5 September 2012

Hardly a day goes by at the moment

without Mr Mustard writing to all councillors. He only hopes that one day, after he has politely asked enough questions, the councillors themselves will start to ask the questions that all the bloggers are asking instead of swallowing hook, line and sinker whatever over-complicated mess of a report the officers spoon feed them with.

Spot on Albert. One Barnet would fail the elevator pitch.
Here is an email that he sent to all 63 councillors on Monday, 3 September at 7.34am and which about half the councillors have now opened. It is holiday season and they don't ever all get opened. Despite being given IT equipment to use some councillors delete everything unread and two had full inboxes today probably because they had done nothing in August. Allowances should only be paid for 11 months of the year if August is to be treated as a holiday. Better services for less money? 

Good morning councillors

I thought you might be interested in the attached FOI answer (you can use FOI to find out what is going on in your own organisation if you wish, strange though it may seem).

Having read the article on the link below I was pondering about management at Barnet Council.


Look at the attached pdf of the proposed management structure to support One Barnet and the commissioning council.

There are, at a quick count, 26 Heads of Service who are management grade 4.
 
Now you would think, would you not, that there wouldn't me much in the way of management about the head of something, but no, there are 23 extra managers about that with grades from 5 to 8 (Chief Exec)?

I can justify probably half a dozen posts higher than the Head of something but not 23.

Just stop and think about it.

Would you agree with me that One Barnet is somewhat management resource heavy. What on earth are they all going to do?

Answers on a postcard please.



Proposed Senior Management Structure

In case you want to apply for any of these juicy posts you can find some of them here (an awful lot of jobs at the crematorium have been advertised Mrs Angry. Do you suppose that the prospect of being sold off has caused many of the existing experienced employees to leave? You could do the Head of Audit job Mrs A which only requires you to dodge difficult questions from yourself and Mr Reasonable and not much else except maybe escorting visitors to the toilet when you also redact the information they wanted to see).
 
How many postcards (or even emails as it is 2012) will Mr Mustard receive from the Cabinet? Any advance on zero?
 
Yours frugally
 
Mr Mustard

2 comments:

  1. Mr Mustard: I think in the interests of transparency you should name and shame those who delete emails unread, or whose inboxes are full. And I agree: if councillors are going to award themselves month long school holidays, they should lose a month's worth of allowances.

    ReplyDelete
  2. and if they don't do anything the rest of the time they should lose the other 11 months!

    In the brave new world of One Barnet they will of course be voting themselves a 70% allowance decrease to go with the reduced responsibility. Better councillors for less money!

    ReplyDelete

I now moderate comments in the light of the Delfi case. Due to the current high incidence of spam I have had to turn word verification on.