Jobs to leave Barnet

One Barnet Pre-Scrutiny BPOSC 29 Nov 2012 - Part 2 from The Barnet Bugle Ltd on Vimeo.

Barnet UNISON Press Release: 5 December 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: EasyCouncil political dogma drives out hundreds of jobs out of London

On Thursday 6 December Barnet Cabinet Committee will decide on whether to outsource approximately 540 Barnet Council jobs to multinational company Capita.

The Committee will be voting to export local jobs to Banstead, Belfast, Blackburn, Bromley, Carlisle, Darwen, Sheffield, Swindon, Southampton.

UNISON has raised serious concerns about the economic implications about losing local jobs and the knock on impact on local residents and small businesses.

UNISON is also concerned about the deliverability of the financial savings and the implications for council tax and other services.

UNISON has published numerous examples of how these ‘too good to be true’ deals often fail to deliver.

The Council claims to have learnt lessons of other Councils however the reality is very different.

At a recent Scrutiny Committee, literally days before the decision to recommend Capita was announced, two Conservative Councillors on the Committee said:

“When the visits were carried out who went on them and what did they learn from them? None of that is contained in here, six pages is desk top research. What members here are looking for are, what have you learnt from meeting up with councils face to face?

Another said

“In fairness all we have here is a list of visits it doesn’t say whether they were for one hour, one day, one week, it doesn’t say when they were there, it doesn’t say what benefit we got from them, it doesn’t say who went, how detailed whether it was one person or a team, it’s so sketchy its absolutely useless I’m afraid”

John Burgess, Branch Secretary said: “The Cabinet Committee are going to rubberstamp this decision which UNISON believe is a bad deal for tax payers of Barnet. The Council is gambling on a high risk strategy which has not worked elsewhere. Other Councils are bringing services back in-house in order to have more control over their spend. In the last month we have learnt from figures published via the Councils website that in total, the bill for One Barnet Advice in October alone was £1,099,413.22 or £47,800 every single working day. This is political dogma gone mad.”