Slower than snail mail - Capita email

not served at Mustard Mansions

Back on 9 November 2012, Mr Mustard sent the dear "leader" Richard Cornelius an email which read as follows:

Dear Cllr Cornelius

Last night you said "NSL is generating savings now" (based on my manuscript notes but it will be on film)

You know how I like to armchair audit this sort of thing.
Please send me the figures which justify your claim. Please make sure this includes how much overtime has been paid to get them up to the expected level of PCN and the number of CEO (traffic wardens) now assigned to the contract as opposed to the number at contract start (number of posts not people in post) which I do believe has increased.

By the way, based upon what happens at PATAS ( the independent adjudicator ) the contract still isn't going very well.

On Tuesday 6th November the hearings went as follows, and every single parking ticket was cancelled:

1. Allowed by Order of Adjudicator (this usually means no evidence filed by Barnet council)

2. TMO wrong.
3. No copy PCN filed.
4. Council failed to deal properly with correspondence.
5. By Order.
6. By Order.
7. Inadequate evidence from council.
8. By Order.
9. By Order
NSL are still not covering you in glory. Imagine this sort of mess in month 7 on DRS and NCSCO. Don't say later that I didn't warn you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Now Mr Mustard is sure that Richard received the email as they discussed it briefly when Richard was also in the public gallery at a committee meeting last week. Quite amusingly Richard told Mr Mustard that the answer was 50% done and then it turned out that Mr Mustard and Richard were talking about different emails as the Cornelius inbox is a place of repose for difficult questions and most of Mr mustard's have a holiday there, some of them on a  one way ticket. So here we are coming up to 6 weeks old and the email has not been responded to.

As you will know Barnet & Harrow "share" a legal department. It is generally seen as more of a takeover by Harrow, the top banana being a Harrow employee and the service being located in Harrow. How Harrow must be hating this deal. Barnet get themselves into more fights than a fairground boxer what with two judicial reviews and a Friern Barnet library possession hearing having come out of the woodwork in the last month alone, and there will be more to come. If Barnet followed more popular policies, ones they had carefully consulted the public about before implementation then they might find less resistance to their plans. They will have to learn the hard way.

Back to email, it seems that Harrow's email service is part of the IT service which is managed by Crapita (you knew Mr Mustard would get to the point in the end) and thanks to the iHarrow blog we can see that earlier in the year it had problems which they wrote of as a disaster which it is nowadays if your email is out for even an hour, it is like the end of the world has arrived (oh that is tomorrow I understand). It seems from what iHarrow have to say, and their links to other published accounts, that chaos follows Capita when it comes to computers.

Whilst on the subject of email not getting through I do hope that someone in FOI at Barnet Council is reading this email. Do you remember FOI that you were sending emailed responses to Mr Mustard and that they were not getting though to the dd........@cr.......co.uk address for some technical reason that only icasework could tell you. Well a few months have gone by and you are still sending replies to mrmustard@zoho.com from where they are auto-forwarded to the address Mr Mustard would prefer them at, his real person address. Have you sorted this out yet please? If so, do please let Mr Mustard know.

You haven't forgotten Mr Mustard have you? Oh no, as you have decided that 20+ of his FOI requests are vexatious. Let's see if the ICO agrees shall we?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard