One Barnet goes forwards : Barnet Council goes backwards

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London Borough of Barnet Labour Group

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Tuesday 13 December 2011

Council’s value for money takes a nose dive

Value for money performance of council services has nose dived according to new figures released by Barnet council in advance of Wednesday’s Cabinet Resources meeting. The Quarter 2 Monitoring report shows that the percentage of services rated as having high performance/low spend has reduced from 83.3% in the first quarter of this year to 67% in the second quarter.

The same report shows that over half of the performance targets were missed by the council in the 2^nd quarter, and over a quarter of the performance measures did worse than in the 1^st quarter.

The data shows that:

The council still cannot answer the phone within 5 rings:  

% of telephone calls answered within 5 rings / 20 seconds – target 75%, but only 55.8% of calls were answered within 5 rings

The council still cannot respond to residents’ emails on time:  

% of customers’ emails responded to within 10 days with resolution or information on progress – target 85%, but only 63.1% of emails were responded to within the prescribed time

 

The council still cannot comply with Freedom of Information request deadlines:
% improvement in response times to freedom of information requests to within 20 working days – target 90%, but only 76.3% achieved
 

More young people are now not in education, employment or training:
% proportion of young people who are not in education, employment or training – target 4.3%, but the outturn was 4.5% - higher than in the 1^st quarter
 

The council still isn’t doing enough to increase the amount of household waste sent for re-cycling – target 36.7% - only 35.7% achieved which is worse than the previous outturn

Labour’s Resources spokesperson, Cllr Alan Schneiderman said:

"The council is busy spending millions of pounds on consultants ( see Mr Mustard's recent blog about Agilisys )  to try and improve council services, but it doesn’t seem to be having much effect according to these figures.

Many residents are feeling that services under easyCouncil do not provide them with value for money either – the Tories are just hiking up fees and parking charges, but the services don’t get any better!”

Notes:

1. For details of the Q2 performance figures see: http://www.barnet.gov.uk/quarter_2_cpis_-_web_version.pdf
2. For a copy of the Q2 monitoring report for this week’s Cabinet Resources committee see: http://committeepapers.barnet.gov.uk/democracy/reports/reportdetail.asp?ReportID=10862