Who runs Barnet Council?
A question for Barnet leader Richard Cornelius from the Barnet bloggers.
Dear Councillor Cornelius
We wrote to you last week in regard to the announcement by
Pam Wharfe, Barnet Council’s ‘interim’ Director of Environment, Planning and
Regeneration, that a decision has been made to abandon the One Barnet Strategic
Partnership proposals for the outsourcing of £275 million worth of our local
services in favour of a ‘Joint Venture’.
You have since contradicted her statement,
saying:
“No decision has been made. No case for a jv
has been made beyond the suggestion that there might be such as case. The
decisions will be made by elected members in due course.”
In a subsequent message to staff Ms Wharfe has informed
staff that:
“...the project Board recommended to Corporate Directors Group that this be formally advanced in discussion with bidders and indeed is currently our preferred option.”
Neither the DRS project board nor the Corporate Directors
Group includes any elected members of the council. Membership of the DRS project
board, we understand, is restricted to a small number of senior council officers
and two consultants from Agilisys/iMPOWER, the company working as
‘implementation partner’ to One Barnet, at an average cost to local tax payers
of £250,000 per month.
It would appear that Barnet Council is preparing to commit
the financial security of this borough to a new model of outsourcing – one that
its own consultants’ advice identified as more risky and costly than the one
originally chosen, and that this decision has been made by senior officers
before any consideration or approval by the elected members of the
council.
Ms Wharfe’s own comments about the new Joint Venture seem
to suggest that senior management are not at all concerned by the increased risk
of failure that this new commitment will entail, or the increased
responsibilities for the authority that this option would involve, as a result
of guaranteeing more favourable terms for the successful bidder at the
conclusion of the dialogue process.
As residents, however, we are concerned: and we believe
that you should be too.
We would ask you and your colleagues to consider the real
possibility that in the event of the new Joint Venture failing, the council will
still be left with the duty to provide the affected services, whilst the
successful bidder may simply walk away with no obligation.
We believe that councillors have clearly not been fully
informed as to the details of the Joint Venture, and that the scale of risk that
the One Barnet programme presents is simply not fully understood by members. It
seems that the need for members to be fully informed of developments and
involved in the formation of policy at all stages of the dialogue process has
been deliberately overlooked.
Perhaps as well as a decision to pursue a new model of
outsourcing, the council is committing itself to a new form of local government,
in which the democratic process is set aside for a bureaucratic dictatorship,
entirely controlled by the senior management team.
If Barnet is indeed determined to bypass the democratic
process, and to give the role of policy and decision making to senior officers,
rather than to the political leadership of the Conservative group and the
Cabinet, we would suggest this makes the role of the elected members completely
redundant, although of course it may well offer a new opportunity for cost
cutting exercises in the withdrawal of members’ allowances.
Failing that, may we ask you to assert your authority as
leader of the council, recognise that the outsourcing programme has been totally
discredited, and instruct your own officers to follow a course of action which
is the result of proper consultation and policy formation rather than one shaped
by the motivations of their own agenda.
Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne
A personal footnote by Mr Mustard:
When reviewing the agreed draft of their communiqué Mr Mustard noted that the bloggers were using the phrase "Corporate Directors Group" as used by Pam Wharfe. The word corporate suddenly spoke volumes to him. Indeed the Directors are aiming to have the most corporate council in history with their ambition to be a commissioning council and pass the maximum amount of services out to the private sector to be run for profit (Mr Mustard is a company Director and will celebrate 25 years of trading next month so he must know something about profit himself).
The other thing was that he thought that it was called the Council Directors Group (there can't be two damn groups of Directors sitting around doing blue sky thinking can there?) and this is supported by the council's shiny new rusty website, here,and if you search on google for "Barnet Council Directors Group" you find Craig Cooper the unCommercial Director using the term. Needless to say the website page about One Barnet is itself already out of date (this website really was a waste of £700,000) and doesn't yet mention the JV. Or is it up to date because it isn't going to happen. Who knows?
Mr Mustard
If you remember, Mr Mustard, what was once 'Democratic Services', although it was neither democratic nor a service, became 'corporate governance', which neatly reminds tax payers and electors that the senior management team is here to serve its own ends, and not the residents of Barnet, and indeed that their loyalties, if not their abilities, aspire to the ethos of the market.
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