20 July 2011

OneBarnet - all talk & no trousers.

Mr Mustard expects that you would like to see what presentations are being made by Barnet Council Officers to the world at large.

There is one here on the website of the Association of London Environmental Health Managers. Do you suppose other Councils learn from Barnet what to do or what not to do ?


Rick Mason ( Assistant Director, Housing & Environmental Health - nice to see what work someone on £104,673 p.a. can produce ) produced this on 7 May 2011 and it was published online on 1 June.

You can read the slides yourself. Mr Mustard will just pick out a few points.

"All the risks of not doing this" are just a theoretical list of possible failures that no well-managed sensible Council would allow to occur. They do not justify OneBarnet.

OneBarnet projected savings. Year 9 - £102m ( in total ).
The Council spends £900m a year. In 9 years it will spend £8,100 million.
A saving of £102m as a percentage of £8,100m is just 1.26%
that is hardly the most radical programme of savings you have ever heard of is it ?
and all this fuss about OneBarnet being the best thing since sliced bread.

The Barnet Bloggers, given access to the complete books of the Council, could save that without the expense of a single consultant as the following paragraph demonstrates.

There was a case of overcharging that Mr Reasonable found recently. Paying £17 per hour for something worth £9 odd. Be generous and just call it a 70% overcharge. Looking the other way, percentages are funny things, the charge for security ( yes, MetPro again ) has now been reduced by 7/17*100 = 41%

Interestingly, and typically sloppily, Cllr Rams on his blog ( which Mr Mustard will not give you a link to as it is not to his taste ) wrote that:
The council has already begun a major transformation programme – One Barnet – to radically change the way we deliver services and save £100m over the next ten years
So that is a slippage of a year already built into the programme.

The bidder invests £1m in his bid. Where does he get that back from ? Why us of course.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard
at

7 comments:

  1. Mrs Angry20 July 2011 at 17:24

    hmm. I would have used the phrase all fur coat and no knickers: but then you mmight expect that, mightn't you, Mr Mustard?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mr Mustard20 July 2011 at 17:30

    That is a more appealing prospect Mrs A. Mind how you sit down at the next public Council meeting you go to.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous20 July 2011 at 22:20

    I think your sums are wrong Mr. Mustard. Shouldn't it be as a percentage of £810 million rather than £8,100 million? Making it a more reasonable saving of around 10%?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mrs Angry20 July 2011 at 23:27

    I never wear fur, Mr Mustard.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mr Mustard20 July 2011 at 23:49

    Sadly not Beestrust. The Council are looking to save a total of £102 million over 9 years which means about £11m each year ( although they do not have the Insight to see that far ahead ) and 11/901 as a percentage is 1.26%

    Numbers are treacherous but accurate in this case

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous21 July 2011 at 07:54

    I see, its. £8,100 over the course of 9 years. Didn't the budget ideas website report the councils budgets at circa £850 million? So its got up by £50 million to £900 after all the redundancies?

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  7. Mr Mustard21 July 2011 at 08:27

    What an amazing memory you have Beestrust. I went to the cached version of the Ideas website as the live one has gone & there is a budget infographic which totals £846m & must just have been a mock-up as the circles are in different places and Barnet's requirements in 2009/10 were £915m.
    Search for Barnet Ideas in google and then choose cached and compare to
    Budget in pretty circles 2010/11

    Now you know why Mrs Angry calls the Chief Finance Officer Mr Travers "Black Hole".

    ReplyDelete

I now moderate comments in the light of the Delfi case. Due to the current high incidence of spam I have had to turn word verification on.