Here is a joint follow up letter to councillors reflecting on the statement made by Brian Coleman yesterday.
Dear Councillor,
We wrote to you recently
about the impending vote on the motion of no confidence in Leader Richard
Cornelius. We observed that there
was a rising tide of concern in your ranks about the One Barnet programme of
outsourcing, and we asked you to act to halt the negotiations for the
privatisation of £1 billion worth of our council services. Now your former
colleague Brian Coleman, who has been a senior member of the Cabinet and
exerted considerable influence within the party, has chosen to speak out
against One Barnet in the strongest terms, calling for its immediate rejection.
In his statement in the Barnet
Press, Councillor Coleman refers to the proposed outsourcing as ‘an
officer-driven juggernaut’ backed up by a ‘revolving door of endless
consultants’ with a ‘promise of savings’. By implication, Cllr Coleman does not
believe that One Barnet will deliver those savings.
He proposes:
‘The council needs to dump this flawed scheme and introduce a
proper strategy which assesses where services belong, whether that is the
private sector, shared services with other boroughs, the voluntary sector or
indeed occasionally in-house - a mixed economy is what
is needed.’
We would give far more
weight than Cllr Coleman to considering the in-house option fully as services
are reviewed, but we are glad that he is prepared to voice publicly the idea
that large-scale privatisation of services is not the answer to all our
prayers. He is not alone in this;
many senior Conservative politicians in local government are saying the same.
He also says of his erstwhile colleagues:
‘I don't know any
councillors who agree we should privatise the planning department.’
We invite those of you
for whom this is true to speak out! We ask again: who controls the Council,
senior officers or the elected Councillors?
We are pleased to see
that at last a Conservative councillor is voicing in public the concerns that
many of you have about One Barnet, especially since he has had to put aside
loyalty to Richard Cornelius in order to do it. (Although, as he points out, Cllr
Cornelius had become convinced that One Barnet will save money, he too was
angered by the covert moves senior officers took towards adopting a Joint
Venture for the DRS outsourcing.)
Cllr Coleman has also
put on record the consternation that many of you felt when Nick Walkley pressed
the button on his ejector seat out of the Barnet cockpit. Of course, we have many
differences with Cllr Coleman. For example, his suggestion that Conservative
councillors have gone along with the One Barnet proposals because the unions
had their own separate objections to them seems far-fetched. We find it hard to
believe that the Conservative philosophy has as shallow a basis as knee-jerk
hostility to anything the unions say.
Notwithstanding that, and our very many differences with Cllr
Coleman over the years, there is an indisputable truth in much of what he is now saying about One Barnet. It is only a pity that
someone did not speak out publicly before!
A glance at what is
happening with the parking contract recently outsourced to NSL shows the
dangers ahead if the Council plunges ahead with One Barnet.
The parking contract has
been in place for six months and NSL have still not got over their teething
troubles; this contract was for £15 million over five years. If you scale up
from a £3 million a year mess to £100 million a year how much havoc will be
wrought in the lives of residents?
Opening his article,
Cllr Coleman says:
‘Something has happened
in the last few months in Barnet. Residents have been taking an interest in the
way Barnet Council is proposing to operate in future, the so-called One Barnet
scheme.’
He is right, residents
are very interested in that, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Of
course, like you, residents are concerned about the fate – for that is what it
is – of their council services, and of the money they have paid out in taxes to
secure them.
We hardly need to remind
you that residents will also take an interest in who was in charge when their
services were handed over wholesale to two large companies, and tied up in
10-year contracts. We all know who they will blame when the service delivery
falls short of the high standards they have experienced up till now, or when
there are contractual wrangles about service levels with the contractors BT,
Capita et al.
Cllr Coleman suggests that Barnet Conservative councillors are
behaving like lemmings heading for a cliff. That is not a very positive image
but we have to believe that his comments do have
some valuable insights and that there must be some truth in them that demand
your urgent consideration.
We ask you now then to
follow the instinct of your own common sense, stop behaving like lemmings, and
abandon the reckless One Barnet programme before it is too late.
Yours,
Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne
