Please read this before you vote

 It is the local election on Thursday, the one and only time in the four year cycle when the council actually have to pay attention to the views of residents through the ballot box. 

There is a lot of spin at this time but I just want to look back over the last four years since the last election and see what has changed for the better or worse. 

Council Tax has risen significantly over the last 5 years and no matter what Conservative councillors may say, the council tax has risen every year, including this year - so no, not a freeze. Set out below is a chart showing the increase year on year. (This excludes the amount paid to the GLA)

In addition, if you have a green bin, you now have to pay an extra £70 a year to have that collected, a clever way to avoid showing the real increase in council tax. Now don't get me wrong, Barnet had no option but to increase council tax because previously they had frozen council tax and in 2014 actually cut council tax by 1% just before the 2014 election. What irks me is the way council taxes went up by 3.99% and 4.99% in the last two years so that, in an election year, the increase can be limited to 1% while saying it is frozen.

Bin Collection is also a matter the local Conservatives are keen to focus on. They promised they would keep weekly bin collections in 2018 only to withdraw the brown bin food waste collection weeks after the election and two years later introduced the £70 green bin charge. Barnet is the only London borough not to have a dedicated food waste collection. Instead of sending the waste for anaerobic digestion which is environmentally friendly, generates electricity from the gas produced and provides a valuable fertiliser as a by-product, we send it to the Edmonton to be burned in the incinerator. Interestingly, there was a business case developed in 2018 by council officers to move to fortnightly general waste collections which, with a retained weekly food waste  and recycling collection, could not only have saved more than £900,000 a year, but would have helped to push up recycling rates by forcing people to separate out their waste more effectively. Political ideology won the day at the cost to Barnet residents and the environment.

Transparency is another thing which has deteriorated over the last four years. In 2019 Barnet Conservatives introduced new rules which stopped Barnet residents from addressing committees in person and dramatically limited the number of questions that could be asked. It was claimed that this would save £42,000 a year of officer time answering questions posed by residents at committee meetings. In reality it was simply to stop residents asking serious questions about the way the council was being run. There was always a time limit of 30 minutes in any committee meeting for residents' questions and speeches, speeches were limited to 3 minutes and questions were taken turn and turn about so no one person could take up all of the time with their questions. Occasionally, not all of the questions were addressed in the 30 minute slot, but at least there was a written record of the council's response. Now, you are not allowed to address the committee in person or be questioned by committee members, you get one question per agenda item and no more than two people can ask a question about each agenda item. When you are dealing with the annual budget, one question simply isn't enough. For example, at the Policy & Resources Committee in February this year, the papers for the budget agenda item comprised 386 pages including, changes to charges levied on residents, debt management policy, capital strategy, risk register, housing revenue account, medium term financial strategy, to name but a few, yet residents are allowed to ask just one question. I suspect that the real reason for gagging residents was not to save an alleged £42,000 from a council budget of  £344 million, but to stop a well informed and curious resident base from asking difficult and inconvenient questions.

We have also seen other changes on transparency such as the removal of senior officer salary data. We used to get a detailed breakdown of how much all officer paid over £55,000 a year were paid. Below is a graph I used to produce showing how much each officer was paid - I limited the range to those officers paid more than an MP and I never published the officers' names even though the data was available.

The data available then changed so this is all that was published.

Not only was the number of posts listed dramatically reduced but all the historical data was removed from the council's website. I suspect this was because there was a level of transparency which allowed residents to see the increases received by some council officers when their posts were regraded or when they received above inflation increases. No data has been published on the Council's website since September 2019.

Performance of the Capita contract has also suffered from a lack of transparency. Historically, a table known as "Benefits Realisation" was provided for the Capita CSG contract which showed how much (or little) the Capita contract had actually saved. When it became clear it wasn't saving anywhere near what we had been originally been told, they stopped publishing it. Data on Capita's performance at answering the phone to Barnet residents also stopped being published until just recently, and after much pestering from me, as it showed how poor the performance actually was. Having changed the targets twice to make them easier to meet, the latest data shows Capita still aren't answering the phone within the target time of 2 minutes and the data set remains incomplete.

