Barnet's Monthly spend - Agency costs look like hitting £20 million this financial year

Barnet's July supplier payments have been published here and it is generally a light month with total spending at just £29.9 million. The one payment that does jump out is Comensura who supply the council with agency and interim staff. In July they were paid £1.86 million and this brings the total for the first four months of this financial year to £6.9 million. On that basis it looks like Barnet will hit £20 million for spend on interims and agency staff this financial year. This is completely unacceptable given that we are paying commission and agency fees on all of those payments.  If we are paying 10% commission on this agency spend - and I suspect it is significantly higher - then the commission alone is is almost as much as the Council are planning to save by destroying our library service. Not only that but the lack of continuity by employing an never ending stream of interims and agency staff leads to inefficiencies and the same mistakes being repeated time and again. I have questioned Conservative councillors about this on numerous occasions and they entirely complacent on the matter. Having outsourced so many services it seems ridiculous that so much is being spent on temporary staff.  Richard Cornelius is the leader of the council and the buck stops with him. He has to get a grip on this massive problem.

Cutting Councillor Allowances - an alternative view

Barnet will be discussing Cllr allowances at the meeting on Tuesday, the same meeting where they will be receiving a petition on library closures.

Cllrs currently receive an allowance of £10,597 and, in addition, certain Cllrs receive a special responsibility allowance. These range from an additional £35,000 for Richard Cornelius as leader of the council down to an additional £2,368 for Chairmen (even women are Chairmen) of the Residents Forums and Vice Chairmen of 8 committees. 17 Chairmen of committees receive an additional allowance of £15,333. This ranges from committees which sit frequently such as the Planning Committee - 10/11 times a year, to those which sit just four times a year such as the Housing Committee or Community Leadership Committee. The Licensing Committee Chairman attracts a lower special responsibility allowance of £8,852 but in 2014 this committee only sat twice.

From what I can see, 26 of the 32 Conservative councillors receive some form of special responsibility allowance whereas only one Labour Cllr receives an additional allowance, Alison Moore, as leader of the major opposition group. Some Cllrs work hard for which they receive their main allowance and I understand why the leader and opposition leader receive an additional allowance as they have to devote a great deal of time to the running of the council but the rest of the special responsibility allowances seem to me like a way to reward loyalty within the Conservative group.

If we really want to make cuts, I would do away with all special responsibility allowances other than for Cllr R Cornelius and Cllr Moore. If committee chairmen didn't receive an allowance then maybe the council would rationalise the number of committees.

By way of example of how the current system isn't working is Danny Seal, the globe trotting Cllr for Hampstead Garden Suburb who has only attended 9 of the 15 meetings he should have attended, or just 60%, see the details here. However, in addition to his standard allowance of £10,597 he receives an additional allowance of £2,368 for his role as Chairman of the Finchley & Golders Green Residents Forum. Imagine an employee turning up only 60% of the time and asking for extra payment. They would be shown the door.

By cutting out special responsibility allowances it would reduce the allowances bill by approximately £300,000 a year and in addition would do away with the patronage system that buys loyalty with committee chairmanship roles.

Perhaps Cllrs should consider this before they go making cuts to the library and other essential services which residents value on Tuesday.

What a load of rubbish.

In addition to the £3.7 million Barnet is spending on new recycling bins and food caddies, I saw last week in a Delegated Powers Report that Barnet are spending £26,343 on biodegradable food caddy liners. Every household will get a roll of ten bags. It is not much in the scheme of things but do we really need liners. We already have a kitchen caddy which we purchased ourselves (£4.99 at Robert Dyas)  and we simply wash it out daily. We put the waste in the green bin (which will not be allowed in future) which we also wash out regularly. To me it is £26,343 wasted and it may also set expectation from some residents that they will be provided on a regular basis - which I don't think is the intention.

A bit more common sense please.

£3,400 booze up paid for by Barnet Ratepayers

The Claddagh Ring Pub, located close to Hendon Town Hall, hosted an event on 26 April for the Revenues and Benefits staff who will lose their jobs when (if) Capita take over. Having seen the pub's name in the suppliers' payments list I requested a copy of the invoice under FOI and today it arrived (See opposite)  The invoice is referenced "Barnet Council Event" and which states that the £3,400 was for "Food and Room Hire" - no mention of drinks, I note.  ( I have edited the pub's sort code & bank account number btw). This was authorised by the Head of Revenues & Benefits and described as a team building exercise. In the supplier payments it is categorised as training.

Now, the reports I have had from staff who were at the event say that there was a free bar and that staff were led to believe  that the Head of Revenues and Benefits, who is a consultant/interim, and another consultant would be picking up the bill. Some staff are indeed very upset that Council money was spent on the event and would not have participated if they had known it would be billed to the Council.

Looking at the Claddagh Ring's website it mentions that finger buffets start  at £7.95 per head with the deluxe buffet at £19.95 per head. Given that there are only 126 FTE staff (so maybe 150 in total) that works out at  over £22/head. From what I hear there was a little food available but the main incentive appeared to be a free bar.

I have no problem with team building events as such and have been on many in my former corporate days - but they were not paid out of the public purse at a time when all budget are being cut. I think it is also offensive to the staff to mislead them about who was paying for the event. This shows a serious error of judgement and needs to be investigated further.

Come on Richard Cornelius tell me this £3,400 booze up was not paid for by ratepayer.

Barnet Councillor Allowances - Value for Money?

Last week I blogged that the 2010/11 Councillors allowances had at last been released but that 2011/12 were not yet available. Well this morning I tried again and they are now available here. What is striking is just how many non Cabinet members are still drawing allowances in excess of £20,000. For example Dean Cohen received £24,257.10 and that was before he was elevated to the Cabinet. Cllrs Davey and Finn also received just over £24,000 whilst Cllrs Perry, Prentice, Rayner, Scanell and A Tambourides all earned just under £26,000. Cabinet members received around £28,000 with the deputy leader and leader earning more. In total Councillor allowances are over £1 million a year.

Now the public needs to think about this hard. According to the Office of National Statistics the average earning of people employed is £467 per week which equates to about £25,000 per annum. So some Councillors are drawing a full time salary for the work they do.  My question to ratepayers is does this represent value for money? I must make the point that one Councillor continues to draw less than they are entitled to. Well done Brian Salinger.

Agilisys - £248k fee in February

Barnet Council published their supplier payments for February last Friday. Sadly the Council's love affair with their One Barnet implementation partner just keeps on rolling. In February Agilisys were paid £248,169.40, slightly down on the £270,719.50they were paid in January. So in the first two months of 2012 Agilisys have been paid over half a million pounds of council tax payers money to help implement One Barnet. Yet this is something we are not allowed to discuss at the residents forums.

In the year to date Agilisys have been paid £1.55 million and when coupled with the £642,050.64 they received last financial year they have now billed £2.2million. That is £2.2 million to just one firm of consultants.

Only in Barnet!

Boris and his trips to Barnet

Having a look on Conservative Home website I came across a list of how often Mayor Boris Johnson has visited the London Boroughs during the last four years. The article was trying to show how Boris has made loads more visits than when Ken was Mayor. What I found mildly irritating was how few time Boris visited Barnet, the largest London borough, compared to some of the inner London Boroughs.

In the last 4 years Mr Johnson has visited Barnet 10 times. During the same period he visited:

Hammersmith & Fulham 17 times
Wandsworth 21 times
Camden 23 times
Kensington & Chelsea 24 times
Lambeth 28 times
Tower Hamlets 29 times
Southwark 40 times
Newham 42 times (possibly due to the Olympics)
Westminster 149 times

My view is that in Barnet we should see the Mayor a just as much as the inner London boroughs. Instead we get sent the bill and largely ignored. The cycle hire scheme doesn't really cut it in Barnet when you can't get a direct bus from Barnet General Hospital to either Chase Farm hospital or to the Royal Free.

Who ever is mayor after the election, they need to start taking Barnet a bit more seriously. 350,000 people don't like being ignored.

For the record Mr Reasonable supports none of the candidates and would prefer to see the entire GLA and mayoral role abolished along with the expensive representatives and advisors. Each borough could send along one of their representative (with no extra allowance) when London wide decisions need to be made.

Consultation Barnet Council Style - What a BL***Y JOKE

The results of the frankly bizarre and utterly meaningless Barnet Council business plan, budget and corporate plan consultations have been published in the cabinet papers for 20 February. The on line budget consultation attracted only 25 responses. It does say that “Due to the small sample size the overall findings should be treated with caution”. Perhaps “chuck it in the bin” might be a more suitable response.

Then we come on to the corporate plan consultation. This consultation asked people to prioritise what services were important to the community and to themselves. At least this consultation attracted more response - 109 people. Yes out of the 350,000 residents of Barnet, the council managed to ‘engage with’ 109 people to fill in the consultation. To bolster the results they sent the consultation to the 1,000 members of the Citizen Panel of which 491 responded. So in total we have a total of 599 results, hardly confidence inspiring.

I criticised the survey when it was first published as being meaningless and I would suggest my forecasts were quite accurate. People were asked to pick the eight most important services provided by the council to them personally and to the community as a whole out of a list of 28 services. Not surprisingly people rated services that are important to the community very similar to the services that important to them personally.

Refuse collection was significantly the most frequently mentioned service as being important to the borough as a whole (54%), followed by community safety services (49%), repairs of roads and pavements (48%) and street cleaning services (41%). However, around half of respondents did not indicate that these services were one of the most eight important services for the Council to focus on for Barnet as a whole, indicating opinion was divided. So what on earth does that tell you. Absolutely nothing!

