Why do councils ignore operational guidance?

who is meant to be serving whom?

Local councils exist to provide services to residents, businesses and visitors. Parking is often described as a service which part of it is but much of it is a vast money making machine serving itself and taking your money. Councils are rightly concerned at the cost of providing services and always try to drive the unit cost down and a favourite method is to nudge you, or force you, to channel shift i.e. to make you use the method which is the cheapest for the council to process. If they can ramrod you into using a webform or eform (probably also have other names but basically a box or series of boxes on their website into which you can only enter certain details and these then get entered directly into the correct fields of the relevant software then you have taken the data processing requirement away and reduced input cost to zero) then you are using the quickest and cheapest method for the council. However they have forgotten they are there to serve. If you complete a webform you only get a copy of what you have done if the council send you one and this could be vital evidence in a PCN appeal.

The council have placed their administrative convenience in front of the customer's and have made us their servant by this forced channel shifting. In Mr Mustard's case this usually backfires as he simply refuses (unless there is no option) to use webforms. The reason is simple, if he is helping people with their PCN then he has a number of appeal points which he uses time and time again and it is easier for him to have all his emails together in neat files in the parking ticket section of Outlook from which he can easily cut and paste into a new email than to navigate his way through up to 17 pages of a webform (Camden council's form has only 5 pages to wade through som isn't the worst but really!). Mr Mustard has this year handled appeals in at least Barnet, Harrow, Islington, Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham and Haringey although he prefers to stick to Barnet as he knows their process errors inside out. He should be able to contact them all by email and letter but often he sees the dreaded webform being put forward as the first option. The upshot of this is that unless Mr Mustard is bang up against the deadline, he uses a traditional letter, for which he gets a free proof of posting, instead of the webform and thus the relevant council is faced with the most expensive method to handle. Hard cheese!

Mr Mustard decided to do something about operational guidance being ignored. He happened to have two PCN to appeal for a blue badge holding friend in Haringey and so he lodged a complaint. He has no particular beef with this borough who aren't actually the worst offenders (they are going to suffer when cctv for parking gets taken away though).

Here is the complaint.

I wish to complain about the fact that PCN issued by Haringey Council do not include an email address for appeals to be made to. This is a general complaint and not about a specific PCN.

I attach a copy for your convenience of Operational Guidance from the Department for Transport. Paragraph 1.4 points out that information printed in Comic Sans is something that authorities must have regard to.

In paragraph 10.4 it says, (in Comic Sans) that you should include an email address for motorists to use. The council does not do so. Please amend your practice as soon as possible to include an email address for appeals within a PCN.

Here is the response.

Thank you for your enquiry.

We have ( with our IT contractor) developed a more sophisticated online representation / appeal service for motorists.

This replaced the previous email offer. We do not intend offering the email option in addition to the online service and feel that we not only comply with recommendations and guidance in the Operational Guidance, but have gone beyond that expected.

How you can go beyond something you don't actually do is an interesting use of language.

Mr Mustard restated his complaint.

I refer to the below answer. We could debate for some time whether a webform (the system to which I think he refers) is more sophisticated or not than an email but that is the not the question at issue (something more sophisticated may not necessarily be more convenient or better).

I have no complaint with the council choosing to offer a webform in addition to email but not in place of it. Interestingly you offer both for complaints but not for PCN.

The council is not complying with Operational Guidance and so my complaint stands.

The council then said they were not going to change.

Thank you for your further enquiry with regards to the Council not complying with Operational Guidance.

I note your reference to paragraph10.4 of operational guidance and we are satisfied that this places no direct obligation on us or any other authority to explicitly offer an email channel for appeals.

We do comply with operational guidance and I am also satisfied that the channels we provide to motorists to appeal comply with statutory requirements.   As stated in our previous response, we have (with our IT contractor) developed a more sophisticated online representation / appeal service for motorists that you can use if you have internet access, something also needed to send an email.  Therefore  it remains our clear view that we have not removed any access channel that will disadvantage any motorist wishing to appeal a Penalty Notice.

Since the introduction of our online system (in line with many other authorities)  we have had no appeals to PATAS  based on grounds similar to that which you have outlined. In fact motorists are far happier to receive direct confirmation from our online appeals system that the appeal has been logged and immediately receive a receipt/ reference number for any future reference that their appeal, rather than simply sending an email.

I hope that you are satisfied with my response to your complaint. If you are dissatisfied, we cannot consider your complaint further under the Council’s complaints procedures. This is because your complaint related solely to the application of a council policy, which I have concluded has been properly and fairly applied. However, you may complain to an independent complaints service, the Local Government Ombudsman, who may be able to help you.

Mr Mustard sent a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman who has a huge postbag and a reduced budget so takes some convincing to take up the cudgels and is currently resisting. How did Mr Mustard have to submit his complaint, yes you guessed it, only one method was offered, by webform which of course discriminates against the poor who can't afford a computer, the computer illiterate, the disabled, the elderly & Mr Mustard. He duly filled in it. To be fair he was sent a copy but you can see how Mr Mustard was forced to present his complaint whereas he would have preferred to wax lyrical in his own way.

The omens for Mr Mustard's complaint were therefore poor from the start.

So Mr Mustard got to thinking about if other boroughs were better or worse than Haringey. He knew for example that Barnet's PCN (and he is only talking about ones attached to vehicles, not those sent by post) only allow on the back for written and webform representations but they do actually accept them by email to barnet@nslservices.co.uk even if their auto-acknowledgement is somewhat confusing in saying both that they do and don't accept representations by email! NSL have to print out your email, scan it and put it on the relevant PCN file which they often get wrong by forgetting to scan or attaching to the wrong file so using email is fraught with danger, but danger is Mr Mustard's middle name (actually he doesn't have one, his first name is Morris, any suggestions for middle names gratefully received).

So Mr Mustard duly sent off an FOI to every London Borough and the City on 1 October 13, although Mr Mustard didn't bother Barnet as he knew the answers. In theory by 1 November every borough should have replied but FOI (and Mr Mustard has rather too much experience in the field!) is rarely responded to on time by every London borough so there are gaps in his information which will be filled in as FOI officers read the blog and are now embarrassed (I know you all talk to each other about who this bloke is in Barnet who asks questions & insists on proper answers) and rush some answers out.

That is the good folks in Barking, Bexley, Brent, Enfield, Harrow & Lambeth, who subject to Mr Mustard being shown to have overlooked something, get "nul points".

please email corrections & additions to mrmustard@zoho.com

The answer in the letter column is, and should be, yes every time as that is specified in the Appeals Regulations 2007.

The email column should really also be a yes everywhere but it isn't. There are seventeen good boroughs and 10 bad ones in this regard, including the afore-mentioned Haringey.

The using the council website column has 19 yeses (so a method that isn't required features more often than the one that is specified in operational guidance, go figure). 14 of these councils do the decent thing and also offer email as a choice so should be praised for offering the choice. The 6 who only offer webforms and not email should be castigated or nudged back into line by the LGO.

Camden
Greenwich
Hackney
Haringey
Sutton
Westminster

please sit yourselves on the naughty step and reflect upon your behaviour. To get off the naughty step all you have to do is to add an email address for representations on the back of your PCN and you will go into Mr Mustard's reformed characters box.

Special praise goes to the City and almost as good as them Southwark. The City will hear from you in almost any way that you want to communicate with them and Southwark are also very considerate. It is easy for the City to be helpful & generous as they don't rely on parking for their income and have far fewer streets than most to worry about.

The phone option should be offered for those PCN which are glaringly wrong and can thus be cancelled at the first opportunity and for the benefit of the illiterate, the disabled, the blind (don't laugh, they may own the car and have a driver) and for anyone else who can't at this moment write a letter (broken arm maybe, etc).

Interesting to see the fax machine hanging on in 6 offices, it is a bit of a relic although many people now have all-in-one scanner/printer/fax machines so may have made a slight comeback from approaching obsolescence.

Having given out the prizes the wooden spoons (three are needed) go to

Hammersmith & Fulham
Havering
Lewisham

all three of whom insist on receiving representations by letter alone. Please bend over whilst the spoon is forcibly applied. You should be red-faced as well as red-cheeked.

Would any council who just happens to read this blog post please have a look at your policies and see if they could be improved? Barnet are, despite him getting nearly every PCN he touches cancelled, very helpful to Mr Mustard in this regard and when he brings to their attention, by direct email to a parking manager, some glaring ticket issue error they are usually pretty quick to agree and get it cancelled. Not all is perfect as the council won't give way on the moribund 2011 PCN which they are desperately still trying to collect and Mr Mustard is trying to kill off wholesale. They need the money!

Mr Mustard also asked a question of all councils at the same time about the extent to which each council implements the London Councils Code of Practice on Civil Parking and Traffic Enforcement. The entertaining answers to that, sent as a business as usual question rather than FOI, will have to wait until another day.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Cricklewood cross

http://brentcrosscoalition.blogspot.co.uk/

Stuff the semantics

call a spade a spade (ignore the fork on the right and other irrelevant facts or figures)

So if you aren't too bored already with the official explanation of why everything in the council garden is rosy, read on. Mr Mustard will try and simplify it all for you whilst also trying to bury the argument (can't have a co-writer for all that long and there are other fish to fry). This blog is by Mr Mustard alone.

OK, back to the start. The Barnet Bloggers often raise matters which would otherwise be blissfully ignored. Think of us as the conscience of the council, critical friends (sometimes more the former than the latter) unpaid external (armchair) auditors, an early warning system of what is going wrong or has gone wrong and who stop councillors from carrying out their worst excesses through the fear of being caught and exposed.

Mr Mustard is the newest of the 4 but is already 2 years 7 months and 4 days old himself so now has a fair amount of corporate council history in his brain and being a debt collector has an elephantine memory.

The unnumbered (they usually have a number) Delegated Powers Report ("DPR") in which the £16.1m payment by Barnet Council to Capita came to light refers to a meeting of Cabinet of 6 December 12 which includes the following words:

Capita’s proposal also includes (within the financial offer described above) approximately £8m investment in areas such as information technology (computer hardware and software), and customer services. This investment not only enables Capita to deliver the transformation it is proposing, but also avoids the Council having to find money in the future to fund replacement technology for systems that are at or nearing the end of their useful life.

Capita’s proposal includes a £2.3m investment in the data gathering and storage platforms required to undertake the complex analysis required to develop policy and commissioning strategies.

Capita’s proposal also includes (within the financial offer described above) approximately £15.3m revenue investment in areas such as information technology (computer hardware and software), and customer services. This investment not only enables Capita to deliver the transformation it is proposing, but also avoids the Council having to find money in the future to fund replacement technology for systems that are at or nearing the end of their useful life.

The options appraisal gave the following as one of the reasons why the services could not be retained in-house

The council has limited capability to secure and manage the significant investment, transformation and remodelling required for these service to preserve service levels, achieve strategic objectives and reduce cost.

One advantage of signing with Capita was given as:

The Council secures upfront investment in the technology and transformation required by the services which it is able to pay back over the life of the contract.

About the then estimated £17.5m investment by Capita

Capita has planned investment of £17.5m to transform the services. This investment will be made by the NSCSO for the most part in the early years of the partnership and recovered through the core service payments made by the Council.

and about funding generally

This means that for a significant proportion of the partnership the Partner will be required to run a level of working capital/project finance before becoming cash positive in later years.

So if the DPR didn't contain authorisation of a payment to Capita, per Chris's letter of 11 November 13, well neither did the Cabinet meeting unless the blue (secret) papers included figures for cash flow and statements that were directly contradictory to the public ones and that wouldn't be open and transparent, now would it?

Did the Cabinet understand what they were signing? Perhaps not, which is why Chris's office is being deluged with requests for information. Now I think that Chris remains on the Barnet payroll but I think that his deputy and team of 40 probably now work for Capita, so is Mr Mustard bothered about them having to do some work? no, not at all. Capita failed to heed the warning signs that The One Barnet contracts might be one contract too many.

The cash flow question is a very simple one which any cabinet member should be able to understand, or find the answer to in all the reports that they will have carefully read from cover to cover (just like bloggers eh Brian, reading council papers at midnight with a moist gusset - funny but not true) so if dear Cabinet member you are out of your depth, best get out of the little pond that you are drowning in.

If the bloggers had wanted to hear from the S151 officer, they would have written to him. We wanted to hear from councillors and although we write out of courtesy to them all the ones who should reply know who they are, in this case the Cabinet who decided to rule out the in-house option at the very beginning on the basis they had no money for investment and then magically found £16.1m in cash knocking about with no other plan to spend it but didn't mention this fundamental change at the time.

