Middling managers

Having seen details of a meeting between the Chief Executive of Barnet Council and Nic Beech of Middlesex University, Mr Mustard wondered what the different ways where that they were planning to collaborate on in their 'partnership' (a much misused word is 'partnership', partnerships normally requiring formal documents setting out the obligations and rights of each party or else they aren't worth the paper they aren't written on).

Mr Mustard followed up on his wonderment by asking Middlesex University to enlighten him under the Freedom of Information legislation, viz:

(Two titans if ever Mr Mustard saw them, yes, the statues of Atlas on the cupboard behind)

It took three weeks but the answer came:

Mr Mustard wasn't convinced as he didn't think that two such well paid managers would have, or should have, a meeting without writing down a single word on the back of an envelope at the very least, or a jot on a napkin, a telephone number on the back of their hand, even electronic notes in their phones but no nothing, they were only having an informal meet and greet and not discussing anything substantive like a partnership as the tweet claimed. Something stank here.

Mr Mustard pondered. He changed tack, he sent a carefully crafted and detailed Freedom of Information request to John Hooton of Barnet Council. This is it.

So there wasn't a formal agenda but a meeting arranged by email:

This was followed up by Laura Norton the Corporate Communications and Stakeholder Manager (Mr Mustard boggles at such an esoteric title) who was in the meeting despite it allegedly only being a meet and greet and thus not substantive. Mr Mustard notes that the University didn't mention her attendance at the meeting in their reply.

So far from a pally 'meet and greet' as the University alleged in their response, it was 'a useful discussion' and topics included 'Communications' and 'Diversity and Inclusion' (coyly not mentioned in the University's official FOI reply) and there were 'useful conversations'. This email should have been disclosed by the University as it came within the scope of Mr Mustard's request. Anyone would think they didn't want a local blogger to take any interest in what they are doing (which is now probably working out how they will survive in the post pandemic period).

John Hooton followed up quite quickly in his email of 13 February.

 In the cover letter from Barnet Council extra information was profferred:

There should be an apostrophe in Council's

Ooh gosh a meeting to explain that a Council provides local services and a University teaches students, it must have been fascinating.

It is an affront to democracy that the CEO has so many informal meetings with 'partner' organisations, notice should be given of them and agendas published and action points published. If that isn't done it is far too easy to conclude either that they are just so much hot air or that dirty back room deals are being done. Far more would be achieved with an agenda and in a shorter time period. The well known Dummies series of books has one which includes a section on managing meetings and it includes having an agenda and action points.

Who else thinks that the University's FOI response did not meet with the letter or spirit of the Act? If you ask them any questions make sure you know the answer before you do and then jerk on their chain hard if they are economic with the actuality.

A really surprising omission from the meeting is any discussion of the replacement West Stand at Saracens for which Middlesex University are the supposedly anchor tenant, vital to the economic success of the project. Wasn't the risk to public funds worth a single word?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

An extra £10,000 on books?

10,000 books not an extra £10,000 of book purchases

It is the season of goodwill and so Mr Mustard is going to give Cllr Robert Rams's blog a little extra publicity today. Robert likes to be in the public eye except that it is usually the eye of the storm he finds himself in.

Here are some of the words which Mr Mustard has cut-and-pasted from Robert's blog post of 7 June 2011:

As I said recently .............. the Library Review was never going to be universally popular. This is despite the extra £10,000 per year we will spend on books,................

Under our strategy, Friern Barnet library will move, and merge with the North Finchley library. All the services currently provided at the Friern Barnet site will be provided at the artsdepot. The library at the artsdepot will be one of our largest; it will be a landmark library that specialises in the arts. It will hold more stock, have longer opening hours, will open on Sundays, and have extra study space and facilities.

Ah yes, the Artsdepot. It will not be "one of our largest", it will not be "a landmark library", it will hold zero stock not "more stock", it will not "open on Sundays" it won't have any library "facilities". Perhaps Robert needs to go back and correct that entry on his blog and delete all the incorrect statements which will make for an interesting post, just white space.

Now Mr Mustard was interested in the spending on books in libraries but as the FOI department have got the hump with him, and deem every simple little request that he makes to be vexatious, he had to get a friend to ask the question. She received an answer in 16 days and luckily Mr Mustard has lots of friends who are happy to ask questions on his behalf.

So it was in June 11 that Robert said that an extra £10,000 p.a. would be spent on books. Did that happen in 2011/12? No it didn't as this table and graph show.

