Get into bed with the wrong partner and contract VD.

Oh dear me Cllr Robert Rams, you can't go around taking a pop at Mr Reasonable and not expect a reaction from the Barnet blogosphere.

This blog post is especially for you. This is what you said in your blog:

Other services will be outsourced and some will be merged with other boroughs – all to make the services better, cheaper and keep council tax down

The most recently ( 1 May 2012 ) out-sourced service under One Barnet is Parking Enforcement. One of the contract elements is to provide paperwork to the ultimate stage of the appeal process, to PATAS - the Parking and Traffic Appeals service. If you look at the parking & traffic appeal statistics 2010-11 here then you can see that of 1028 Barnet appeals in that year some 499 were decided in favour of the motorist which is very nearly half of them (49% in fact)

So let us look now at the PATAS appeal statistics since 2 May. My friend, Miss Feezance is keeping an eye on the cases for me and you can find her blog here. There are notes from the parking adjudicator on many of them which highlight the lack of paperwork from Barnet even on a couple of occasions after asking for adjournments.

Overall since 2 May the position is as follows in this table:

Week	Motorist	Council
Starting	won	won
2 May	34	3
7 May	102	1
14 May	34	2
21 May	55	1
28 May	70	0
4 June	2	0
11 June	43	7
18 June	24	8
25 June	17	6
2 July	12	7
9 July	13	1
since NSL	406	36

So if 2012/13 followed the pattern of 2010/11 then the numbers that you would expect to see are 214 in favour of the motorist and 228 in favour of the council.

Therefore NSL and/or Barnet Council's lack of planning and/or incompetence during the handover period means that, so far (and there is no indication that the problem has yet been fixed) 192 appeals have been won which would ordinarily have been lost. So for breach of contract NSL should repay £98 per ticket and also the £46.73 that Barnet Council has to pay for each appeal listed at PATAS. Each failure costs £144.73 which, so far, times 192 = £27,788 which could have been spent on keeping Friern Barnet library open for a few months or would pay for the 5 parking meters that the council is about to buy. 

Mr Mustard is already on the case for information about payments to NSL since they took over. He expects the usual battle to get information (he has already booked 4 weeks holiday for next year June/July so that he can go more thoroughly through the Annual Accounts. Please take this blog post as notice in the Closing section that Mr Mustard will want to see every document relating to the parking account next year. Save yourself some time and start putting the file together now) as if Barnet Council parking management are partly to blame for NSL's he fully expects them to go into fortress mentality mode and try and pretend that nothing was there fault. The FOI request about payment to NSL for May 12 is already late in being answered. Mr Mustard is used to obstruction and will bulldoze his way to his target through anything put in his way.

So why has Barnet Council got VD? Well, they didn't choose very carefully who they got into bed with and now have a Veritable Disaster on their hands. All the clap-trap that gets talked about One Barnet has led them to contract corporate clap.

As outsourcing goes then Robert Rams this doesn't look like a better or cheaper service to me. Does it to you? Answers in an email with your apology to Mr Reasonable for doubting his judgment.

Here is a thought for you ruling councillors (especially cabinet members), once you catch corporate clap it is very hard to eradicate, it is (financially) painful and contagious, prospective partners who hear you have it will run a mile (are you thinking about your corporate image BT, Capita & EC Harris?).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

for those who ended up on this blog because they have a nasty rash, you need to follow this link instead.