One Barnet "savings" 2011/12

no officer or councillor noticed the glaring error about 2010/11

Executive summary

Is One Barnet a radical project or is it just the normal efficiency savings, combined with price increases and cuts to services that don't justify a management structure of 95 and a consultancy firm (Agilisys) bagging £250,000 a month and an addition to the budget for transformation this year of £10m. Let us look at the figures Mr Mustard has finally been sent for 2011/12. (It is the latter.)

The detail

Mr Mustard was rather disappointed. The figures came out at the end of April and Mr Mustard was pre-occupied so he didn't get to them until June. On 21 June he sent an email to Ed Gowan, the Assistant Director Commercial Transformation, a man who ought to be able to walk and talk costs and savings for the One Barnet programme without any notes, and this is what the email said:

21 June 12

Dear Mr Gowan

I refer to the final page of your report headed "Programme Savings"

Can you please tell me why the figures for 2010/11 are still provisional at this stage some 15 months after that council year finished. (Because they cut and paste from another report and didn't read it!)

Please can you give me a breakdown by council tax year of the total Base Budget Savings to date of £5.82m

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

This email should be 5 minutes work because the April report couldn't have been written without the figures having been compiled and so Mr Mustard rather hoped to get a reply within a few days and certainly the 10 that correspondence should be. Not a chance. Ed delegated the request:

22 June 

Dear Mr Mustard,

Thank you for your email. We will now respond with the information you request in line with the Freedom of Information Act. (Will you? you don't normally hit the timetable.)

To this end, I am passing your enquiry to our Freedom of Information link officer (not his real job title), Mohsin Abbasi, who will lead on the collection of the data you request. (Data doesn't need "collecting", it is sat in a table waiting to copy and paste in 2 minutes. Barnet Council is just one massive job creation exercise.)

Yours sincerely,

Ed Gowan

Assistant Director, Commercial Services

so 20 working days later the answer should be in Mr Mustard's email inbox. This is 10 days longer than if his enquiry had been dealt with as correspondence and it is arguable that the breakdown should have been in the April report anyway. Needless to say he was kept waiting and had one added to his FOI statistics.

Dear Mr Mustard,

I write in response to your request, received by the council on 21^st June 2012, for information on "Programme Savings". We are processing your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). Under the Act you should have received a response within 20 working days. I apologise for us not meeting this deadline.

Response

The figures for 2010/11 in the programme highlight report of 24^th April were not provisional and is a typographical error. (as Mr Mustard had guessed but no officer and no councillor who read the April report had noticed - must try harder).

The total of base budget saving of £5.82m was comprised of savings from two council tax years (2010/11 and 2011/12). There could have been some restatement of the previous year.

The information relating to 2010/11 has previously been disclosed to you in a prior response to your FOI request (#1104), (thank you for quoting the reference, that is so unusual, Mr Mustard knew he had these) the total of the savings was £1.437 million.

Please find attached the information relating to 2011/12. The estimate shown in the One Barnet highlight report of 24^th April 2012 was provisional and based on the original planned savings for the year. OK

The savings proposed were to the value of £4.387m; of these £4.262m were delivered. The difference of £125k was a result of the planned implementation of new parking charges in the borough's seven remaining free-to use car parks not taking place. Due to a near riot and Robert Rams and his fellow ward councillors throwing their toys out of the pram because they could see they were going to be in trouble in 2014 at the next elections. Mr Mustard added the missing apostrophe.

Yours sincerely,

Mohsin Abbasi

Business Support Officer (£600+ was spent on those customer service guides which say you must put your title in emails Mr Abbasi which you forgot to do as usual and so Mr Mustard has added it for you. Did you bin it along with everyone else?)

One Barnet Programme Office

Now to the figures.

Mr Mustard has put these One Barnet savings in decreasing size order for you.

Starting at the top, reducing the youth support services, reduce directly provided services, reducing advice : straightforward service reduction. What did Cllr Richard Cornelius say

“It’s a big achievement that we're coming in on budget. It's really quite something. We're delivering these 28 per cent cuts and remarkably few people have noticed any diminishment in the services.”

If you have noticed that youth support services have gone backwards do please email Cllr Cornelius to complain, here.

Next we have £897,000 taken from people who need help with social care at home, washing and dressing, getting meals ready, getting out of bed and using the toilet, that sort of thing. It might be called the fairer contributions policy  There is no point in re-inventing the wheel so you can read about this policy, which does not seem to be popular, on Mr Reasonable's blog. (Don't forget to come back) Someone noticed eh Cllr Cornelius? 

So far you have pillaged two groups who don't have as much voice as middle-aged middle-class voters. The young might not even be voting yet and are unlikely, with the odd exception, to be politically active so this won't hurt your vote and then the housebound not many of whom turn up to council meetings to protest because they can't without help. Maybe we'll have to see if we can fill the public gallery for you one evening with "fairer" contributions victims and you can explain this marvellous policy to them one-to-one?

What next? Reduce the school improvement support service by £633,000 and let schools worry about their own educational standards. The schools do have well paid head teachers and I wondered why they needed so much help which did look like local nanny state interference. Now either the council has been meddling needlessly for years and wasting over £600,000 p.a. or this is just a pure cut, nothing One Barnet about it. Mr Mustard doesn't know enough about schools to be sure, he is sure that others will comment at the bottom of the page.

Next. Tax the motorist. Collect another £565,000 by removing free bays and increasing CPZ and car parking charges radically. Exactly what central government have said should not be done. Just too tempting. Given that you are facing a judicial review, that you are back-tracking on charges by holding reviews, that someone sent the police after Helen Michael at Cafe Buzz and North Finchley traders are standing four square behind her, as are the bloggers and others, that East Barnet councillors have been publicly pooping themselves and saying they didn't vote for car park charges (what rot) and that posters are being prepared which say Anyone But Cornelius (sounds familiar!) it seems to be safe to say that just about everyone has noticed this unsubtle policy.

SEN transport changes worth £258,000. Mr Mustard will leave this one to the public to comment upon. Either the council used to be hopelessly inefficient and were wasting £250,000 p.a. or they have perhaps made savage cuts in provision and there will be examples of people who need transport who don't now get it or a combination of the two. Do tell.

Introduction of e-recruitment will save £125,000. Absolutely millions has been wasted in procurement over the years with the management team not being the same 2 days running and massive amounts being paid out in compensation for loss-of-office (your face no longer fits money) and to recruitment agencies to recruit highly paid officers who stay for a year or two and then move on and the whole process starts again. Look at this FOI response:

Mr (Jason) Wheatley (Town Hall Tax Dodger) was engaged through Advance HR Consulting Ltd to provide an executive recruitment function to the council. (Who used Penna and like firms to do the actual recruitment)

He provided specialist recruitment support in the appointment of the following Directors:

Director for Corporate Services
Director for Commercial Services

Director for Environment & Operations (appointment 1)
Director for Environment & Operations (appointment 2)

Director for Adult Social Care and Health

He also provided that specialist support throughout the council’s Assistant Director restructure, where the following appointments were made:

Assistant Director Finance x 2 roles
Assistant Director Audit & Risk
Assistant Director Env & Ops x 3 roles
Assistant Director Commercial x 2 roles
Assistant Director Planning & Regeneration
Assistant Director Customer Services

Finally Mr Wheatley was responsible for the appointments of Deputy Director Adult Social Care and Health and Deputy Director Children's Service.

This was from mid 2009 to mid 2011. Do we still need all of these people who have been so expensively recruited? Advance HR were paid £625 a day.

Look at this webpage. Adverts for more new executives because the ones we have don't have the skill set to enable them to do the jobs that are being advertised. The wrong sort of snow springs to mind. If they are so useless why do some of them earn £130,000 p.a. ? Bad news for Barnet Council, Mr Mustard did the suitability test on that webpage and was strongly encouraged to apply for the posts. 