31-Mar	Spend £
2004	459,065
2005	674,094
2006	594,786
2007	470,659
2008	444,599
2009	416,668
2010	409,197
2011	390,762
2012	387,830

Will extra spend arrive in 2012/13? It probably will now as Robert will read this post and have to go off and bother senior officers to make sure it happens as an FOI question will be asked after the year has ended. The clear evidence though is that spending on books has been reduced year on year since 2005.

Anything that Robert Rams says has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It seems that his Cabinet colleagues might agree as here are 2 of them, from a year ago, checking if they have enough salt in stock to cope with all the imaginary landmark library utterances, or something like that.

Have a Happy Christmas readers and go easy on the salt as it really isn't good for your health to have too much of it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Economical with the truth ? - Glass bottle - bottle glass.

Mr Mustard had the dubious pleasure last week of sitting through Council Committee Meetings on two consecutive nights. He is still shocked by how quickly he is back out of Hendon Town Hall each time and home again with oodles of time to write his blog before bedtime.

Often in advance of the meeting Mr Mustard sends any question he has, or points he would like to make, to Councillors in order to stimulate some debate as he thinks that Committee Rooms should be like debating chambers involving serious intellectual argument.

One of the comments he sent to all the Councillors who were going to Thursday's General Function Committee was that if Procurement was outsourced then the Council would not have full and proper control of the purchasing function and it would still need a layer of management to oversee the outsourced function which has a cost and carries risk.

Sadly Cllr. Thomas did not get the benefit of what a Council Tax Payer thinks about this as someone deleted the message unread from his inbox. You need to have a word with them Cllr. Thomas as the matter was important. Other Councillors have found that if they delete ( unread ) messages from Mr Mustard the postman kindly delivers another copy by snailmail.

Now Cllr. Suzette Palmer does pay attention to what the electorate has to say and she also happened to ask a question about Procurement. I expect she had thought about it as soon as she saw the agenda, and then had Mr Mustard's timely reminder, and what with MetPro procurement having broken every rule in the book she was worried for the Council's sake about what might go wrong. She probably didn't like Lord Palmer having to stay out till mid-night either trying to get all the muck out from under the carpet in the audit room.

So, about 15 minutes into the meeting, after Craig Cooper had presented his rather thin 5 page report she said she needed to know a lot more about these changes to the Procurement team and expressed her concern that OneBarnet was being rushed through without any proper checking.

Cllr. Thomas jumped into action then and he asked Craig Cooper if he would clarify some points ( oh how pleased he must have been to have been fed to the lions ) and then set out the clarification points that he wanted Craig Cooper to say, which were that this paper ( committee agenda ) did not authorise outsourcing, the MetPro problem ( yes, he actually said MetPro - I thought the word had perhaps been banned at Barnet Council )  was devolution of purchasing to the services and that this would just streamline and consolidate Procurement and thus there could be some reduction in posts.

Cllr Thomas had evidently forgotten where he was the previous evening. Mr Mustard had not !

Craig Cooper then said ( I have edited out all the "errs" that nervous people pepper their speech with, there were quite a few. Mr Mustard takes dictation at a fair old lick )

"Yes, I can confirm that this is not seeking authority for any form of outsourcing.

It is starting a process of consolidating the capability.

And yes, creating a capability that can perform these functions effectively for the Council".

Oh how Mr Mustard laughed at that last line. Mr Cooper's fine sleight of hand reminds Mr Mustard of the Tommy Cooper glass & bottle trick. Here it is.

The difference is that Tommy Cooper remembered where everything was.

At the previous night's performance of the Cabinet Resources Committee, the Chairman, one Cllr. Daniel Thomas, had, at act 7, witnessed the unveiling of the "New Support & Customer Services Organisation Business Case" 

Click here

which at the head of page 13 lists the Council Services that are in line to be outsourced. What is the first one listed, yes you guessed it "Procurement".

So although that day's report did not seek permission to outsource, the report of the previous day had done so. Oh, and who is listed as One Barnet Lead Director in the Business Case document mentioned above. Yes, that's right, its Craig Cooper.

So nil points for Cllr Thomas, and as for Craig Cooper, Mr Mustard thinks that from now on the Councillors are going to have to ask you a lot more searching questions including :-

"is there anything you have omitted to tell us in your report that you really should mention"

Mr Mustard is thinking about taking up his 5 minutes next time you are presenting a report Mr Cooper. Who will be laughing then ?

Thank goodness also that the Leader, Cllr Cornelius confirmed that the Customers Services outsourcing had to come back to committee before it could go ahead.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard