Barnet Council - alleged to target ethnic minorities

 

The above clips are from the Daily Mail - this story was also in other papers. You can read the entire story here.

Barnet Council, for a while, were really good at publishing data on all sorts of topics but have become less so, by order of a particular councillor according to information given to Mr Mustard. When Fixed Penalty Notices were first issued in Barnet for environmental contraventions the contract was with NSL as they had already their enforcement foot in the door. When sent out to tender it was won by Kingdom. The problem with these contracts is that they reward contractors for issuing and collecting more FPNs, there is a revenue share arrangement, with Kingdom getting the lion's share of the revenue, 70%. 

Is this a good deal, well Kingdom have built up reserves of £8m so Mr Mustard would, if he was employed by the council, be looking for a better deal based on open book accounting i.e. to establish what the true costs are and then agree a modest profit uplift.

Remember that what Mr Forrester says is an allegation although made within a witness statement which will have been verified by a statement of truth. Mr Mustard thinks this would be a stupid matter to lie about as if ethnic data must be measured the answer will be a checkable fact.

Current data about FPNs is at this location but doesn't include any data about ethnicity.

Previously there was such data when NSL were issuing the FPNs.

In order to make any sense of the ethnicity data you need to know the ethnic breakdown of the residents of Barnet and even that will only be an approximation as every day it changes and as people who visit the borough could drop litter.

As Mr Mustard tweeted recently, there have been zero penalties for dog fouling (really for not clearing up afterwards) the pooper scooper penalty

Mr Mustard now sees that the FOI response is at odds with the council's own dataset in which 0.01% of penalties were for dog fouling, an inadequate focus on what really matters, Mr Mustard would rather tread on a fag butt than in dog mess.

Something is suspect though, given this council response.

Mr Mustard has been contacted in the past by residents of Mill Hill, above the shops, who have nowhere for wheelie bins to be stored, who would put their rubbish out on time and see it not collected and then be hit by a penalty despite being innocent of any wrongdoing & having to pay because they were in a profession where they couldn't afford the slightest blemish on their character, fixed penalty notices can be enforced in the magistrates court. Perhaps this is why timed collections haven't been expanded across the borough, because barnet Council can't keep up with their own colelction schedule, oh yes, Mr Mustard remembers now, the council ran out of the correct coloured bin bags!

The end, for now.