The saving of £125,000 is a paper one.

Chop staff and working hours of the mobile library. A service cut worth £75,000

The next item of merging routes of Children's SEN transport with Adult's Day Care centres sounds interesting. This isn't enough detail. We know that there was uproar about route changes in the sharing with Brent and that was  abandoned. It is not clear if that formed part of the savings. Day care centres are all under risk so if any close that will make the budgeted transport savings.

Customer service transformation. Call centres are vile fort staff to work in , inhuman degrading sheds, and no-one likes phoning them. You also can't force people to use the web who don't have a computer and the concept of customer choice is being forgotten. Mr Mustard will not complete on-line web forms. Instead he sends an email. He has no plans to change his policy; he is the customer and the customer is king. If Barnet Council decide to force the pace by removing the option to email Mr Mustard will start posting everything to them.

Close Church Farmhouse museum and shackle Barnet Museum by withdrawing funding. There you have it. Official One Barnet policy: Museums are just so much history.

Savings in procurement. Hang on, Craig Cooper, the unCommercial Director is busy setting up a new centralised Corporate Procurement Section with 5 or 10 procurement officers (he isn't quite sure how many he needs). That won't lead to a saving of £30k on office supplies and £30k on staff. This is just moving money around the budgets.

Another £28,000 by merging transport routes. Didn't we have that a little earlier? Double counting perhaps?

Get rid of a bit of a manager and save £25,000. Until we see the management cost for each council tax year set out clearly on a comparable basis one year after another we will never have any idea what has happened. This is what you do, you add £1m to the management budget from one year to the next and then chop one little bit of a post and call it a £25,000 One Barnet saving. Simples.

We are starting to get near the bottom of the barrel now. Charges kids for stuff that used to be free (they don't have any money of course) new charges in the contact centre (no facts as to what sort of charges) and charge for training. If that is an internal charge (what commercial company could possibly want to buy their training from the council, a course on how not to breach EU procurement regulations anyone? or on keeping data safe and not being fined £70,000 by the Information Commissioner, rat catching in data centres, tax avoidance, oh the list of possible courses is endless) then it isn't a saving, it is justing moving figures around budgets. Anyway supposedly £21,000 from this.

The final barrel scrape. £8,000 from providing a new source of income. Settlement checking which is done on behalf of the government. Was this in the original One Barnet plan. No as it only recently became a nice little earner. It isn't One Barnet except that it was convenient to bump the figures up a little. Desperation.

So let Mr Mustard summarise. What is One Barnet., It is a programme of:

Cuts

Charges

Cuts

Charges

Cuts

Cut waste

Cuts

Cut waste

Cut waste

Cuts

Cut waste

Cut waste

Cut waste

Cut waste

Charges

Charges

Mr Mustard is starting to understand One Barnet, the emperor with no clothes.

We mustn't forget about costs. An extra £10,000,000 has been pumped into the transformation budget reserve this year (2012/13) Here is the spending so far.

Do we need to spend £4,000,000 on outside help in order to carry out a routine (if ruthless) programme of cutting services, becoming slightly more efficient and increasing prices. Isn't that something that a cabal of 63 councillors (OK not 63 as ideas emanating from the Labour side will be automatically dissed) and 95 senior management ought to be able to manage between them? Surely the time has come to send Agilisys up the road.

The other thing that worries Mr Mustard is that this is only Wave 1. If the projected spend is only £2,000,000 for this year why has £10,000,000 been pumped into the budget. Could that be for waves 2 & 3?

One day someone will wake up and realise that this One Barnet nonsense and the 10 year contract to outsource are the craziest thing they have ever heard and press the emergency stop button. Let us hope that it will not be too late when that happens.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

What does "recently" mean to Barnet Council?

It means 2004!

this real French stamp didn't come to Mr Mustard from Barnet Council ! Quelle surprise!

In one of his FOI requests Mr Mustard asked about the spend with the Royal Mail of £353,451 in the year ended 31 March 2011. He is told that EU procurement rules do not apply to this spend ( he hasn't checked but will accept that as a true statement ) and so a tender has not been advertised in the OJEU. That should not be the end of the matter though as this is an area which is ripe for savings ( it's low hanging fruit in management parlance - he expects that every senior manager at Barnet Council will have heard of this concept - they just haven't implemented it ).

In addition to the full year spend shown above the spend on postage from April to November 2011 was £212,367 so we are again looking at something in excess of £300k in a full year.

In 2012 it is possible to send your letters by other services of which the best known is probably TNT.

Now we have to do some maths, sorry, and we have to make some assumptions just to illustrate the possibilities.

Let us assume that all the spend in 2010/11 was on 1st class DL size envelopes ( DL is when you fold a sheet of A4 into 3 ). If you bought a stamp at the Post Office it would have cost you 41p ( it's now 46p - it won't be long before the penny post is the £1 post ) but if you used a franking machine you only paid 36p. Think of that as bulk discount and compensation for delivering lovely uniform well typed letters with clear postcodes.

So £353,451 would buy you 981,808 first class "stamps". Post is sent on 6 days a week, say 300 days a year which means about 3,270 items a day.

If you now go the TNT website here you can use their savings calculator. You have to drag your slider with the mouse to the right until you reach 3,000. That shows you a saving of £108,000 so for 3,270 items the saving would be £117,700.

However, TNT have shown the saving against the full price of postage so we need to take 981,808 times 5p = £49,090 off the level of saving shown ( Mr Mustard does try to be fair and accurate ) giving a potential saving of £68,610 which is still not to be sniffed at. It would pay for 6 months use of Craig Cooper the Commercial Director ( third class? ) who is in charge of procurement and whom, one would hope, has already thought about putting postage out to tender.

So, over 10 years, the usual period Barnet Council talk about for cashable savings, the council could save £686,000 ( more as prices rise ). 

Now of course the real saving will have to be based upon the actual mix of postage sizes and whether second class is used much and upon the negotiation skills of the senior management of procurement. TNT would love to have the volume, look, they even mention local government on their website. Perhaps certain types of bulk post could be put out to tender?

It's not as if Barnet Council haven't heard of TNT. They paid them £41,397 in the year to 31 March 11 and £15,721 in the following 8 months (going down?) although some of that was supposedly for stationery ( Mr Mustard finds the analysis of the over £500 lists to be wanting ).

So what caused this blog post? It was the words added into the FOI reply which were possibly meant to be spin. Once the answer was that the supply did not need to be tendered there was nothing more to add but someone, person or persons unknown who was feeling defensive, added the words:

"Until recently there was no option but to use Royal Mail for postage"

and yet TNT started doing mail in 2004!

When will the council look at this? Probably "as soon as possible". Mark your diary for about 2020.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mike Freer appears in an episode of The Billion Pound Drop.

Mr Mustard has now found an article that appeared here in publicservice.co.uk about the savings that Mr Freer believes can be made in central government. Mr Mustard hazards that these are the kind of potential savings he will highlight to Francis Maude MP.

You can play TV show game The Million Pound Drop here


So here is the article with added comments by Mr Mustard in red.

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The cost of government
15 April 2011

Questions from MP Mike Freer recently uncovered more than 10,000 mobiles in just one government department. Having achieved efficiencies when he was Barnet Council leader, he looks at how central government could learn from the 'easyCouncil' approach. The department was the Ministry of Justice. It has 81,000 staff. So one in eight has a work issued mobile.

Mike Freer was elected as MP for Finchley and Golders Green in the May 2010 general election. Previously he was leader of Barnet Council and previous to that was the lead member for driving efficiency.