Minutes of the Strategic Commission Board (Council Management Team) used to be published. They were not normally that informative although from time to time they included real insight into the way the council operates. In one set one minutes from February 2018 but published after the election, it highlights a practice known as 'telephony service degradation'. I suspect it was linked to an issue I  raised as part of the inspection of accounts which highlighted that if calls to Barnet exceeded a certain threshold, Capita were able to charge extra and in the financial year 2017/18 that amounted to an extra charge of £247,000. As a way to generate savings, the proposal was to introduce  'telephony service degradation' i.e. make the service worse so as to reduce the number of calls being answered and thereby cut the extra charges being made by Capita. Barnet stopped publishing these meeting minutes before the start of the pandemic and have yet to restart their publication.

Development is another contentious issue in Barnet. Conservatives are saying that they are opposed to over development but if you look at the huge amount of development along the A5 that clearly does not apply there. I know some of the people impacted by the Sainsburys development at the Hyde where Barnet pushed through a development of 1,309 flats in blocks up to 28 storeys even though it sits outside the agreed development area and is not in a town centre. All of their views were ignored including the home owners which will be very badly hit by loss of light. We now have a series of developments which will create 2,500 new flats on a 400 metre stretch of the A5 but without the infrastructure to support anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 new residents.  The massive development at Homebase in Cricklewood was another example where Conservative councillors were saying what an awful scheme it was yet voted for its approval. Yes, we need new homes especially for families, but what we are getting is a mass of small 1 and 2 bed flats which remain out of reach for most of the people who actually need them.

Barnet became addicted to a central government grant, New Homes Bonus, and in 2019 were forecasting an average of £10.8 million per annum. The more homes you built above a threshold, the more New Homes Bonus you received. It was a crude measure to boost housing builds but Barnet saw it as a useful revenue stream and so were incentivised to build more and more homes, typically 1 and 2 bed flats even though the top priority is for three bed homes for families. However, each year since 2019, that has been adjusted down so that next year we are now forecasting only £4.8million compared to an original estimate of £10.9 million. I raised this issue in 2019 of how reliable New Homes Bonus payments would be, but that was dismissed as pessimistic. It is exactly for these reason that residents need to be questioning the council and why gagging residents is so short-sighted.

The most recent example of Barnet's planning committee not listening to local residents is the Hendon Hub, a massive development at The Burroughs in Hendon which will destroy the beautiful, albeit downsized, Hendon library and a scheme which Historic England did not support. Local residents have launched a Judicial Review. You can read more about the Hendon Hub here.

This leads into our Library service and the way it has been decimated over the last five years. We were told that this was all about saving money and that people didn't really need libraries in an age of kindles, but now more than ever, when people are choosing whether to eat or heat, monthly broadband charges look like a nicety, not a necessity. Libraries were great places for people who didn't have internet access to work, study, apply for jobs, search out information and carry out other day to day functions, not just about somewhere to read and borrow books. In New Barnet, when the writing was on the wall for the old East Barnet Library (2017) I asked if it could be relocated in the proposed new leisure centre which would allow it to stay open all the hours the leisure centre was open. It was still too small but at least if it was open 90 hours a week it would allow people to access books, study space and the library computers. The reality is that we have a library located within a leisure centre open 90 hours a week, with a manned reception right next to the library area, yet the library is only open for just 17 hours per week. With the prospect of  thousand of people moving into New Barnet in the assortment of new developments, a tiny room open just 17 hours a week does not seem like a library we should expect. If you live in New Barnet you will get a chance to visit it on polling day as it is the local polling station - however you will not be able to use the Library - voting only.

Care Homes is another area which Barnet outsourced and which has proved to be a disaster. Apthorp Care Home was outsourced to Catalyst and run by another company Fremantle. You can read all the details here but the net result is the care home was run into the ground, the care offered was appalling and rated inadequate by the CQC. There was a massive backlog of repairs which meant living conditions were unacceptable. Fremantle handed back the running of the home to Barnet in 2019 and in 2021 Barnet decided that the backlog of maintenance was so bad that they would close the home. Now this isn't an old home, it was only opened in the early 2000's. I asked about monitoring in the period before the damning CQC report and it was clear that Barnet did not keep a log of all the monitoring visits nor was there a sanctions or penalty regime in place to make the provider improve. They outsourced the care of our elderly family and friends and did not do enough to ensure their care was safe and secure, something which is unforgivable.

Capita contract is the other issue that remains a running sore in Barnet. In 2018, after the election we told about a massive fraud carried out by a member of Capita's staff, stealing over £2 million in 62 separate transactions over a period of 17 months in 2016 and 2017. The fraud went undiscovered and only came to light after the fraudster's bank alerted Barnet Council to the potential problem. Grant Thornton were brought in to see how on earth such a massive fraud could take place and their findings showed fundamental weakness in the Capita systems and, that " there has also been insufficiently close scrutiny and client side management on the part of the Council and the Chief Officers coupled with an over reliance on the limited scope and frequency of work carried out by the Internal Audit service, to highlight issues. This is likely to have contributed to the lack of focus on effective controls". 

This was followed in 2019 by another fraud in the Capita run Pensions admin department, this time  seven different payments for a total of just over £70,000. Yet again Capita systems were found to be wanting. 

Set out below is the current cost of the Capita contract and shows that so far we have paid Capita £586 million, £225 million more than the contracted sum. It is also important to understand that Barnet have already taken back a number of services including Finance and HR which were in the original contracted sum so, in reality, we are paying even more than is shown.

Following the major fraud, the finance function along with HR was brought back in house and Barnet has been discussing what elements will be returned to the council ever since. We still do not have a definitive list of which council services that will be retained by Capita and we won't get a decision until after the election even though this should have been decided more than two years ago. In 2021 the review of Capita services was accompanied by a “Market Insights” report prepared by Grant Thornton in which the Executive Summary opens with the statement:

“Historically procurement has been ideologically driven and highly political”

 It also goes on to say:

“The gap between cost and efficiency for delivery between the public and private sector has been significantly squeezed over the last decade as a result of market pressures. This means that outsourcing is not always the most cost effective option by default”

I think this first statement sums up so much about the way Barnet Council has been run, ideologically driven and highly political. 

So when you are thinking about which way to vote on Thursday, ask yourself if you want another four years of the same or whether you think there is a better way to run Barnet. Whatever way you vote just please make sure you use your vote, as it will be the only way to show your views and to get politicians to listen for the next four years.

The Ladder of Citizen Participation in Barnet - More Snakes Than Ladders.

 Tomorrow there is a Community Leadership & Libraries Committee meeting where one of the agenda items is all about resident participation. The main thrust of this is about getting Barnet residents to do more for themselves but they also talk about greater engagement and participation and include a section about informing and consulting with residents.

There is quite an academic tone to the paper referencing the ‘Ladder of Citizen Participation’ "first modelled by Sherry Arnstein in a US planning journal in 1969" as the report says.

From my perspective we are definitely stuck on the lower rungs of tokenism and that is where we will remain unless there is a change of administration or we encounter more snakes and slip further back down the ladder as the urge to suppress discussion gets worse.

Over the last ten years we have seen many backward steps in resident participation.

• No longer allowed to address (speak at) a committee. Originally you could ask to address the committee for up to 5 minutes and committee members had the opportunity to ask questions of the speaker to get more insight into the issue. This was then reduced to three minutes, then the right to speak was removed entirely.

• Not allowed to ask more than one question on an agenda item, no more than 100 words, and if more than two people want to ask a question about the same agenda item only the first two questions are taken and all others are rejected. 

The excuse given was that people were asking too many questions even though the time for questions and speeches was limited to no more than 30 minutes. Some agenda items especially those dealing with budget and finance may be accompanied by up to 12 additional reports running to several hundred pages. Irrespective of the length of report or topics covered, one agenda item, one question is the limit.

• Restrictions on asking questions at residents forums. Pre 2010 residents forums used to be held up to 10 times a year, you could submit questions on the evening and there was a dialogue about the items. Now forums are just 4 times per year, you have to submit your question a week in advance and you can only speak for three minutes which is rigorously enforced. One councillor, John Marshall, disrespectfully labelled people who wanted to speak for four, five, six or seven minutes as "village bores". 

The report identifies the need to "reinvigorate" residents forums but what I find so galling is that exactly the same message was given 10 years ago in a detailed paper which you can read here. Set out below is an extract from that research paper:

The research asked what would encourage residents to get involved, the most common themes were:

• Topics needed to be of specific interest and relating to their local area;
• The Council should demonstrate they are taking action and feeding back what was happening as a result;
• Engagement should be better publicised through a variety of methods.

As a result, their principal requirements for an attractive engagement model was that visible action resulted on the night from those with authority, which was then fed back. The system should also be more widely publicised, and there were a number of suggestions on how this be done including greater use of electronic communications. There were also suggestions that the council should make greater use of Barnet online and the web to understand the issues that were causing residents most concern within different areas.

In terms of format some participants said they did not like the top table format and would prefer the meetings to be more informal, with table discussions, mixing residents, councillors and officers on each table.

There were some requests for all local issues, including other public services, to be covered, and for meetings to allocate a small budget, but this was by no means universal.

The research paper also identified barriers to people attending residents forums which included:

• Lack of action as a result of what is raised or discussed was the main deterrent to getting involved in the future
• Lack of feedback and explanation of the process was also seen as a key deterrent
• Lack of time was also a barrier to getting involved
• Inconvenient time/day - some participants felt if the engagement foras were held at inconvenient times this was a particular barrier to some residents. Reference was made in particular to mothers with children who would find it difficult to attend in the evening due to childcare
• Inconvenient location – if the event was in held at an inconvenient location and not in participant’s local area
• Confidentiality - was also mentioned as a barrier to raising issues in face to face foras. Particular reference was made to raising anti social behaviour issues about neighbours.

At the time, I thought the officer responsible had done a good job in identifying the problems and therefore their recommendations would be accepted. But no. This is Barnet and of course they ignored the findings and made it even more difficult to ask questions by banning a range of issues that could be raised. No surprise when people stopped going. 

Now they say they have a problem with engagement and want to 'reinvigorate' the forums. Ten years, no lessons learned, no one looking back to research carried out previously, same councillors doing their utmost to supress, ignore and discourage resident engagement. No wonder people are disengaged.

Highly Political and Ideologically Driven - The Capita Contracts in Barnet

 It has been some time but Mr Reasonable is back! During lockdown and the incredibly tough time that we have all experienced, I thought I would ease back on my detailed scrutiny of Barnet Council and allow it to get on with what was a much more important job of looking after the residents of Barnet during this crisis. Throughout the entire lockdown period many vital frontline services have continued to operate and my thanks goes to all those incredibly brave and hardworking staff who have never had the option to work from home. However, council committee meetings have resumed in person so now is the time to resume detailed scrutiny.

Yesterday I reviewed the latest position on the Capita contracts in papers published for the Financial Performance and Contracts Committee which you can read here.  It sets out plans for which of the services currently operated by Capita will be brought back in-house, which will be reviewed after a year and which will continue to be operated by Capita after the contract expires in 2023.

In the past I would have taken my views and a long list of in-depth questions to the committee meeting in what would, in a normal democracy, be seen as public scrutiny. However, as we all know, in Barnet the current regime hate any form of scrutiny so they have gagged all those people who take a close interest in how the council is run.  I am allowed just one question on the contracts costing an average of £72 million a year. 

To set the Capita contract in context, set out below is the total Barnet have paid to Capita since the contract started in September 2013. As you can see, so far Barnet have paid Capita £540 million, £212 million more than was originally contracted.

When I meet people who are unfamiliar with Capita’s role in Barnet, they often ask if I am joking when I say that one council, Barnet, has paid over half a billion pounds to one company, Capita. The level of disbelief is huge but that is the reality of the contract councillors entered with Capita back in 2013.

The paper being discussed next week sets out where they have got to in reviewing the two contracts and the strategy going forward, something they are asking councillors on the committee to agree. Bear in mind that the CSG contract review should have been completed two years ago and the Re contract a year ago. It is accompanied by a “Market Insights” report prepared by Grant Thornton in which the Executive Summary opens with the statement:

“Historically procurement has been ideologically driven and highly political”

Definitely 100% true in Barnet’s case. It also goes on to say:

“The gap between cost and efficiency for delivery between the public and private sector has been significantly squeezed over the last decade as a result of market pressures. This means that outsourcing is not always the most cost effective option by default”

Unpicking that statement and reading between the lines, it is saying that the price difference between companies like Capita and in house teams is slim, if at all, something I told Barnet back in 2012 and 2013.

The killer line is at the bottom of the executive summary where it says:

Key to pragmatic delivery and understanding is an effective and objective options appraisal process with a clear vison at the outset of 

‘WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACHIEVE’ and 

'WHAT PROBLEMS ARE WE TRYING TO SOLVE’

The council failed to address those two critical questions in 2013 and reading the committee paper they still have not been addressed nearly eight years later. Indeed the current paper seems to have been written from a Capita centric view point with services from which Capita can continue to make money being retained and those that do not generate profit/make a loss, or don’t fit the model of what Capita want to provide, being returned to Barnet. 

For example, the reports says it makes sense for Capita to keep IT, customer service and revenue and benefits. All three of these services have contract clauses that allow Capita to charge extra for exceeding volume thresholds. The biggest money spinner of all is planning, a service which is intrinsically linked to local knowledge but which Barnet seem happy to let Capita keep creaming off a profit share. I am aware that there has been a high turnover of staff in the planning department and this has led to a real loss of local knowledge when planning applications are put forward. Knowing planning law may be seen as the most important criteria but I would say that having some local knowledge, is right up there when deciding planning applications. One possible reason for the high turnover of staff is that the biggest employer of planning officers are other local authorities who offer the benefits package, especially pensions, that Capita fail to offer.

Set out below is a summary of how the different services will be managed; retain means retained by Capita and returned means given back to Barnet to manage. I have dealt with the issues involved with each service individually below the table.

IT – “whoever controls the data controls the world” applies at corporate level as well. Without control of the IT systems we are forever dependent on Capita. A couple of years ago when there was a major review of spending being carried out, some of the shortcomings of Capita’s Integra system were highlighted, especially budgeting for capital project over more than one year. The then acting Finance Officer (who I rated highly) said that computer systems such as SAP had the ability to schedule capital budget over many years and he has used that at other Local Authorities. The irony of the situation is that Barnet had spent more than £20 million developing and perfecting an SAP system only for it to be thrown out and replaced by Capita’s Integra system when we signed the contract back in 2013. In this paper they have recognised the need to improve of the Integra systems and are saying that by extending the contract, Capita will make investment in this area. 

WARNING!!! 

This is a complete and utter myth. Back in 2013 Barnet councillors said they did not have the money to invest in IT systems and that is why they needed a company like Capita who would invest their own money in new systems. However, as soon as the contract was signed they completely reversed that decision saying that it was much cheaper for the council to borrow money than Capita and put up £16.1 million which they said saved the council £800,000 in interest that Capita would have charged. The same will happen again this time.

Customer Services – The report says that this service has performed well. Not what Barnet residents were saying pre covid when getting through to the council on the phone system was a nightmare. I demonstrated that on some departments Capita had never met their full quarter KPI targets on answering the phone since the start of the contract. 

Barnet’s response was clear and decisive…. they stopped publishing the data so that I could not point out the failings any more. Capita also charge extra when call volumes exceed target levels, even though many of the calls are now fully automated (quarter of a million pounds in 2018). The Covid pandemic has seen a massive change in the way calls are handled with call centres closed and most calls dealt with by staff from their homes. Why haven’t Barnet looked at doing this themselves?  Covid has forced many people in the hospitality and retail sectors out of work In addition, there are always people looking for fairly paid part time work, especially working mothers who need to balance childcare with work. Why aren’t Barnet looking at utilising these local staff working from home as a way to create better paid local jobs using people with good local knowledge. Sadly this is a prime example of ideology trumping pragmatism.

Revenues & Benefits – This service is now the largest recipient of the wonderfully titled “Gainshare” clause. With this clause, if Capita save some money or gather more than was forecast 9 years ago when the contract was drafted, then they get to keep a proportion of it – up to 50%.  Last year Capita claimed £837,218.66 using this clause including £180,421.92 gainshare for exceeding the council tax collection target,  £125,057.81 for gainshare on recovered housing benefit over-payments and £230,702.89 for reducing the number of people claiming single person discounts. Times and technology have moved on. It would be good to see Barnet hanging on to all of that £837,000 rather than handing it over to Capita.

Procurement – after years of campaigning and highlighting to both Barnet Council senior officers and to the External Auditor how much we were paying out unfairly in gainshare to Capita on procurement, gainshare on procurement was dropped as part of a secret deal done between Jonathan Lewis, CEO of Capita, and Barnet back in November 2018. This clause had generated just under £8 million of gainshare for Capita so was extremely lucrative. Without it Capita simply can’t be bothered so that is why they are handing this service back to Barnet.

Accounts Payable/Integra – Barnet are proposing that this service is given a short extension with a further review even though Accounts Payable has been one of the worst performing services of those provided by Capita. Since the start of the contract Accounts Payable has received four limited assurance reports from Barnet’s Internal Auditors in January 2015, January 2016, April 2018 and October 2019. This department’s failures were also highlighted by Grant Thornton in their investigation into the £2m fraud discovered in 2018. What else is to review – they have provided consistently lousy service and should have been sacked back in 2018. The report also talks about economies of scale but this is already a massive operation. In 2020/21 I logged and tracked 162,468 payment transactions and those were only the ones made public. Accounts Payable needs attention and is large enough to warrant being brought back in house where hopefully we would get more scrutiny on what is being paid out.

HR/Core HR - a large part of this service has already been brought back because of serious failings. It therefore makes sense to bring the rest back when the contract expires yet Barnet want to extend and review this service. Why? Ideology over pragmatism.

Estates – another service earmarked a short extension and further review. Reading the report it is hard to understand why when it says “Overall, the Estates function has had a number of problems over many years, which go back to before the CSG contract was put in place. Repeated efforts to resolve this over the years have made some improvements, but the service is not yet consistently performing to the required standard”.   The only conclusion I can come to is that Capita want to hang on to it because while they provide a dismal service, they can still claim gainshare on property income where Capita keep 30% of the additional income from rent reviews, lease renewals and letting on the property portfolio above an agreed baseline. Last year that was just over £100,000. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Planning Control & Development – Barnet is in the top ten of busiest planning departments in England (2,694 applications in 2020), something from which it generates a large revenue stream. The head of planning was a Barnet council staff member before the contract was outsourced so I am not sure what value Capita have brought to this contract but currently we have to share the planning income with Capita. Given that there has been so much criticism of planning and the accusation of conflicts of interest with other Capita companies such as GL Hearn, it would seem like an obvious choice to bring back in house. In this case the financial interests of Capita win again.

Building Control and Land Charges – again both revenue generating service where profit has to be shared with Capita so yet again the recommendation is to leave the service with Capita.

Regulatory Services - these include Environmental Health, Trading Standards and Licensing and they are recommended to return to Barnet’s control. Definitely, the right decision and one where right back in 2013 it seemed unwise to hand to a contractor. Possibly of more relevance is that none of these services make money so are therefore of no interest to Capita.

Regeneration – is also a strategic service which generates no income for Capita so surprise, surprise the recommendation is that it should return to Barnet. It is important that the service is run and controlled by Barnet staff but it is clear to see why Capita aren’t putting up a fight to keep it.

Highways – this is another service that has performed dismally under Capita. They have struggled to recruit and retain senior management for this service. It received a 'Limited Assurance' rating in April 2017 and a 'No Assurance' rating, the worst possible, in October 2019. Indeed at the most recent Audit Committee meeting in April this year, the deadline for resolving the problems identified in the 2019 report had been missed again – for the 5^th time. Capita do not physically carry out the highways work; that is let through a London Councils framework contract, they just manage it. The report is also contradictory on this service saying in the text that the service should be returned yet in the chart saying it should be extended with a further review. Which is it?