Now Chris Naylor is the accountant and Richard Cornelius isn't.

Chris tells us that the Council has cash in hand of £200 million, although not official reserves, which would fund the necessary investment at least 12 times over so the council have made a grave mistake in ruling out the in-house option which they could afford to invest in because if they had they could have made similar savings to capita, or if the council managed by incompetents who don't know how to make savings?

What reserves did Corny tell us we had?

Oh dear me, only £15m, what was that then Richard, a slip of the tongue or a complete lack of knowledge of the council that you run? I think you owe me, the bloggers, staff you are making redundant and every council tax paper in Barnet an explanation, don't you? It will have to be a good one.

Here are the actual reserves. Naturally they can often move from one column to another.

Chris - please stop writing to me, this is not your problem. We can discuss briefly on Tuesday. I am more interested in recovering the car that the NSL owned bailiffs took from a lady who is 6 months pregnant, with a small child and a disabled grandmother who she has to take to hospital every week and with whom the council have shown not the least sign of any empathy, understanding or compassion.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Guest blog #2 by Chris Naylor (Chief Operating Officer of Barnet Council)

Dear Mr Dishman

Thank you for your email response

I don't think I have a huge amount to add to the answer I have already given about the decision making process, the relationship between the deal, cabinet decision and payment profile and the Council's constitution.

The substantive point is that we have not relieved Capita of their obligation to fund the investment from within the contract price.

I can see from your response that there remains some confusion about terminology and I think we're in danger of having a debate about semantics. I wasn't at the Audit Committee to which you refer, so let me have another go at explaining the cash flow point. I've written separately to Ms Musgrove about this but not to you all. I don't think she has yet had time to publish that response. In summary, our cash balances are not the same as our balance sheet reserves. As I've previously set out, our balance sheet reserves are unchanged as a result of the payment profile to Capita. In terms of cash, at any given point in time the Council holds cash balances in the region of £200m as reported publicly at Cabinet (and also publicly to full Council - in the annual treasury management strategy. The Council finds it necessary to place cash in the order of £50m on overnight deposit often generating no or very little return. This is a function of the paucity of investment opportunities that meet the Council's stringent investment criteria. In this context, the front loading of the cash-flow of the £320m to release savings of £0.8m makes commercial sense and is in keeping with other routine treasury management decisions that are periodically made regarding the stewardship of the Council's investment portfolio. As set out in the Council's publicly published financial regulations these stewardship decisions are delegated to officers and quarterly treasury management reports are monitored by Committee, in public. See here for the link. We will often refer to the use of our cash balances as "internal borrowing". We have not taken out an actual loan from the public works loan board in this instance.

If I've still failed to articulate the differences between cashflow, cash balances and balance sheet reserves then I can only apologise. As a fellow accountant Mr. Dix may be able to make a better fist of it! Either which way, I trust you can now all accept that no payment has been made outside the contract sum or the Council's constitution.

Again, given that your respective blog comments and correspondence with Councillors are generating a lot of enquires for my team, I would ask that you publish this response. I will be sending a copy of this email to Members in due course.

kind regards

Chris

Our minds are not at rest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Response sent to Mr Naylor

In December 2012 the Cabinet report which authorised this contract was quite clear when it said: “Capita’s proposal also includes (within the financial offer described above) approximately £15.3m revenue investment in areas such as information technology (computer hardware and software), and customer services.

This investment not only enables Capita to deliver the transformation it is proposing, but also avoids the Council having to find money in the future to fund replacement technology for systems that are at or nearing the end of their useful life”.

It went on to say: “if the Council chose not to complete this procurement, it would have to: • attempt to replicate the investment, technology and other solutions being proposed by Capita in order to drive out the future savings required”

In September 2013 Barnet paid Capita £15.2 million which Mr Naylor described as follows: “Of the total £320m, £16m of this is paid up-front for the capital investment. The remainder of the service charges are paid quarterly in advance.

The reason for making an up-front payment to Capita for capital investment, and for payment of service charges quarterly in advance is that the Council’s “cost of money” – i.e. the amount that it pays for access to cash, is considerably cheaper than Capita’s.

The Council has internal reserves, and access to the Public Works Loan Board funding which is closely aligned to the Bank of England base rate. So the up-front capital contribution and quarterly in advance payment reduce the overall cost of the contract to the taxpayer.

n August, the Council made £10.5m payment to Capita which represented the balance of the capital contribution for investment in the services, and £4.7m in respect of the service charge.”

The council have made a decision to fund the investment instead of Capita and from Mr Naylor’s response in October there is a very clear inference that this would come from reserves or borrowing.

At the audit Committee of 23rd October the council stated: “The council agreed to fund the capital costs up front because the council benefits from a lower interest rates which keeps the overall cost of funding CSG as low as possible.

The assets are Capita’s, but Capita is obligated to provide them back to the council upon contract termination for at no further cost” - again implying borrowing or lost interest on reserves. Mr Naylor says in his letter of 11 November 2013 that: “there has been no change in policy, and no radical change to the terms of the business model agreed by Cabinet on 6th December 2012”. Based on the above this would appear to be untrue.

The Cabinet report of December 2012 was very clear when it said that: “As dialogue has now closed, the Regulations permit that the Council may only request a bidder to clarify, specify or fine tune a tender, but further detailed negotiation is no longer permitted.”

Relieving Capita of the obligation to fund £16.1 million of capital investment which impacts the cost of the contract by £800,000 does not appear to fit these criteria. Clarification is needed over the specific issue of the origin of the funding source used by the authority to support the £16.1 million.

Mr Naylor asserts in his response that this was not from reserves, yet in his earlier statement he refers to ‘internal reserves’ and the ‘Public Works Loan Board funding’.

Was the funding from reserves, or not?

Was the funding borrowed, and if so, how much, and does not such an action contradict the position taken by Cabinet member Robert Rams in criticising opposition proposals to borrow money for capital investment?

Was the £16.1 million from internal reserves, contrary to Mr Naylor’s statement, or if not, why did Councillor Thomas think so?

If some of the money was obtained by a loan from the Public Works Loan Board, how much did the sum comprise, and does the use of borrowed funding not contradict Councillor Robert Ram’s stated criticism of Labour proposals to fund investment this way?

Why have our councillors remained so reluctant to address the questions publicly, and why has the Leader of the Council remained silent on an issue of such public concern? Why was the belated statement about the £16.1 million at the behest of Councillors Thomas and Rams, rather than the Leader? 

There are further unanswered questions about the authorisation signed by Leader Richard Cornelius on August 5th.

Why is a decision, which is not a decision, listed as a ‘non key decision’? Why are there no background papers listed for this document? 

What exactly are the ‘international financial reporting standards’ to which the document refers? If this authorisation was merely a technicality, why was it necessary for the Leader to approve it, rather than a senior officer acting under delegated powers?

Were the backbench Conservative members aware that the funding of the capital investment was not in fact an ‘upfront’ payment from Capita, but to be undertaken by the council? 

If they were, why have so many statements been made seeming to imply the contrary? Is the truth that although the method of funding the investment this way was arranged between Barnet and Capita, for reasons of political sensitivity the Conservative administration has failed properly to explain this to backbench members or the residents of this borough? 

Is it fair to suggest, as the Labour leader Alison Moore commented at last week’s Cabinet meeting, that the way in which the funding has been arranged would appear to involve a ‘sleight of hand’, and is this really compliant with the principles of transparency, accountability and open government, and the duty to protect the best interests of the residents and tax payers of this borough?

It is clear that there are still many serious outstanding questions left unresolved and for this reason we repeat our call for an immediate investigation into the issue so as to ensure that our elected representatives are fulfilling their roles in the proper scrutiny of the actions of this council.

Derek Dishman

John Dix

Theresa Musgrove 

Roger Tichborne

Mr Naylor is in danger of suffering from the Streisand Effect. He didn't start One Barnet or this chain of correspondence and wasn't in the blogger crosshairs, but by responding to it he has taken the place of the people who should be answering (anyone seen Richard Cornelius since that photo of him in an old folks home, perhaps they kept him?) Rams is wimbling on about tiny good things and ignoring the elephant in the room and Dan Thomas is keeping his head down to avoid the flack. It's not as if there is an election in May 14, is it?

More from Chris and then from us and from Mr Mustard and hopefully soon he will be able to blog about other matters.