Barnet Council took nearly £90m out of the annual £600m+ revenue spend during the period May 2002 to December 2009. It reduced the back office costs to the second lowest in London, reduced it's workforce and moved services from two star to three and four star. How very odd. In this article they were only claimed to be the fourth lowest in London. Statistics eh? slippery devils. Mr Mustard refers readers to the Q2 2010/11 performance report on the Deputy Chief Executive, available here, which says in respect of indicator 17b that no benchmarking data is available as the calculation is unique to Barnet and that "We recognise that the council's true back office costs, when taking into account back office functions embedded in frontline services, are much higher than this ( £59.41 )" and yet someone gave Mr Freer comparative figures previously?  How odd.

Many of the savings were driven by monthly meetings of each spending department to drill down into over/under spends. Both the chief executive and I would lead the review and each service director and lead councillor would be expected to attend and know their departmental budgets – line by line. Spend lines forecasting an end of year under spend were returned to central contingency; any unreported under spends (slush fund) discovered were 'confiscated' and returned to central reserves. The monthly meetings maintained the pressure and the fact that they were driven by both 'the council leader' and the chief executive established an culture of driving out costs; that budgets were not a 'target for spending' but to be under achieved. I fear that in government, spending departments regard their agreed budgets as a spending target. Mr Mustard does not know if this still happens but suspects that it does not. He has seen this system in use in the private sector and it worked very well indeed. It should be reintroduced at Barnet Council.

The year on year 'salami slicing' that identified the £90m also drove us to understand some three years ago that central government support would inevitably be severely reduced. We embarked on the a major review of how to structure the council for an age of austerity; the programme – the future shape of the council was dubbed 'easyCouncil' because of its relentless drive for spending transparency and efficiency; a drive for merging back office functions within the borough's public sector (rather than sharing back offices across councils) and a co-ordinated drive to resolve the causes of dependency costing the council and public sector partners huge sums (300 families cost Barnet £16m a year, every year). Mr Mustard is all in favour of efficiency and not wasting money. The forerunner to One Banet, called Future Shape, was a much more modest programme and unfortunately it is now like a runaway horse. The rider really needs to stop it but can't.

Recently I have been looking at key lines of expenditure for central government to see if the learning from Barnet could be carried across. Early indications are that nearly £900m could be saved without impacting front line services: reducing office accommodation by adopting private sector space per employee allowances; introducing hot desking and flexible working - £832m; moving all departments to paying invoices electronically and driving down the cost of invoice processing to 'best of government' – £9.1m; releasing surplus office accommodation - £61.4m; reducing employee annual days lost to private sector average - £63m; and cutting the amount spent on magazines and periodicals - £6.3m. On top of this my next round of enquiries has identified that 10,000 mobile devices, costing £2.3m a year, are issued to just one government department – the Ministry of Justice.( Hot desking is an abomination. Where is the feeling of security for the employee, driving to work not knowing if there will be a space for them or not. Barnet Council seems to still have lots of offices, surely room still for some further consolidation. Mr Mustard will make some enquiries about the number of mobiles at Barnet Council and report back.

A simple review of usage identified how many mobile handsets had been issued; looking at spend anomalies – highlighting unusually high usage (inappropriate numbers e.g. sports results lines) or high data downloads (inappropriate web access). Also identifying unusually low usage; those whose bill was just the minimum monthly charge identified those who were not using the phone (a surprising number were in desk drawers, unused or rarely turned on). Not only did this lead to the withdrawal of mobile that were clearly not needed because they were not being used but also drove management to refresh the list of blocked sites/numbers. Hopefully this will not be an issue in Barnet Council?

The exercise also gave a clearer insight into the volume and type of calls. The information allowed a complete renegotiation of the contract, shaving significant sums off the annual cost. Money that was redirected to front line services. There are contracts now that allow calls to other mobiles within an organisation and even desk phones to be made for an all inclusive price – irrespective of the volume. The challenge is for central government – is there one contract or does each department negotiate it's own. When was the last time the number of handsets issued and usage was seriously reviewed? Above all, which minister is responsible for in-year savings? EasyCouncil can deliver some easy wins. Barnet Council's notorious procurement section will have tackled this already, won't they?

