - entirely unnecessary for the activities of 99% of councillors - but deemed easier to have the same posh tablet computers than buy cheaper ones. This is because the Council had already purchased 2450 of these tablet computers for staff to be able to work from home overlooking that fact that many of the basic desktop computers used by staff every day were out of date and inadequate for the job they were supposed to do.

I also managed to ascertain that the council spent £22 million on a computer system that was originally budgeted to cost £2.5 million (the costs continued to rise after my blog post in 2011). It demonstrated how the council had started with a modest but entirely functional idea but after listening to consultants and being driven by the supplier had ended up with an incredibly complex and expensive system that actually didn't give the council a lot of the functionality is actually needed. This was a very clear early warning sign of the risk that the One Barnet project might follow exactly the same course.

Over the last four years the council have spent a fortune on temporary staff and consultants and which the council have done their best to keep secret from the Bloggers. For a number of years the council have employed senior officers on longer term contracts as consultants paying them up to £1,000 a day, a strategy which in my view is both excessively profligate and leaves the council with a lack of continuity when their contracts expire. In 2013 I blogged about the excessively high salaries of people at just one meeting where I totted up their salaries of just 8 people amounted to over £1 million. Now with such highly paid talent in the council's senior management team you would not have thought there would be a need for more consultants. But that's where you would be mistaken.

When Barnet embarked upon the One Barnet outsourcing programme they brought in a firm of consultants, Agilysis and iMPOWER to act as the council's "Implementation Partner". At the time I raised concerns about how they had been selected and the budget for their fees. Following the submission of a Freedom of Information request by the Barnet Bugle it was disclosed the budget for these consultants was "circa" £2 million. In reality this firm has billed Barnet over £8 million in fees. When I challenged the Council's external auditors on this and the fact that councillors had only approved a budget of £2 million I was told that because officers had used the word "circa" it meant no upper limit had been set and any amount of money could be spent without reference back to councillors. That was the day I lost all confidence in the council's auditors to protect the interests of council tax payers.

There have been many other examples of waste over the last four years such as spending £27 million replacing perfectly sound street lights with new brighter lights only to spend a further £4 million on a glorified dimmer switch to save electricity.

More recently has been the massive spend on the new blue bin recycling system. I am the first person to want greater levels of recycling but the council have achieved higher levels by flinging vast amounts of money at the problem. First of all they spent £3.7 million on new bins and having them delivered (they did get a small rebate due to the problems with delivery). the council then spent £150,000 on adverts about the new bin system and a similar amount on doorstep staff to go round and ask people if they had any questions about the recycling system. The council then bought a new fleet of recycling bin lorries at a cost of £7.3 million. So all up the council spent approximately £11.3 million on the new recycling system. I did discuss this with senior officers at the council who said they had no alternative as they were bringing the recycling contract back in house. I had a different perspective. We had a good recycling system already in place. Kerbside sorting generate high quality recycled material but not enough people were using the system. I would have spent some of the money on a pilot study trying to educate and encourage more residents into recycling - to see how that worked first rather than just splurge money. As it happens recycling rates have gone up but so has the charge made by the North London Waste Authority to sort the waste. In fact it has gone up by over £1 million a year.

Then we come on to the waste associated with the entire parking mess. We started with pay & display meters which took cash and which residents wanted. Cllr Coleman decided that the way to go was to pay a company (without a contract) £80,000 to take out 408 working parking meters  (a further 43 meters were taken out separately). Two years on and the council spent £200,000 to install 50 new meters capable of taking debit & credit cards. A complete and utter waste.

There are many many more examples of waste from a council that is supposed to be on a "relentless drive for efficiency".

When candidates come knocking on your door asking for your vote ask them how they will spend your money and what they will do to eliminate financial waste.

So this is where our money goes - Barnet Supplier payments for December

This month’s supplier payment s have been released and as previously blogged we have a very large bill from Capita for  £7,384,960.23. This is for services provided on the NSCSO (CSG) contract which involves making hundreds of Barnet based staff redundant and moving the call centre to various points around the UK operated by Capita.

Our friends Agilisys who continue to advise the council on the implementation of One Barnet billed £188,917.67 in December. Personally I simply cannot understand why after the contract has been operational since October that we still need to be shelling out almost £10,000 each working day on this contracts which is now over £8 million for a contract that councillors were told would cost “circa” £2 million. Frankly if that is how the implementation partner’s contract has been managed I hold out no hope that the Capita contract will be managed any more effectively.

Barnet Lighting  the wonderful PFI contract for street lighting in Barnet billed £970,742.49 in December. Given that they dug up three perfectly sound lighting columns in my road to put in new ones with “brighter lights” and then spend £4 million to allow them to dim the street lights just shows me how imprudent our council has been.

Comensura, the company that supplies the council with agency and interim staff billed £710,668.41 in December. Someone did ask me why I thought this was a cost for One Barnet and my response was that ever since the council announced they were going to outsource the service a significant number of key staff have left the council, not fancying the prospect of being either made redundant or transferred on to Capita’s payroll. The council have equally found it difficult to recruit new staff to those posts for exactly the same reason – why take a job you know you are going to lose in a few months. Then there are all the interim staff, some who have been with the council for rather a long time but who have no loyalty to the council. On procurement we saw one consultant after another come and then leave after six months, each time requiring the new person to go through the learning process of the workings of Barnet all over again. Even worse is that we are still paying out over £35,000 every working day when hundreds of council staff are being made redundant, something we ultimately pay for through Capita’s charges.

GVA Grimley who are property and planning advisors billed £138,338.95 against the DRS contract – I wonder if this is to do with the Brent Cross development?

A company called Insight Direct who are suppliers of computer hardware billed £129,611.33 on the NSCSO contract. Is this for more laptops/desktops  - it looks like it as it is spread over 21 separate invoices. Given so many staff have left or been made redundant, there must be a large pile of high spec tablet computers sitting in a cupboard somewhere so why are the council buying more?

Our friends NSL, responsible for managing the parking contract managed to bill a sizeable £575,289.98 in December. My fellow blogger Mr Mustard has written at length about the dismal performance of this contract which seems to be costing more than when it was run in house. Is this yet another example of Barnet’s failure to manage its outsourced contracts.

And last but by no means least, our friends at Trowers & Hamlins, the lawyers who have been assisting the council on the One Barnet contracts. They billed £92,063.42 in December. Again I am a loss to understand why this is still clocking up fees given the contract was awarded in August.

I would think it was in everyone’s interest to have a much greater degree of scrutiny of these payments but my suggestion to do just that, made over three years ago, has fallen on deaf ears. Maybe that might change after the elections in May.

Did Barnet pay £2 million for the new recycling bin lorries?

Barnet's Supplier payments for September are out. No large payments to Capita this month but having being paid over £30 million in the last couple of months I think they have had more than enough already.

Following a relatively modest billing £106,001.10 in July and £120,801.60 in August, Agilisys bounced back with a £292,640.83 in September. Given we now have Capita running Barnet I find it puzzling why we are still spending more than a quarter of a million pounds a month on consultants to implement One Barnet.

A couple of payments which did catch my eye are for just over £2 million pounds payable to Go Plant Ltd who supply refuse vehicles to the Council and are based at the Brittacy Hill depot at Mill Hill.. The payments are for "Equipment and Materials Purchase" and attributed to the Environment and Operations department. I am investigating this further but I wonder if this is to pay for the lovely new recycling bin lorries. If it is, it will take the total bill for the new recycling system to just under £6 million.

Barnet still paid over £1 million for temporary staff in September which seems shocking given we have Capita in place.

Barnet's bad economics - Make people redundant while spending £1m a month on agency staff.

I constantly scratch my head at the way Barnet Council is run. Suppliers payments for August show that the council spent £996,000 on agency staff in August. That is down from £1.7 million spent  on agency staff in July but probably reflects that Capita were paid £700,00 to use their staff (part of the £14.7 million advance payment Capita received in July). What really irks me is that Capita start the consultation on the redundancy process tomorrow. So while they are making loyal staff,  who have a great deal of experience and knowledge, redundant they continue to pay temporary staff who have no continuity or in depth knowledge £1 million a month. Surely the logic would suggest that the first thing to cut is agency staff given their costs include a percentage of profit paid to the agency (Comensura) and try and redeploy as many council staff into those posts as possible. But in Barnet, logic is not something that seems to feature prominently in the way the Council is run.

Why have Barnet paid Capita £30 million in "management fees"

In July, Barnet Council paid Capita £14.7 million for "management fees". This was supposed to be a management fee to last until the end of the year, assuming the Judicial Review appeal would take months to be heard and settled. Almost immediately after that payment the court case was brought forward and the contract was awarded to Capita. I was waiting to see whether and when most of this money would be repaid.

Today the supplier payments for August have been published and low and behold Capita have been paid another £15,223,862 for "management fees". Bear in mind that Capita took over the NSCSO contract on 1 September so none of this £30 million relates to the contract. So in two months Capita have been paid just shy of £30 million in management fees which represents the anticipated savings for the first two and a half years of this contract.

Something here is very very wrong.

£120,000 to find out Barnet residents' views - Just try talking to them!

Today Barnet have published a decision made back in July regarding the Residents' Perception Survey. This survey used to be undertaken once every two years but the Council have now decided to undertake this survey twice a year for the next two years. This will cost £120,000, a not insignificant sum. Now I'm not against the residents' perception survey, in fact I'm a great believer in research. However, I find it quite ironic that a council which seems so antipathetic towards residents should want to spend £120k finding out our views. Perhaps if the council made residents more welcome at meetings and some Councillors weren't so contemptuous they might find out some useful information. Perhaps if the council hadn't run residents forums into the ground by barring most subjects from discussion they might have learned more about which issues are important to residents - they have changed the rules again to allow residents to ask any question at residents forums but only if they submit them on line by 10am, 2 days in advance.

At the June residents forum I asked if the Barnet Council have a resident engagement strategy, something which many other council have implemented. The answer is, no they don't. The council are consulting on changes to the way the council is run but they won't be holding a public meeting until after councillors have made the decisions.

Perhaps the council would be more effective if they kept the residents perception survey to once every two years (£30k) and spent the other £90,000 on setting up resident engagement events where they actually listen to what residents have to say. There is a strong network of residents associations, try tapping in to them. Get our well paid Councillors to hold ward meetings on a range of themes that are important to people in that ward. £90,000 would facilitate a heck of a lot of dialogue. In fact they could spend £40,000 on hosting meetings in every ward keep the £50,000 they intend to plunder from reserves in the reserves. For a council that talks a lot about saving money they certainly know how to waste money.

£1 million pounds of talent around the table

The Cabinet meeting on Monday saw a collection of senior officers around the table. When you look at the Council's website you start to realise what an expensive lot they actually are.

Kate Kennally Director for People £153,464
Chris Naylor our new Chief Operating Officer £158,464
Craig Cooper Director of Commercial Services £132,480
Pam Wharfe Director for Place £134,870
Maryellen Salter  who I believe£103,486
is Assurance Director
Andrew Travers Interim Chief Executive £187,683
Andrew Nathan Head of Governance  - not listed as he is comparatively new to the post
There was a lady there from the legal department but I do not suspect her salary is anywhere near as eyewatering as the others present.
Sat in front of me throughout the meeting was the Assistant Director of Communications who last year was paid £117,432 and sat next to me was Dawn Wakeling, Adults and Communities Director on £124,870.
It is a shame that the Assistant Director of Commercial assurance wasn't there (or was she) - her pay for last year was £179,250.

When Richard Cornelius talks about cutting costs perhaps he should start with his senior officers. Oh and just to be clear, all this salary information is in the public domain no secrets have been revealed.

Barnet Outsourcing and a Capita inspired £167k solution

In the latest Delegated Powers Report it notes the huge problems of staff retention in customer services, revenues and benefits and procurement departments that are due to be outsourced. The report states:

 "The current staff turnover rate within these services shows a loss of circa 32% of total staff numbers throughout the life of the procurement and early stages of mobilisation. This directly affects these public facing front line services and will be reputationally damaging for the Council". 

Now this report tries to pin the problems currently being experienced on the judicial review and appeal but the statement above reveals the truth  that the outsourcing programme itself, where staff know they will lose their jobs, has caused them to leave in their droves - why wouldn't they.

So to get around the problem CAPITA have suggested a solution which is to use CAPITA'S  "overflow staff" (I guess they mean their call centre staff in Darwen and Blackburn) to help the staff that remain and who await their redundancy notices if the judicial review appeal is unsuccessful.

The interim contract will cost £167,625 and will only run until 21 June in the hope that the judicial review appeal will have been heard by then (as they say, Barnet have two hopes, Bob Hope and No Hope and Bob Hope is dead). Part of this deal also includes what they term a" skeleton team" to prepare for the handover after the appeal hearing.

The report states that "This interim measure is for a 4 week period and does not prejudge the outcome of the Judicial Review appeal proceedings nor is the Council entering into the NSCSO contract prior to its formal commencement". I think that is to keep the lawyers happy.

Now we wouldn't be in the mess of the Council had actually carried out a proper consultation exercise in the first place, something Lord Justice Underhill was clear about in his judgement and I suspect one of the key reasons that an appeal on the technicality of timing has been allowed.

All of these types of problems should have been anticipated and should have been built into the risk register when the entire outsourcing programme was being considered. As ever our Councillors stuck their head in the sand and believed everything they were told by their hugely expensive advisors.

This is a mess and has been from the start. The DRS contract looks even worse given that it seems almost entirely dependent on generating new business from other local authorities something which brought about the demise of the infamous Southwest one Contract and which closer to home has been shown not to work for the beleaguered Your Choice Barnet contract. Councillors need to face up to reality that the whole One Barnet outsourcing project has been an extremely expensive mess and the sooner they recognised it and seek an alternative solution the sooner they can refocus on running an efficient and effective council.

Another Month Another Massive Consultant's Bill for Barnet

Barnet's supplier payments for April are out after having to look for them buried away under last financial year's figures. The usual suspect are present; Agilisys billed £230,822.34 which brings their running total to £6.55 million. Trowers & Hamlins put in a comparatively modest bill of £60,977.09.

The Barnet Group which includes both Barnet Homes and Your Choice Barnet received just a shade under £7 million but interestingly there was a bill for consultant's fees of £928,003.42 - I will be investigating further.

One unusual recipient of £3,400 in April was The Claddagh Ring - I assume that to be the Pub just down the road from Hendon Town Hall used for a training venue. It seems like quite a significant payment to me.

Another recipient was the Crown Moran Hotel, a very nice venue on Cricklewood Broadway which was paid £3,666.50 for venue hire. I wonder what that was for and was it really necessary to hold it in such an expensive venue.

There was a payment for £54,167 to Parkeon Limited who supply parking meters - I suspect that was for the new credit card parking payment machines which have been introduced and which I used just the other day. It is just a shame that they ripped out perfectly good payment machines in the first place.

Harvest Energy win the prize for the most diverse range of payment headings. They were paid £153,941.39 for services which included: Agency staff, gas, training, equipment and materials, building repairs, printing and software. That will need a bit more digging!

Sandbanks Hotel time again - £17,000 for a conference

Oh dear. It comes around every year. The time when the poor old head teachers of Barnet need to get away and do their professional development by the seaside. Barnet have just signed off authorisation for the annual conference at the Sandbanks Hotel, Poole, in October here. Barnet Council says that the £17,000 cost of this residential conference is funded by the schools who pay for places but frankly, given the cuts that are being made currently and the news today that Danegrove School is struggling to raise money to pay for essential play equipment, it does seem rather profligate. Lots of private business stopped resident conferences years ago, hosting these types of events closer to home and avoiding the cost of overnight accommodation. There are plenty of venues in North London with day delegate rates of around £50-£55 per person and that would be keeping money in the local economy. In a time of austerity is it right to spend so much on a conference? I don't think so.

One Barnet Bill Rises Inexorably

Barnet Council's supplier payments  reveals that the cost for One Barnet advice in January 2013  was £456,131.45 or around £22,800 every working day of the month.
 
Agilisys, the Council's One Barnet Implementation partner, billed £274,283.82. This brings their bill to date to £5.8 million - not bad for a contract that was due to cost 'circa' £2 million and still has 6 months to run. The Council's legal advisors, Trowers & Hamlins, billed £181,847.63 (this excludes charges for advice to the Housing Revenue Account).

Interestingly, if you were to search the supplier payments spreadsheet looking for One Barnet Programme payments, it would show costs are only £65,395.62 including £34,000 of Trowers & Hamlins fees and not a single penny of Agilisys payments. Transparency of One Barnet costs is poor and without that analysis how can the Council fully understand what it is actually costing them? Maybe they just don't want to know.

Sandbanks time again - Teachers have a £17,000 holiday in Poole

It that time of year again when the Assistant and Deputy head teachers of Barnet pop off to the delightful Sandbanks Hotels at Poole in Dorset. Barnet Council says that it doesn't cost the council anything because they sell places to schools. They did get quotes from other hotels but their quotes for a 24 hour delegate rate were considerably higher than Sandbanks.  I wonder which hotel wanted to charge £251.50 per day - it must have been rather nice.  However, given the period of austerity we are in, it does seem rather profligate to be spending £17,000 on a nice conference at the seaside when there are excellent non residential conference facilities right here in Barnet on North London Business Park. No expensive hotel charges and no travel costs. The details are set out in the delegated powers report here.

Barnet Supplier Payments - is spending out of control?

The supplier payments for July are out this morning and yet again Barnet Council's Implementation Partner have been well rewarded. They have billed £276,454.77 this month and there seems no sign of the spending on this contract slowing down. For a contract that was originally budgeted to cost 'circa' £2 million and could end up costing close to £6 million, I am constantly surprised at the relaxed approach the council take to this contract.

Please read this blog on Monday as there will be some very interesting details about this contract.

I also note that the new parking contractor NSL has billed £588,195.32 this month. I hope that this represents a saving on what the previous in house team cost. Perhaps the Council would care to enlighten us?

My question is who is monitoring all this spending other than the Bloggers?

One Barnet Consultants - another £272k last month

The Barnet Council supplier payments for June are now out and once again Barnet's Implementation Partner, Agilisys, have done well. In June they billed £272,787.30 bringing their total invoices for the first six months of 2012 to £1.56 million.

Every single penny of that money is discretionary spend. It didn't have to be spent. There was a clear Officer/Cabinet decision to spend that money. Last month I thought their spend was slowing down as it was 'only' £165,575, but in June it is back to the levels we saw in January and February.

Cllr Cornelius, how much longer are you going to let the senior officers and your young but entirely inexperience cabinet colleague pull the wool over your eyes. This is a budget that is out of control and someone needs to get a grip. If you don't take any action a quarter of a million pounds every month is going to continue to be squandered on just one firm of consultants to give you a solution which 70% of local authority Chief Executives and senior officers believe reduces control and increases risk.