One Barnet parking contract - less for more

Mr Mustard's twitter followers asked why NSL managed to issue so many more PCN than Barnet Council and then collect a lower amount of money.

To save you going back to the previous blog (you easily can by clicking on older post at the bottom) the number of PCN went up by 30,000 in the year that NSL took over (they were in charge of issuing and processing for 11 months of that year) and the sum recovered from motorists for PCN fell by £1.4 million - that is a spectacular result by any measure - spectacularly bad unfortunately. Mr Mustard seems to recall the council "Leader" Richard Cornelius telling the audience at the BAPS Question Time event how well this contract was working; you didn't have a clue did you Richard? you were simply bluffing. The contract with NSL was intended to save £600,000 a year.

Mr Mustard does accept that costs are down by more than the drop in income but he doesn't have an analysis of why that is so (he might have to make his first FOI request for many a month) and thinks that it is because there are a number of one-off events such as the movement of £167,000 out of the parking budget into the customer services budget. We must compare apples with apples, or more likely lemons with lemons in this case. Costs were only targeted to reduce by £600,000 so a drop of £1.9m must have some other explanation.

So possible reasons for the dismal performance by NSL are (and these are simply the as informed as possible views of Mr Mustard, if NSL want to write in and explain Mr Mustard will publish what they have to say)

When traffic wardens were employed by the council they were paid about £10 an hour. New ones taken on by NSL to fill existing and new vacancies are only paid £8.20 an hour. Applicants are likely to be of lower quality.

Traffic wardens were being sent out on the beat before they had sat their NVQ in parking tickets which would be a breach of contract by NSL that was probably swept under the carpet by Barnet Council; at least until Mr Mustard asked a direct question about the start dates and exam pass dates of traffic wardens. It is only a level 2 NVQ which isn't exactly difficult to obtain. You might think that NVQ stands for National Vocational Qualification but others know it as Not Very Qualified.

Traffic wardens are issuing more marginal parking tickets which motorists are more likely to contest. People have an inbuilt sense of fairness and won't pay if they have been unfairly treated. Marginal tickets include for being 2cm across a dropped kerb, having half a wheel on a bay line, overstaying for 1 minute, being ticketed whilst in the process of paying by phone and being stood next to the traffic warden and telling that what you are doing. 

Parking tickets were also being issued when you, or a visitor, parked across your own dropped kerb (which only serves your property) and which should only be enforced if you ring up saying there is a problem. 

Parking tickets have been issued for scratching out vouchers with a pen instead of a coin. Ridiculous as the voucher has been rendered unusable a second time.

When NSL took over the existing back office team of local people who answered your letters and emails about parking tickets were all made redundant (a handful scrabbled to find new posts elsewhere within the council) and the whole operation was moved to Croydon. Posts that were previously worth £25k were suddenly only worth £18k. The quality of staff employed by NSL must be lower than those previously employed by Barnet Council directly.

Some of these new Notice Processing Officers (NPO) simply don't know enough about parking law and get corrected by the independent adjudicator at PATAS who is legally qualified. These NPO keep writing, for example, that you should go on the internet before you set off on a journey to see if Saracens are playing. The Adjudicator keeps giving that comment a drubbing.

The back office is in Croydon so there is no local knowledge or affinity with the residents.

The back office team should have been increased in size by 20% to reflect the increased volume of parking tickets which will have led to an increased volume of appeals. It probably hasn't been increased in size. In fact, as NSL are paid a fixed price per month they have probably tried to slim down the team. You can see the temptation to do that. 

Some of the extra PCN were due to the Saracens Zone which has added from 200 to 500 parking tickets on each match day (up to 16 a year). This has led to new arguments because the zone wasn't advertised well enough, because the zone is far too large and because people miss the zone entry signs and then have no idea if it is an Event Day or not.

The back office team weren't familiar with the back office software used by the council and which NSL are still using (new software is being purchased later this year; that will lead to a few new cock-ups). This meant that some parking tickets weren't chased at all and others were wrongly chased and had to be cancelled.

NSL were meant to have had bailiffs ready to roll on 1 May 12 but they didn't get them appointed until April 13. How incompetent can you get? The delay also meant that the parking tickets sent to bailiffs were harder to collect as many more of the cars would have been sold on or scrapped and so couldn't be seized.