Cemetery & Crematorium – the report says that Capita aren’t doing a bad job. Others who had a loved one’s memorial bench chucked into a heap in the Hendon Cemetery memorial garden and who have seen the process of death “memorialised” to use Capita’s jargon, might disagree. However the service doesn’t fit with Capita’s strategy “and is the only cemetery and crematorium they (Capita) run. Whilst this does not present any immediate issues of concern, the potential for them to add further value to the development of the service over the medium-term may be limited”. So yet again they are handing back a service not because of any pragmatic or logical reasoning but because it doesn’t fit with what Capita want to provide.

Reading this report I am shocked that it is so one sided and biased towards what is best for Capita rather than what is best for Barnet and its residents.

The Grant Thornton Market Insights report raises a number of interesting points including information about councils that are insourcing (bringing back in house) services that were previously outsourced.

As I mentioned at the outset, local residents are not allowed to ask more than one question and if more than two residents want to ask their single question about an agenda item then they are simply ignored. We will be invited to a focus group session in early July and one later in the year in the same format as 2018. In that focus group they gave everyone tea and biscuits and £50, (I donated my fee to charity) listened to what everyone said and then completely ignored every single word. It ticks the box for consultation without listening to a word that is said.

This is a contract which has already cost £540 million yet this report seems superficial and entirely biased in favour of Capita. Grant Thornton are right when the say procurement has been ideologically driven and highly political. Unfortunately that seems to still be the case in Barnet. No big picture, no wholistic viewpoint, no recognition of the links between services that make a council function efficiently, just more of the same old fashioned ideology where Capita’s needs and strategy are at the forefront of any decision.

Gagging - The questions I would have asked if I wasn't gagged

Since the introduction of the new gagging rules, residents are no longer allowed to make public comments or submit them in writing and are limited to just one question per agenda item. I intend to publish the questions I would have submitted to demonstrate that these questions still need to be asked. Set out below are the questions I would have submitted to the Financial Performance and Contracts Committee on 28 October. Scrutiny is a vital function and without residents questions it is an incomplete process.

Agenda Item 7

• The leisure budget is overspent by £719,000 because of the on-going problems at Finchley Lido which has now been closed since March. Does this overspend include the £245,520 the council has spent on phase one propping of the roof at the Lido while investigation works take place or is that in addition to the £719,000. What have been the results of the investigative works, what is the likelihood that the Lido will remain closed after December and what are the estimated costs or repairing the roof so that the Lido can reopen?

• Why were the counter fraud operations overspent by £731,000 before reserve movements?

• In CSC 0-25 the manpower costs were overspent by £362,000 with 13 agency staff in place. What steps have been taken to reduce the dependence on agency staff and how much will it save if all those agency staff can be converted to permanent staff?

• The CSG managed budget is £2.36 million overspent. Of that sum, £411,000 was due to the delay in moving out of NLBP to Colindale. Who was at fault for the delay, the contractor or the council and if the contractor, is it possible to recover this cost through contractual penalties?

• Why are we picking up the bill for the £469,000 shortfall in document solutions service given that this is a service provided by Capita?

• Is the £690,000 shortfall associated with Brent Cross income shortfall and running costs a one off problem or an early indicator of wider problems with the Brent Cross redevelopment?

• If the £1 million overspend on the Re projects management fee relates to the fee increase for the deferral in 2017/18 to 2019/20 can you clarify why this wasn’t accrued for in 2017/18?

• Frontline waste is £1,162,000 overspent. The explanation includes reason such as replacement of the fleet but surely these are capital expenditure, not revenue? The detailed evidence suggests that the rounds reorganisation saved no money whatsoever and in fact appears to have cost an additional £250,000. Given you have already missed the deadline to consolidate services into one depot, that the Oakleigh Road depot is about to undergo a period of major works to address subsidence problems known about from day one and which are likely to increase operating cost, are you sure that the year end forecast is reliable or merely an aspiration?

• The highways service is currently predicting an underlying overspend £654,000. Given the recent internal audit “No Assurance” rating for Highways and examples where invoices weren’t properly reconciled, work wasn’t properly checked and invoices weren’t certified for payment by the appropriate budget manager, how certain are you that the shortfall will not be considerably more by year end?

• Given that this financial year, the net forecasted overspend is £9.423m excluding reserve movements and that according to the MTFS the council will have a budget deficit of £118.7 million over the next five years, is Barnet facing the inevitable risk of bankruptcy unless you take radical action to get the finances on a more secure footing?

 Agenda Item 9

• As the contractual dispute with the main building contractor was resolved in July, why are we not allowed to know the scale of the payment made by the council given it could be up to £5 million and will have to be identified at some stage in the accounts?

Agenda Item 10

• Given that TPR felt that even after issuing a Warning Notice, they were not confident there would not be further delay without their involvement, they issued an Improvement Notice. What steps is this committee going to take to ensure that Capita’s role as the pension administrator is much more rigorously monitored by the Council?

• What was the outcome of the Annual Benefits Statement exercise?

• Why are there no KPI’s for pensions, will KPI’s be implemented as a matter of urgency and does the lack of KPI’s mean that there is no contractual redress against Capita for their catalogue of failures on pensions administration?

• Given that Accounts Payable operated by Capita has received a "Limited Assurance" rating from Internal Audit, will this committee explain why they chose not to bring Accounts Payable back in-house along with the finance function in April 2019 and will this decision be reconsidered as a matter of urgency?

• Given that you expect that overall phone and email volumes for the year will be less than 500,000 contacts for the first time since the start of the contract does that reflect the fact that many residents have given up trying to use the telephone system because it is so poor or it is because the strategy of savings opportunities from “telephony service degradation” agreed by the Senior Management Team at the Strategic Commissioning Board, are working?

• The report on HBPL does not identify if the contract is overspent. Can you confirm that the contract is in line with the budget forecast and if not, by how much is it overspent?

• Why does the Cambridge Education contract which provides vital services to schools, including 1.1 million school meals, warrant just 8 words of text and does that mean that there are no problems at all with the service provided by Cambridge Education and its subcontractor ISS?

• In the Barnet Group report it notes that the repairs target is not being met. I understand that the contract with Mears (who carry out the repairs) is being terminated one year early and the service will be brought back in house. What is the risk that the backlog of repairs will increase between now and when the contract is brought back in house in April 2020 and how can that situation be avoided?

Agenda Item 11

• The forward works programme states that you will set out details of the 6 and 7 year contract reviews at the December meeting. Why has this been left so long given that we are already in year 6 and have you renegotiated the contract to change the terms of reference for the year 7 review which relates to the extension of the RE contract?

It will be interesting to see if any of these questions get asked at the meeting - I suspect not.

Supplier Payments - Gagging means these concerns can't be raised at Committees

Barnet's supplier payments were published yesterday and yet again Capita are raking in the money. On the CSG contract Capita were paid £8.55 million and on the Re Contract they were paid  £8.35 million, a total of £16.9 million in just one month.

Set out below is the Capita spend to date which shows just how much we are paying for extras.

Another large beneficiary in June was PA Consulting who were paid £1,288,268.09. By the looks of the detail (Adults IT) I suspect this is for the implementation of the Mosaic casework system, the project that Capita completely messed up. I just hope the compensation we received from Capita for their failure was sufficient to cover all these bills from PA Consulting.

Agency staff costs appear to be falling with Matrix, the agency staff contractor, billed £1.09 million so the trend remains downward. It really makes you question why we stayed with the previous contractor, Comensura, for so long and why these changes were made sooner.

The agency contract seems on target to hit just over £12 million for the year, down from its peak of £20 million in 2016/17. However we are still paying £29,000 a month to separate agencies, Gatenby Sanderson and Hampton's Resourcing for a couple of very senior members of staff.

Another payment that caught my eye was to Saracens who received a payment of £25,271.30 for "rent". I am not sure what we hired the stadium for but that seems like a lot for rent.

The Capita payments often used to figure in my questions to the Financial Performance and Contracts Committee. Now that I have officially been gagged I get just one question and no opportunity to speak. It is clear to me that I have asked too many difficult and awkward questions about Capita and their contract with Barnet and that is why the new rules have been imposed. This isn't small change we are talking about but £160 million more than the contracted value but if you believe everything Barnet Conservatives say it is fantastic value for money. Having no one there at meetings to challenge them is exactly what they want.

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.