Nothing radical or novel then in what Mike Freer has to say. It will be interesting to see what comes out after his meeting with Francis Maude or whether this story quietly  disappears.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mike Freer to "advise" Minister on savings - and Consultants in Government.

Mr Mustard is looking forward to reading later about the savings of £1bn that Mr Freer claims to have identified in Central Government. We have a small problem of £54m to find over 3 years. That is evidently chicken feed for Mr Freer and if he were to pop along to the council for an afternoon he could find those excessive back office costs and keep front line services then his seat is guaranteed for life by the people of Barnet. How about it Mr Freer? The below is what appears on the Finchley & Golders Green Conservatives website. Type in red is illumination added by Mr Mustard.

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Mike Freer MP is to meet with Francis Maude, the Minister leading the Coalition Government’s cost saving program, to advise on what central government can learn from Barnet Council’s experience. ( and yet Barnet Council are in a £54m hole! ) 

Following an exchange in the House of Commons, Mike Freer said “Ministers have made an excellent start identifying waste and inefficiency. Cutting this fat means the bones of front line services are saved, but I believe there is more that can be done. The lessons I learnt at Barnet Council are directly applicable to central government, and that is what I will be putting across to the Minister.” ( Mr Mustard looks forward to seeing the meat of these savings. Mobile phone costs will be one item, for sure, but what are the rest? )

The Government’s Efficiency and Reform Group has already identified £3.75bn of savings through better procurement and by lowering overheads. Using Written Parliamentary Questions, Mike Freer has identified an additional £1bn of potential savings, based on ‘back office’ reductions made during his leadership of Barnet Council. ( If you would like to see the written questions, click here, but don't forget to come back. Is that £1bn in a year or 10 years? ) 

Below is the exchange yesterday in the House:

Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green): What estimate he has made of the savings to the public purse arising from the work of the Efficiency and Reform Group in 2010-11?

The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude): The Government saved £3.75 billion in their first 10 months after taking office by stopping unnecessary and wasteful spending. We saved £800 million by renegotiating with the biggest suppliers to Government. We cut spending on consultants by 70% and on advertising by 80%. This is just the beginning; there is much more to be done. ( There is an awful lot of unnecessary and wasteful spending in Barnet of which some like the publication "Barnet First" existed in Mr Freer's time. Ooh look, spending on consultants cut by 70%; how many million would that come to in Barnet? )

Mike Freer: I thank the Minister and welcome the initial savings of the Efficiency and Reform Group. He will be aware, however, of the £1 billion of additional savings that my own research has identified. Will he agree that I could meet the chair of the Efficiency and Reform Group to discuss these savings further?  ( Please publish them Mr Freer once you have discussed them. Do you have a date for the meeting yet? )

Mr Maude: The chair of the Efficiency and Reform Group is me, so I will be delighted to meet my hon. Friend, who, when he was leader of Barnet council, showed how much can be done. We do, absolutely, have a huge amount to learn from what is being done best in local government, particularly the sort of savings that can be made by much better use of office accommodation. ( Has the current management forgotten what Mr Freer's legacy was - how to make easy savings? Office accommodation, there is lots of that, NLBP, Barnet House, Hendon Town Hall, how many other buildings? - shedloads.  )

Whilst looking through written questions Mr Mustard came across this very interesting one to Francis Maude MP.

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Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby, Labour)

To ask the Prime Minister how many senior civil servants in his Office at each grade had worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst and Young, Deloitte or KPMG immediately prior to taking up their appointment in each of the last four years; what consultancy agreements his Office had with those firms in each such year; and how many consultants from those firms have advised his Office in each such year. ( The same question in relation to consultants would probably be a good one at Barnet Council )

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Francis Maude (Minister for the Cabinet Office; Horsham, Conservative)


The Prime Minister's Office is an integral part of the Cabinet Office and therefore the answer provided is for the whole of the Cabinet Office.

Appointments to the civil service are made on merit on the basis of fair and open competition in accordance with the Constitutional Reform Act 2010.

The information requested for the Cabinet Office is not readily available and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.