Finally, the whole structure of parking enforcement is not designed to enable good communications and team working.

Traffic Management Orders, permits, sign installation and the organisation of line painting are all managed by the council out of North London Business Park or the Mill Hill depot.

Traffic wardens work out of Solar House in North Finchley (which incidentally will be why there are so many traffic wardens in the town centre there. Mr Mustard saw one at 8.10 and two more at 8.20 whilst eating his poached eggs on toast at Cafe Buzz and co-incidentally reading emails from the parking manager about the Lodge Lane Car Park Meter)

Documents are scanned in Worthing.

Challenges to parking tickets are dealt with in Croydon.

Not quite sure where bulk document printing takes place but it could be somewhere else again.

How can the poor client side parking manager ensures everyone works as a team when they are in so many different places? He can't, as we see.

This experience has a parallel in the Capita contract for collecting Council Tax. If their collection performance is inferior to that of the previous council team the drop in income could obliterate any cost saving.

If Mr Mustard had his way he would bring parking back in house. Mainly because it is a front line service that the council is measured by and it always upsets people which causes reputational damage to the council and secondly because it would be twice as easy to manage if it were in one place. The money doesn't matter. It will always make a profit which shouldn't be used to artificially subsidise Council Tax. The surplus made from parking tickets should be used for special one off projects which otherwise wouldn't happen and should be spent in the following year so that there isn't pressure to make a certain amount. The surplus should be spent on things that make Barnet a better place to live.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mr Mustard tenders his apologies to the council client side parking team who have probably now got senior management and/or the "leader" or Cllr Dean Cohen breathing down their necks wanting instant results which just isn't possible when each PCN is only 0.0000606% of the problem. This mess is not of your creation; it is the fault of the Cabinet Resources Committee for voting it through.

Where did the NSL contract savings go to?

Parking contract savings - as safe as houses?

Calculator and cup of tea at the ready? then armchair audit time it is.

Back on 23 September Mr Mustard attended the Cabinet Resources Committee. It was receiving a report from Finance about the financial performance for the first quarter of the council tax year i.e. for April to June 13. For the first time in Mr Mustard's short but eventful life (since 10 March 2011 - ha, he is in his terrible twos phase) there was an overspend, of £2,384,000 (to nearest £thousand) and the biggest culprit was "Streetscene" (hard to tell exactly from the name what that encompasses but it will become clearer later) which was £2,163,000 overspent on a budget of £15,212,000 a spectacularly awful result which is 14% over budget.

Now Mr Mustard hastens to add that these were the projected outturns for the end of the year so there was still 9 months remaining in which to get back on track (or go further off the rails!) but clawing 14% back, or 7 weeks of expenses to put it another way, looks like a mighty ask.

The way in which the figures were presented was insufficiently precise at the Directorate level for Mr Mustard and this is how the streetscene budget problem was presented in the written report:

The Street Scene Directorate is forecasting an overspend of £2.163m which includes:
•   An overspend of £1.081m in  the Special  Parking  Account. This  is  due to cost pressure on the NSL contract of £0.800m plus shortfalls in income of £0.378m.
•  The Parking service is forecasting an overspend of £0.434m, due to shortfalls in off street parking. (this is a different overspend to the one above)
•  An overspend of £0.380m in the Waste service is a result of domestic refuse staff cost pressures, however it is anticipated that the May Gurney contract negotiation should bring this back in line.
•  An overspend of £0.170m in  Street Lighting  is  as a result  of budgeted savings that will now not be achieved during the year.
•  A Highway Maintenance overspend of £0.246m is a result of winter maintenance pressures.

That was all far to vague for Mr Mustard (who had failed to notice Appendix 2 where the answer to his question was to be found) so he asked for a breakdown of the £2.163m and he was helpfully sent a copy of the table although he could have been pointed at it. Here it is:

Description	Budget V1	Q1 forecast	Variation
	£'000	£'000	£'000
Street Scene Management Team	647	631	-16
Business Improvement	333	332	-1
Mortuary	136	134	-2
Street Lighting	6,339	6,509	170
Transport	-6	-131	-125
Highways Inspection/Maintenance	508	754	246
Parking	-747	-313	434
Parks, Street Cleaning & Grounds Maintenance	5,052	5,084	32
Street Cleansing	4,236	4,240	4
Waste	2,911	3,291	380
Recycling	3,278	3,238	-40
Streetscene	22,687	23,769	1,082
Special Parking Account	-7,475	-6,394	1,081
Total	15,212	17,375	2,163

Variations in red are underspends so no need to worry about those.

The street lighting overspend is last year's budget failure carried forward. Surely we can just buy fewer lamp posts? It's not as if anything appears to be wrong with the ones that are being taken out.

There is winter pressure on highways maintenance. Mr Mustard seems to think that much greater sums have been spent in previous years and this lack of spend will shortly show up as potholes.

Parking refers to the anticipated spend in off street car parks. Mr Mustard thinks that this would magically come back to what it was if the system and charges are put back to what they were when he started blogging i.e. install cash parking meters (and card) and make prices those of 2010 or lower until there is 90% occupancy of car parks most of the time.

The waste overspend of £380k is expected to be salvaged from changing to in-house and away from May Gurney (except that they are going to continue to run the Summers Lane recycling depot - shiny new signs everywhere and a most useful facility). When the dust settles, we'll see.

So everything except for on-street parking, permits and PCNs is £1,082,000 behind budget and the Special Parking Account (on-street parking, permits and PCNs) is very nearly the same at £1,081,000 behind budget. The annual increase in the SPA budget was always going to be hard to maintain and Mr Mustard has told the relevant councillors to wean themselves off this income stream which just shouldn't be there. So instead of ripping almost £7.5m out of the pockets of the motorist (the majority of whom are also residents) a mere £6.4m will be filched instead; both surpluses are obscene.

The SPA budget problem was explained as "Cost pressure on NSL contract plus shortfall on income". The shortfall is easily fixed with cash parking meters but the NSL overspend had Mr Mustard foxed as it is a fixed price contract. So he asked for a breakdown, the one that should have supplied to councillors in the report (which to be fair Cllr Alan Schneiderman did pick up on in the pre-scrutiny meeting) and here it is:

Reason	£,000
Vacant Managers Post	-41
Agency Costs (parking manager back fill) and Pension strain	107
Signs and Lines	100
NSL Parking deployed Hours and bit payments.	821
Software license and support	-7
On street parking/parking suspension fees/Parking permits	378
DLO charges for suspensions	143
Reduced SLA with Parking Design team	-421
Total	1,080

So we have had an interim parking manager since the NSL contract started on 1 May 12. Why? is the startlingly obvious question. Why we employ someone who has to travel miles when there must be perfectly good candidates available locally is hard to fathom. Has the council even advertised or is it that the reputation of parking at Barnet is so bad (as has been reported to Mr Mustard by another council parking department less than 20 miles away) that there are no takers? It's not as if parking is a temporary thing, there will be a need for a parking manager into the next decade at least. Anyway that is £66,000 to the bad.

Nice to see real money being spent on signs and lines. Only another £900,000 needed.

We'll come to the £821,000 in a minute in yet another table.

Is it any wonder that the income from on-street parking and permits is down. Prices were increased markedly and that caused behavioural changes and suppressed the income. Making it harder to pay also had an effect; cash is universal and the meter removal policy has hit the council hard. Permit income will slowly recover now that they are £40 again.

Then we have the usual inter department budgeting which seems to be such a waste of time, moving money from the left pocket to the right. An extra £143,000 paid to the DLO (Direct Labour Organisation) for suspensions. How many suspensions are going on and what does one suspension cost? This figure seems high.

Now Mr Mustard was concerned about cost pressures of £800,000 on the NSL Ltd parking enforcement contract, you know the one which was advertised as saving us £600,000 and here is a screen print from the council's website which is looking rather out of date

Then Mr Mustard asked for a breakdown of the figure of £821,000 as he likes everything to be clear. Here it is.

	£’000	£’000
2012.13 budget (NSL Contract)		3,020
Savings 13.14		-349
13.14 budget		2,671
13.14 Spend
Deployed hours	541
BIT Payments (Contract management KPIs)	291
Basic Contract Payment	2,635
NSL Non-Scheduled Items	25
13.14 projection		3,492
Difference		821

Now the standard monthly payment to NSL this year is £212,755.64 giving a base annual payment of £2,553,067 and on top of this about £25,000 a month (yes, a month) is paid through NSL to Verrus for the largely unloved PayByPhone system giving another £300,000 per year (2012/13 payments came to £290,559). This seems an extraordinary amount for processing payments willingly made of £2,945,682 from Pay & Display (as it was quaintly described in the SPA) and another £300,000 or so of car park income. A fee equivalent to 9% just for holding your hand out and taking money seems like remarkably poor value.

So last year £3,020,000 was budgeted for NSL and base fees & charges amounted to £2,843,626 and the rest was swallowed up an extra hours payment of £104,000 and by one-off transition costs such as redundancy payments. In version 2.5 of the Business Plan, which went through a dozen iterations, are the projected annual costs of parking enforcement for the 5 year term, viz:

Projected costs of Options	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15	2015/16	2016/17	Total
	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s
NSL – Cost of Contract	3,246	3,220	3,328	3,328	3,328	16,451

which leaves no scope for a saving of £349,000 in this financial year 2013/14 and ignores inflation. Mr Mustard asked under Freedom of Information legislation for the NSL contract and he did receive most of it although the financial information was, of course, redacted. Thus Mr Mustard can't tie the actual payments to the budgeted figures but a budget of £2,671,000 against an annual payment of £2,850,000 is utterly unrealistic.

What the budget also shows is that there is no budget for the KPI (Key performance indicator) performance payments which might amount to another £291,000 in 2013/14 except they can't as the performance was stuck at minus 6 at the start of the year so it should be 6 months before a KPI payment is due assuming performance improves every single month. Mr Mustard will be checking the actual KPI measurements at the year end.

Now the really shocking figure is the one of £541,000 for deployed hours which should have said "extra deployed hours". Now why are the council trying to save £600,000 p.a. and then negate 90% of the proposed savings by  spending on extra enforcement hours.

Now call Mr Mustard suspicious if you like but an extra £541,000 spent on enforcement is likely to lead to a net PCN income of at least £1million. That wouldn't be the motivation, would it?

We know that the contract was failing all the way through 2012/13 and so the solution looks like rather than termination is to throw money at the contract to make it work in 2013/14 and it is one of the few contracts that the council enters which works this way,i.e. the more you spend the more you gain, always assuming that all the extra marginal parking tickets don't just lead to extra appeals to PATAS.

One final point is that NSL are entitled to 50% of the savings they generate on the contract. No "options proposals" were suggested in the first year of the contract. The 50% saving is meant to encourage and reward innovation. 

There hasn't been any.

This is an early One Barnet contract. It hasn't made the anticipated savings. Let's hope that NSCSO and DRS are better (don't hold your breath).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Sat 17 Nov at 4pm - Friern Barnet library extra meeting

Extraordinary meeting

A guest blog on behalf of the Friern Barnet Community Library. Email them on this link.

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We are calling an extraordinary meeting to discuss extraordinary events tomorrow Saturday, 17th November 2012 at 4pm in the library.

Barnet Council are meeting about the decision to market Friern Barnet Library - Cabinet Resources Committee on 17th Dec which is the day before court case. Members of the public are BARRED – see this link:

If you can’t attend the meeting then either attend the ward surgeries or phone or email councillors to object to any decisions being made before the court hearing. If you phone, make sure it is at a reasonable hour and that you are polite.

If you live in East Barnet Ward you can attend the surgery tomorrow of Cllr. Rams.

If you want to lobby outside the meeting at 11.30am - then let us know.

If you live in Totteridge Ward you can attend the surgery of Cllr. Cornelius.

The emails and tel nos from the council website:

cllr.r.rams@barnet.gov.uk - Phone: 020 8446 7291

Surgery Details 10.30am -

12.00 noon on 1st Saturday of each month at New Barnet Community Centre, 48-50 Victoria Road, New Barnet EN4 9PF.

10.30am - 12.00 noon on 3rd Saturday of each month at East Barnet Library, 85 Brookhill Road, East Barnet EN4 8SG. (Next meeting TOMORROW 17th Nov)

cllr.d.thomas@barnet.gov.uk Bus. phone: 07944 038 591

Surgery : First Wednesday of each month, 7.00-8.00pm. Avenue House, East End Road, Finchley N3.

cllr.r.cornelius@barnet.gov.uk Bus. phone: 020 8359 2059

Surgery : Third Saturday of the month 10.30am-12noon. Barnet House, 1255 High Road, N20. (Next meeting TOMORROW 17th Nov)

cllr.t.davey@barnet.gov.uk No phone number

1st Thursday of each month 6pm-7.30pm.

Alternating between:

Edgware Library, Station Road, Edgware HA8 and

Mill Hill Library, Hartley Avenue, Mill Hill NW7.

Call 020 8958 3364 to confirm location of next surgery.

cllr.a.harper@barnet.gov.uk 020 8201 9527

No Surgery details listed

cllr.s.rajput@barnet.gov.uk Phone: 020 8449 3610

Surgery Details - Third Saturday of the month 10.30am-12noon.

Barnet House, 1255 High Road, N20.

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These councillors are listed above as they are the members of the Cabinet Resources Committee.

Polite but firm is the approach to take. They represent you (supposedly).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

After the dress rehearsal

Mr Mustard always wondered how the Cabinet Resources Committee could get through its business so fast. It might have been that every councillor did their homework in advance of the meeting and cleared up any questions beforehand but last night one councillor ( name not noted ) when presenting their agenda item said "if councillors have read the report" which rather implies that he doesn't think other councillors read the reports and he doesn't read them all either. That particular cat won't now be able to go back into the bag.

aah

It could be that councillors can speed read but 71 pages of public report and 106 pages of exempt documents ( notice that more is exempt than public ) in 17 minutes is pushing it even for the most gifted councillor ( you will have to decide who that is for yourself ).

Mr Mustard usually stops and looks at the rather expensive flat panel screen which announces the meetings so that he knows which room to go to. There, as bold as brass, were two meetings of the Cabinet Resources Committee. One at 6.30pm which the public certainly wouldn't have been allowed into, the dress rehearsal, and then the public meeting at 7pm.

Not members of the Cabinet Resources Committee apparently

 Picture copyright : Bike Portland

So having a meeting at 6.30 is the reason why the agenda business can be got through at the gallop. You can look through the agenda in the box below.

Barnet Council 7 November 2011 Cabinet Resources Committee

So here is the timing of the meeting.

7.00pm - Start, items 1-4 rattled off. Cllr Coleman absent.

7.00 Item 5 - Dollis Valley. Building might start in the next 18 months to 10 years.

7.04 Dollis Valley item agreed.

7.04 Item 6. Stonegrove & Spur Rd Estates. Let's compulsorily purchase more land to snuff out any claims in advance.

7.05 Stonegrove item agreed.

7.05 Item 7. Former Child Guidance Centre. It is surplus to requirements. The line that says "As the site falls within a flood plain it is expected that offers will come mainly from community organisations" is to be reworded.

7.06 Child Guidance Centre sale agreed.

7.06 Item 8. Catalyst Care Home Contract Renegotiation. A rather excessive 4 minutes spent on these 8 pages.

7.10 Catalysts item agreed.

7.10 Item 9. Short breaks for disabled children, young people and their families. Some stress on the fact that this is a statutory requirement and that government chips in towards the cost ( Mr Mustard fears these would otherwise be cut).

7.12 Short breaks item agreed.

7.12 Item 10 Adult & Children's Service Contracts. Neither Councillor Rajput nor Harper wanted to talk about this item and so it fell to Val White, an Assistant Director in the Children's Service, to speak for 5 minutes. Mr Mustard wonders if the ducking of this opportunity to hear the lovely sound of one's own voice was because this report was an outcome of the MetPro failure of procurement and this report contained hundreds of Contracts which needed  "Regularisation" ( Mr Mustard thinks that means they needed to be put right in some way ). If you go back to the box above there is page after page of contracts which need correcting in some way.

If everything had been perfect the councillors would doubtless have been happy to go 10 rounds to get the right to present the report.

7.17 Item 10 agreed. The public then went home.

Open, transparent, a democracy. No, this is Barnet.

http://www.sexworkersproject.org/publications/reports/behind-closed-doors/

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard