Six days Till The Voters Decide

In the run up to the elections on the 22 May I thought I would revisit some of the blogs I have posted over the last four years to see of anything has changed. Today I am looking at events in 2011starting with a blog posted in March 2011 and relates to the infamous Council meeting where MetPro first came to the bloggers attention. This became the watershed moment when Barnet's attitude to residents became clear and war was declared on the bloggers. 

What transpired was that MetPro had no formal contract, were not SIA licensed, had not been CRB checked and had secretly filmed residents at council meetings. However this was at at time when residents were not allowed to film in council meetings, another matter that resulted in a showdown between residents and the Council. Filming of meetings is now commonplace but in 2011 it took a series of heated exchanges and the open filming by bloggers to eventually get the council to relent.

2011 is when the Council changed the rules on residents forums to make it much harder to ask relevant and challenging questions. They introduced this censorship in order to protect the dogmatic One Barnet programme from questions or scrutiny. At they same time they closed down the only scrutiny committee that had responsibility to oversee this project. Redaction of any and all information became the norm to the ridiculous extent that the council even redacted details of payments to the Council's recycling partner May Gurney in the "belief" that the payment of £861,000 was going to Mr & Mrs Gurney's daughter May. 

Roll forward to 2014 and the Council will claim to be more open. In some ways they are having restored the ability to ask any questions you want at residents forums. However, the ability to get an answer which is in any way relevant to the question is a great deal harder and now that One Barnet has been implemented and matters are covered by commercial confidentiality the council can blame someone else for hiding the facts from residents. 

Take for example the publishing of Capita contract which Barnet said was a landmark decision. Try reading it or downloading it. Still plenty of black ink.

When asked about why the Council had given £16.1 million to Capita to fund capital investment when all along we had been told this would be funded by Capita, we got a response but one that very carefully constructed in such a way that it actually told us nothing. 

So has the culture of secrecy and conflict with the residents changed since 2010? Not really. We can ask questions at residents forums but they have to be submitted two days in advance and you are unlikely to get a straight answer. The amount of time for questions and to address committees has been reduced from 30 minutes plus time for people to address the committee to a total of 30 minutes for everyone. In addition the time allowed to address the committee has been reduced from 5 minutes to just three. How topics as complex as those dealt with at the last Audit committee can be explained in three minutes highlights the way the council stifles meaningful dialogue. I would say that all out war is over but it has now become a cold war, more subtle but no less confrontational with residents.

When candidates ask you for their votes ask them how they will be more open with the public and whether they welcome resident involvement in setting council policy. That will be a real test of just how seriously they want resident engagement.

Barnet Judicial Review - is this justice?

Yesterday, the judgement on the Maria Nash's judicial review was published. I would urge as many people as possible to read this judgement because it illustrates just how unfair the justice system can be at times.

The judge, Lord Justice Underhill is critical of Barnet and is quite clear that they failed to consult with residents. However, the law believes that ordinary residents without a law degree, need to do things like study the Official Journal of the European Union  (OJEU) with great rigour, to read between the lines on council papers, even when they are not explicit and to seek legal redress at the earliest possible opportunity even though they don't know what they are objecting to.

Barnet failed miserably to consult - and in  the judges words;

"Although I have, out of deference to the attention given to it in the evidence, and to some extent also at the hearing, summarised the nature of the consultation about the 2010/11 and 2011/12 budgets, there is no real dispute that it did not constitute consultation about outsourcing as such.  “Alternative service provision” was mentioned in the materials supplied, at least for the latter year; but no relevant information was supplied, and the exercises were plainly not designed to elicit views about it".   He went on to say:

"It is clear that in the present case the Council did not make any attempt to consult on the specific question of whether the functions and services covered by the NSCSO and DRS contracts should be outsourced", and in summary he said:


"It follows that if the application for judicial review had been made in time I would have held that the Council had not complied with its obligations under section 3 (2) of the 1999 Act in respect of the decisions taken in 2010/11 to outsource the performance of its functions and services, covered by the proposed NSCSO and DRS contracts".  

BUT...   the case is out of time so tough luck!


I believe it was Lord Hailsham who coined the phrase "elective dictatorship" and that is exactly what we have in Barnet, a weak group that fails to represent the broad views of the residents but is able to drive through whatever policies it wants aided by the weaknesses of the democratic system we have in place. If this judgement stands it will send a green light to Barnet to be even more secretive about what they are doing, to completely ignore meaningful consultions, to ignore the broad range of views of the 356,000 residents and to go ahead with whatever it wants, because it can. 

I understand that Maria Nash is going to appeal and I hope for everyone's sake she is successful.