Much worse, it goes on to say, “Perhaps the most surprising finding is that many of the services that seek to support the most vulnerable were not reported as being of the highest importance by respondents. Namely, Support for adults with a physical disability (13%, ranked 24th =), Support to adults with a learning disability (13% ranked 24th =), Support to family carers of adults (12% ranked 26th) and Fostering, adoption and children in care (11%, ranked 26th).”

So what conclusion can they draw from that. Are these essential services for the most vulnerable to be dropped because 599 people didn’t rank them highly enough. I have an acronim for this type of meaningless question. SFW (So F****ng What).

Interestingly, when they asked people about areas where the council could save money the top answer was Review salary and expenses packages for 'top' and senior council Employees closely followed at joint third place by Review remuneration and expenses of councillors.

They also held what they call a deliberative event where 74 people from the Citizens Panel were invited to ‘deliberate’.

And at the end of it all, what conclusions did this extensive and probably very expensive consultation exercise. Ain’t got a clue and how on earth this can inform the decision making process I simply do not know.

Perhaps the council should stop messing about with these pointless, crass and utterly inconclusive consultations and just start engaging with the community. Try listening to people at residents forums – where we were forbidden from discussing the budget consultation and stop wasting our money.

Suffolk on mass outsourcing - "it simply didn't work"

On the BBC today is an interview with the leader of Suffolk County Council. His view on large scale outsourcing was unequivocal. "It simply didn't work". He also made the point that "In trying to do this (outsourcing) so quickly we simply weren't taking the communities along with us".

Now it just so happens that one of the architects of the Suffolk strategy, Max Wilde, was also influential in setting up the One Barnet programme.

Barnet Council, wake up and smell the coffee! Stop trying to peddle this discredited One Barnet strategy, stop wasting millions on consultants and start running the council more effectively.

The cost of going cashless

In the latest Delegated Powers Report we see that RM Counrtyside Services have been appointed to take out all the 408 current pay and display machines. In addition, they will put in some regular time plate posts to replace the existing low posts. And the cost of this work? £80,244. Now what is interesting is that the council invited three companies to bid but "once the specifications were confirmed and the programmed timetable provided, two of the tenderers withdrew". Given the all the critisism of the Council's procurement performance I would have thought that they would have gone back out to tender. Oh no just award it to RM Countryside - they are "a known and trusted contractor that has worked with L B Barnet
for some time providing consistently high quality work". Are Barnet residents happy that at a time of cuts in essential services, £80,000 is spent to get rid of something many residents actually want? Only in Barnet!

£300,000 wasted in Barnet

Last year plans for the redevelopment of Brunswick Park Hub were hastily put forward. They were rather glossy plans and even included a new swimming pool to replace the ageing and “not fit for purpose” Church Farm Pool. However, one key issue was that they wanted to build part of the scheme on Metropolitan Open Land. With objections from the Mayor of London and the short timescale for gaining permission led to the situation where the Council missed the funding window and the scheme was dropped. The redoubtable Barnet Bugle has investigated this at some length and has unearthed a great deal of information through Freedom of Information requests.

One thing I was still unclear about was how much this has cost Barnet Council taxpayers. I still don’t know the full extent of the costs but as part of my audit investigation I have unearthed a bill from Elevate Partnership for £299,269 who worked on the design of the scheme. So much money for absolutely no return.

As the Barnet Bugle has quite rightly reminded me, the real tragedy here is that the old facilities were closed to make way for the new scheme, and the local community is now worse off than they were before.

£1 million to leave Barnet Council

Reading through the un-audited accounts I have come across some pretty shocking news. In 2010/11 Barnet council paid out over £1 million in "compensation for loss of office". In other words, people paid to leave. The largest payment was to Mr Brian Reynolds, former Executive Director for Environment and Development. He was paid the handsome sum of £280,485 to leave. Others payments for compensation for loss of office include the former:

- Director of Environment and Transport £143,832
- Acting head of Health Integration (Irene Findlay) £106,685
- Assistant Director Inclusion £103,955
- Assistant Director Building Control & Structures £96,692
- Principle Inspector Challenge Intervention £95,661
- Director of Strategy £67,793
- Director of Corporate Services £58,923
- Assistant Director Shared Services £42,675
- Assistant Director Regeneration £20,511

These are huge sums of money being paid out yet the council has advertised for a new Head of Planning Environment & Regeneration on £140,000 a year. What on earth is going on!

Where oh where has Pledgebank gone?

Having spent rather a lot of money to build a beautiful Pledgebank website I thought I would take a look and see how it was doing. But where is this beautiful website? Not on the front page of the Council's website. So I enter Pledgebank into the search box. Up come lots of pages but none of them are Pledgebank. Wait, in the side bar of the Community and Living page is a link to Pledgebank. I click on it only to find it clicks through to the free, standard, UK Pledgebank website with Vicki Morris' pledge for the march on Sunday top of the successful pledges. I know I am trying to make this a bit humorous but actually it makes me rather cross. The Council has spent a lot of money building a bespoke Pledgebank website and then burying so deeply in the recesses of the councils main website that it is impossible to find. What a complete waste of money!