In May 2010 the Government announced a freeze on new consultancy expenditure. Any exception to this freeze (where the estimated value is over £20,000) must be approved by the relevant Minister. In the case of the Cabinet Office, the Minister for the Cabinet Office approves any exception to the consultancy freeze. Expenditure on consultancy is only allowed if the consultancy is deemed to be operationally necessary, or the work can not be done by in-house staff. All consultancy contracts are subject to a review every three months, for a maximum of nine months. Where contracts go beyond nine months, they must be submitted for approval to the Efficiency and Reform Group for consideration by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

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Mr Mustard is shocked to find that a very sensible policy that is being applied in central government is not being applied in Barnet Council.

Are any councillors reading this blog? please do something.

Mr Mustard has just found a blog post by The Barnet Eye about Mr Freer's mobile phone questions here. Take a look.

His Wikipedia entry is here if you want some background information.

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

The OneBarnet budget 2011/12

Sadly Mr Mustard cannot make this evening's meeting of the BPOSC - Budget and Performance Overview and Scrutiny Committee as he has a prior commitment.

You can all go along. You will find the agenda available to download here. guff

You might find the final page of agenda item 9 interesting. It is here along with page 1.

click and then click again for a full page version

and then use the back key to return to the blog

Sorry that page 15 is sidewards but let me tell you what it says. The budget for OneBarnet for the year 2011/12 i.e. the year to 31 March 2012 is £5,928,988 - let us call it £6m for round numbers.

Mr Mustard has just popped into the downstairs toilet ( yes really ) and found the pamphlet "The Council Tax and Business Rate in Barnet 2011/12". On page 3, Message from the Council, it says

"Our One Barnet programme will make over £13m of savings over the next 3 years and this, along with other improvements to efficiency, will account for the bulk of our savings." 

Oh dear, OneBarnet will cost £6m in a year ( = £18m in 3 years ) and as far as Mr Mustard is aware has not yet saved a single penny. Unless, of course, you know better ?

Hopefully the Councillors who read the blog will give the figures presented to them a good workout. Also councillors take a look at the risk scores of 16 which are very high with both the likelihood and the impact coming in at 4. They couldn't be much worse.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

OneBarnet - all talk & no trousers.

Mr Mustard expects that you would like to see what presentations are being made by Barnet Council Officers to the world at large.

There is one here on the website of the Association of London Environmental Health Managers. Do you suppose other Councils learn from Barnet what to do or what not to do ?

OneBarnet enabling Council approach

Rick Mason ( Assistant Director, Housing & Environmental Health - nice to see what work someone on £104,673 p.a. can produce ) produced this on 7 May 2011 and it was published online on 1 June.

You can read the slides yourself. Mr Mustard will just pick out a few points.

"All the risks of not doing this" are just a theoretical list of possible failures that no well-managed sensible Council would allow to occur. They do not justify OneBarnet.

OneBarnet projected savings. Year 9 - £102m ( in total ).

The Council spends £900m a year. In 9 years it will spend £8,100 million.

A saving of £102m as a percentage of £8,100m is just 1.26%

that is hardly the most radical programme of savings you have ever heard of is it ?

and all this fuss about OneBarnet being the best thing since sliced bread.

The Barnet Bloggers, given access to the complete books of the Council, could save that without the expense of a single consultant as the following paragraph demonstrates.

There was a case of overcharging that Mr Reasonable found recently. Paying £17 per hour for something worth £9 odd. Be generous and just call it a 70% overcharge. Looking the other way, percentages are funny things, the charge for security ( yes, MetPro again ) has now been reduced by 7/17*100 = 41%

Interestingly, and typically sloppily, Cllr Rams on his blog ( which Mr Mustard will not give you a link to as it is not to his taste ) wrote that:

The council has already begun a major transformation programme – One Barnet – to radically change the way we deliver services and save £100m over the next ten years

So that is a slippage of a year already built into the programme.

The bidder invests £1m in his bid. Where does he get that back from ? Why us of course.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard