Visitor Vouchers do not expire

Yesterday Mr Mustard and his co-director were puzzled by the ridiculously difficult processes which exist at Barking & Dagenham and Barnet councils when it comes to the simple task of buying visitor vouchers.

In the Barking case the prospective purchaser is 88 years old and has never touched a computer keyboard and although pretty with it she is happy with her life as it is and doesn't need a new challenge. Of course, she needs vouchers if she isn't going to be isolated by having no visitors. Barking have CPZs which are nowhere near the town centre but whose hours extend late into the evening for no obvious reason (@publicnaylor the Chief Executive has been contacted about it but did not respond although he is probably busy having just started in Barking).

This is what the website says

so having clicked on the link for Visitor Vouchers you would expect to be taken to a form to complete with your address and credit card details. Not so. You get a pdf form which opens, which you have to print out (which rather assumes everyone has a printer at home) complete and then post to the council with a cheque. Many people no longer have cheque books. You can go to the one-stop shop in the library to do this but they won't process the form and give you the Vouchers, they will merely print out the form for you to complete and pass it on. Councils are restricting choice to one method which they find the most convenient rather than providing a number of methods to suit their many residents, young and old. The tail should not wag the dog.

Might Mr Mustard mention at this stage that Barking & Dagenham Council has many services which are run by a joint venture with old friends Agilisys who are neither agile or systematic if this process (one presumes it is provided by them as it is IT) is the yardstick. Mr Mustard thought that one of the justifications for such a venture was the supposedly cutting edge technology they provide. 

Transformation can leave you worse off than before

About as sharp as a beachball.

Then on to Barnet, where permit renewals are done by Crapita.

Visitor vouchers can be purchased on line (and by phone). The bit that caught Mr Mustard's eye was the requirement to set an expiry date 3 year's hence. Being Mr Mustard he tried to bend the system and get future dated vouchers, that failed with a maximum 7 days forward dating being allowed. He then tried to short date his vouchers and was allowed to steal a year of validity from himself, viz:

Mr Mustard knew this was not council policy, as he and others had been over this particular matter with councillors and parking management, so he tweeted the Chief Executive but the tweet seems to have gone into a black hole. He also contacted parking management who responded that Crapita's system has to have an expiry date. The expiry date of their contract can't come soon enough.

So the council sign up for 10 years with Crapita because ruling councillors think they are the answer to all their prayers and we get clunky software foisted upon us, probably because they have already written it for another council which does use expiry dates, and is not tailored to our specific needs. Mr Mustard will henceforth refer to software from capita as Crapware. Doubtless Crapita will argue that you can just ignore the expiry date, it isn't printed on the front of the vouchers and no harm is done but it sows doubt in the mind of the person, probably causes people to order fewer vouchers more often so they don't get stuck with ones which have "expired" (except they haven't) causes phone calls to the call centre and makes think people think that Barnet Council are an incompetent bunch of t*ssers which doubtless ruling councillors would prefer not to be the case (add own joke here).

Councillors need to actually experience what residents do in order to find out for themselves how Crapita things are. They won't because they won't want to know the answer. Crapita could probably press the nuclear button and councillors would say that lessons have been learned and it won't happen again going forward. They would lose too much face to admit what a disaster the outsourcing is.

Buy how ever many visitor vouchers you need and don't worry residents, they do not expire, whatever the council website tells you to the contrary.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Seize your opportunity to halt One Barnet

Here is the draft of joint letter, sent by the famous five Barnet Bloggers to 62 councillors today (we left Richard Cornelius off the distribution list and doubtless another councillor will tell him what we have said)

Ten councillors have already opened their email, which happens to be sent by Mr Mustard on behalf of the famous five Barnet Bloggers because he is probably the one who spends most time glued to his keyboard.

from Cabinet Resources Committee of 18 Oct 12.

Dear Councillors

In the next few days you will be asked to vote on a motion of no confidence in the Conservative party leader Richard Cornelius.

You will no doubt be asked to express your loyalty to Councillor Cornelius and to defeat the motion.

As local residents we would like to ask you to think very carefully about the consequences of such an action.

We know that many of you are now deeply concerned about the future of the Conservative administration, that you have profound misgivings about the viability of the One Barnet programme, and that you are also concerned by the response of the leader to issues arising from the arrest and consequent charging of your colleague Councillor Brian Coleman, in relation to an alleged assault. The announcement today that the much trumpeted Landmark Library plan has fallen through can only add to your sense of misgiving. 

The continuing difficulties felt by residents and traders over the contentious parking policy has caused enormous damage to the relationship of trust between this administration and the residents of Barnet, and now it has become abundantly clear that the massive scale of privatisation of a further £1 billion worth of council services envisaged by the One Barnet project is hugely unpopular not only amongst residents and voters, but within your own ranks.

Last week Andrew Travers,  the newly appointed ‘interim’ Chief Executive of Barnet Council, affirmed to a committee that the ‘Joint Venture’ model was still very much under consideration, despite the fact that elected members have not been involved in the discussions for such a proposal, and that the leader has stated previously that he was being excluded from such discussions.

Councillors must ask themselves why they are being distanced from policy decisions of such vital significance. Who is in control of this council, councillors or the officers of the senior management team?

Once the £1 billion contracts are signed, of course, elected members will effectively lose all control over almost all of our council services, which will then be in the hands of unaccountable private companies for a period of ten years, with huge financial penalties to the authority, that is to say to residents, should any serious difficulties arise, which they inevitably will.

Councillors must also ask why there never been an independent assessment of the risks posed by the One Barnet programme, and why there has been such a clear failure to mitigate the risk of conflict of interest raised by the exchange of senior officers between the council and the private companies bidding for contracts as part of the One Barnet programme.

Such an apparent lack of regulation might reasonably be said to have compromised the whole procurement process, and to have exposed the authority to legal challenge, a prospect already a clear possibility on the basis of the blatantly inadequate consultation with the residents and stakeholders who will be bearing the full impact of the privatisation of almost all our council services.

Another question that must be addressed is the extraordinary level of cost to local taxpayers of Agilysis/iMPOWER, the consultants who are acting as the One Barnet ‘implementation partners’ – newly released figures reveal that their bill for September alone cost us nearly half a million pounds, and spending on all consultants, wildly out of control, is now estimated to reach a staggering total of £9.5 million.

Such extravagance with taxpayers’ money at a time of austerity, with no return in the form of savings is clearly a reckless indulgence, benefiting no one other than the consultants themselves. In combination with the loss in revenue as a result of the newly privatised parking service, it perfectly illustrates the improbability of the delivery of any of the promised savings from the outsourced profit of the One Barnet programme.

Last week Cornwall County Council voted to halt their own Joint Venture proposals at a late stage in the negotiations, due to the extent of concern felt by councillors and residents over the plans for their large scale privatisation of council services. The Conservative leader lost a vote of no confidence, having shown a determination to proceed with the plans in the face of enormous opposition.

Now here in Barnet you, our elected representatives, face the same choice as your Cornish counterparts - and now is the time for you to have the courage to act.

Please use this opportunity to bring a halt to the One Barnet programme and instigate a fundamental review of a commitment which will place the long term future of our borough, our services, our residents, in the hands of unaccountable private sector companies using us for their own profit.

Please take this last opportunity to stand up for what you know is right, what is the sensible thing to do.

Derek Dishman

John Dix

Vicki Morris

Theresa Musgrove

Roger Tichborne

The Friday Joke - Mr Mustard is a cyberstalker

Sex up that dossier

The above paragraph is from a decision of the Information Commissioner not to release information about who carried out the evaluation of the Invitation to Submit Outline Solutions for the Development and Regulatory Services tender. This is information which every resident of Barnet ought to be told - who is deciding, the act of doing all the donkey work, who, what and how will be outsourced. It is possible for Mr Mustard to appeal to a tribunal but that would be to take a lot of his time away from the blog so he isn't likely to do so.

You do have to laugh at the way the council writes as "information provided under the FOIA" is of course information that is properly available. You can be sure that Barnet Council haven't given Mr Mustard anything he isn't 101% entitled to see. If if doubt, they say no with a capital N.

Note that people "felt" they have "been stalked". Has Mr Mustard been following staff to work, sitting outside the gym they exercise at, taking long range paparazzi pictures of them on holiday on the beach, sending anonymous hate mail or love notes to them at home? 

(oh, he did post Brian Coleman an email to his home but only because he said he didn't want to receive round robin emails - hence the personal one just to him with a signed post-it note - did Mr Mustard misunderstand? Brian is not an employee, and he is of course big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Brian can write about Mr Mustard in his own somewhat turgid blog now - bling bling) 

no, of course he didn't. What did Mr Mustard do? Well he simply did what everyone else does when he sees a name, he puts it into google which gives you results from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other places and he puts the information together to see what sort of an employee we have been blessed or burdened with.

Funnily enough Mr Mustard's alter ego, a debt collector, gets friend requests on LinkedIn & Facebook from debtors who owe money. He turns them down. Twitter followers he usually allows.

Whoever wrote that somewhat embellished account to the ICO didn't know that a different governance officer had previously checked out Mr Mustard on google and Mr Mustard will bet everything he owns that at least one (a safe bet, but probably dozens) of council staff have googled him and his alter ego. Remember Barnet Council that all bloggers have tracking software installed, know the ISP address of the council's computers and know what search terms you use to land on the blog. You also forget that when a posting was written about Dogstar a member of staff at Barnet Homes saw it as he duty to tell them, thus encouraging them to check out Mr Mustard (except it isn't cyberstalking, it is just curiosity)

NLBP self inflicted damage

Now today Mr Mustard read Roger's blog about the Friern Barnet library squatters, here. He noticed that the Barnet Council representative was called Heather Wills. Mr Mustard had not heard of her so he googled her, oh yes he did. Off you go and do it and see what you can find out and then compare to Mr Mustard's findings.

First stop, Barnet Council website, put her name in the search box and get this page of a report showing that she has inherited a disastrous Library project.

Next stop google. That leads you first to LinkedIn where 4 pages of blurb show you that Heather is not shy & retiring and surely won't mind the extra publicity here. She is the "Libraries Strategy Programme Manager (interim)" and has been since February 12. It is funny because customer services and libraries have been bolted together and to "save money" one of the Heads of Department posts has been left unfilled, see this blog. The interim post is not in the establishment list for Libraries and we can be sure that the cost of this will be more than the post left vacant. Not exactly complete or honest then the DPR was it?

Previously Heather was the Divisional Director Corporate Policy and Public Affairs and the Head of Community Cohesion and Equalities at Barking & Dagenham Council where there is a joint venture between the council and, wait for it, Agilisys. What a coincidence that she should move from one Agilisys linked company to another.

Prior to that she was the Idea Stores Programme Director at Tower Hamlets Council where one of her achievements was 

- 4 ground-breaking library and adult education service built and opened to the public.

Don't go getting ideas Heather about opening 4 libraries in Barnet. In this borough they get closed.

The goods news is that she has been a senior librarian and has an MBA and is a Bachelor of Library Science from the University of Wales (a 1st, no less). She will still have to do what councillors want which is closing libraries.

Oh, one of her listed specialities is "Libraries & heritage". No need to mention the heritage part in Barnet, Heather, as one museum is closed and its contents being auctioned off and the other one will be closed as soon as the council can work out how to do so.

Heather was flavour of the month in 2005 when she was at Tower Hamlets and was visited by the Commons Committee for Culture, Media and Sport. You can find the report on the Internet and her are some little snippets.

Ms Miranda McKearney, from the Reading Agency, argued persuasively that libraries’ role should be about reading, as an activity, rather than a focus on books themselves as physical objects for lending. She said “To me their role in encouraging reading is about…active intervention at key life stages in a way that connects to policy and helps build the kind of society that we want”. Ms Wills, from the Idea Store programme in Tower Hamlets, agreed saying “at the top of my list [would be] a contribution to ‘life-long learning’ in its widest sense” from support for the under-fives to adult evening classes.

We recall the Secretary of State’s evidence in 2003 that “the best libraries are undoubtedly the libraries that, when you walk into them, you do not know whether you are walking into a job centre, an Internet café, a juice bar or a library.” This was likely to have been, at least in part, a reference to the Idea Stores in Tower Hamlets which have precipitated something of a renaissance in Bow. Ms Wills told us that, despite all the improvements in environs, book stocks, facilities and opening hours, if the building still had “library” on the door, “we probably would not have achieved the significant results that we have.” We recognise and support the importance of listening to the results of consultation with service users—and we were extremely impressed by all the Idea Stores had to offer (inside and out)—but we regret that the word “library” seems to have accreted such negative overtones. We would far prefer to see the re-invigoration of what libraries mean to the public (by improvement of the services) than the rebranding of institutions.

Do you suppose that Heather would love to hear from Friern Barnet residents about how they would like to have reading groups in the Friern Barnet library building? You can email her at heather.wills@barnet.gov.uk (assuming the usual mail format applies).

Heather gets a mention in "The Network Newsletter: tackling social exclusion in libraries, museums, archives and galleries" issue 33, June 04 in respect of an LGUI briefing "The latest issue contains a short piece by Heather Wills, Tower Hamlets’s Idea Store Programme Director, on how the setting up of Idea Stores has turned round library usage – “The Idea Store has very quickly become the place to be for the local community.” Readers will rapidly link to the problem of exclusion of the less mobile of Friern Barnet who cannot easily get to Tally Ho.

Heather appeared again in Parliament, here, in January 2010, when she was a witness on the matter of Preventing Violent Extremism. That "expertise" won't be needed in Friern Barnet either where the library occupiers are peaceful, they offered Mrs Angry a cup of tea which she declined (she would probably have accepted a glass of Sauvignon) and where local residents simply want their library back, which is hardly an extreme act.

No twitter account could be found. If you know otherwise do let Mr Mustard know.

Oh dear Facebook is such a giveaway especially now the new privacy settings are such a complicated mess tending towards openness and transparency. Mr Mustard is on it but minimises the information he puts on there. One of Heather's friends on Facebook is one Bill Murphy, the AD of Customer Services and Libraries. Now Bill was at Barking & Dagenham from 2007 to 2010 which overlaps with Heather's time there. Perhaps Agilisys isn't the reason why Heather has suddenly landed in Barnet (and the job she has now seems lower status than the one she had at B&D) but Bill is. This world of interims is far too small and cosy for Mr Mustard's liking.

Moving on to Companies House free Webcheck service we find the formation of a Heather Wills Ltd on 13 March 2012 which is suspiciously soon after her arrival in Barnet. It seems that someone is suggesting that interims become Town Hall Tax Dodgers, it is more virulent than E-coli, and it would be good to know if it is the idea of other Town Hall Tax Dodgers (© Eric Pickles MP) or if it is Hays HR. If you know, do tell. Heather's date of birth is recorded as 16 June 1967 (please don't accuse Mr Mustard of being ungallant, Companies House insist on the date, not him) and her occupation as Local Government Manager, the sort of description that applies to a person who should be paying PAYE. Maybe she does but the formation of this company would suggest she has stopped since joining Barnet Council.

The other thing about Heather is why, if she is a Libraries Strategy Programme Manager she is running off to Friern Barnet Library to deal with its occupation by Dave, Phoenix and friends from Camden. That doesn't sound to me like the sort of blue sky thinking she would be involved in, more the act of a line manager with a problem. This again smacks of her being an employee who should be on PAYE.

Heather gets a credit in a film in B&D (no, not that sort of film) and here it is. She does not appear, the credit is in the text at the bottom.

Might Mr Mustard suggest a sequel that you could fund in One Barnet. The Marvel of Sticky End (as there is no One Barnet plan B and no other outcome is possible).

It is late and Mr Mustard doesn't really want to know any more about Heather Wills; she isn't that interesting except that Mr Mustard, along with every other Barnet resident, has to pay an inordinate sum for her to strut her stuff in Barnet, possibly PAYE free.

Finally, a little gem. Heather was quoted in the Guardian on 11 July 2004. You can read all about it on the link but lets just see what heather said:

This is the result of a poll of residents, whose biggest complaint about the old libraries were that they weren't conveniently located. 'People wanted them to be in the high street, where they could pop in while shopping,' says Heather Wills, who is in charge of the programme.

So Heather, to Friern Barnet, there is as you know an (almost) empty building in the heart of the community next to the British Legion and near the shops. Best start planning for the grand reopening. Mr Mustard is sure that local residents could put a play on for you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

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

£7m in and on Amber alert (with red blotches)

Mr Mustard realised it was quite a while since he reported generally on One Barnet but then no-one inside the council seems to have reported on it since 24 April (to Budget & Performance Overview & Scrutiny - papers here ; for now you will have to download the whole thing as the Appendix 1 link seems to be broken).

The pdf is sadly sideways as Mr Mustard doesn't lash out hundreds of pounds on software. If some kind soul wants to use their version of Adobe Acrobat to turn this round for Mr Mustard it would be greatly appreciated (please email the corrected version to mrmustard@zoho.com) . If you download it from scribd you can view it sideways on the screen, just not save it, and it will print correctly.

One Barnet Programme Report 24 April 12

If you want to see it the easier way around, here we go, with a series of jpg images that you can click on to increase in size:

Some points extracted from the above:

How is the legal services merger going? It is too early to say until all this One Barnet nonsense is out of the way although we have seen Harrow staff not know that planning decisions cannot be taken after a certain time and try to give advice after a vote has been taken (too late!).

The HR update is a masterpiece of delusion. Mr Mustard doubts that a single person is looking forward to working for BT, Crapita or EC Harris.

This report shows how worthless the traffic light system is. For parking two of the indicators were amber and so overall the project was green which is an over-generous way of marking. All the accounts, and secret documents, that have reached the eyes & ears of Mr Mustard show that the new contract is a shambles and this is in the public domain given how badly appeals have been going for the council at PATAS.

The delay of the IPT upgrade is a significant issue ...data within detailed business cases will be less robust (i.e. wrong )  but One Barnet ploughs on regardless.

Route sharing with Brent didn't last very long due to customer complaint. Mr Mustard expects that the customer was put last in the process and was driven all round Brent & Barnet before reaching their destination like a holidaymaker on a cheap trip in a coach on the Costa del Sol.

The transport bureau hasn't been very well planned; "issues with staff transfer" and "the lack of IT system in the WLA Transport Bureau" yes, in 2012!

Oh dear me Robert Rams, the worst performing project is Libraries and your project is going to take over 3 years to complete. "Programme is still developing a fully worked and approved plan..."

The major risks are so worrying that the public cannot be allowed to see them (p33). Mr Mustard thinks we should be told so has the matter with the Information Commissioner.

Major issues. Oh dear Robert, there is  no budget for library transformation. That may be a blessing as it will stop change occurring.

Just look at the spending on this vanity project. By April 2013 the allocated spend will be £9,172,748 and that is without valuing the time of management and staff taken off their normal daily jobs.

£9m spent and nothing really to show for it.

Stop the world, let Mr Mustard off.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The Friday Joke 2 - Better services with less money

Real pigs are adorable.

You are probably as sick of hearing this mantra as Mr Mustard is:

"Better services with less money" is officially known as one of the three priority outcomes in the 2010/13 Corporate Plan.

Agilisys Ltd supported by their sub-contractor iMPOWER Consulting Ltd are the council's implementation partner for the One Barnet programme. 

You would therefore expect that they would completely buy into the corporate plan and that their fees would go down in the future and that they would provide "Better services with less money"? Surely they must do that as otherwise it would be completely hypocritical of them to want to be treated differently to the many suppliers who will come under pressure to reduce prices and provide a better service.

Mr Mustard expects you have worked out the answer. Here is part of paragraph 6.1 of the contract with them:

Indexing: in accordance with the provisions of the Contract at the commencement date of the contract and on the anniversaries of that date the charges shall be varied by the application of the following formula:

NC = EC * X
Where NC= New Charge
EC = Existing Charge and
X = 1 + (%change in RPIX Index) ÷ 100

which in plain English means that if the Retail Price Index (excluding mortgage payments) goes up by, say, 4% in a year the hourly rates of Agilisys will also go up by 4% 

If you are suffering cuts to your council service or if what you have to pay for that service is rising then get hold of Cllr Thomas, who approved the placement of this contract, and ask him why he let council officers (employees to you and me) sign a contract with the well paid consultants at Agilisys which includes inflationary increases. The normal staff are getting no pay increase this year, again, not even the lowest paid ones. The likes of Pam Wharfe and Craig Cooper who are both on £132,480 p.a. can just about manage without an increase but staff on £15,000 a year need every extra penny.

Agilisys implement reductions for others whilst snarfing up increases for themselves.

Diabolical hypocrisy.

Yours frugally, and not the slightest bit surprised

Mr Mustard

Was Nick looking a bit shabby this morning?

Welcome

Just over 1,300 of the UK's most senior leaders (and Nick Walkley) in local authorities gathered yesterday at the Grosvenor House Hotel, for a day and evening of learning and sharing of best practice.

The momentous day for local authorities started with the inaugural day time LGC Future Thinking and Best Practice Summit; exclusive to awards attendees, the summit offered a unique opportunity to hear first-hand from the councils shortlisted for Council of the Year and Most Improved Council as they made their final presentations live to the judges. Throughout the day, presentations from previous winners, a series of big issue (has Nick been seen outside Arnos Grove tube with a bundle of papers for sale?; The Big Issue is a better read than any One Barnet report) future thinking discussions and organised networking sessions (what, no disorganised sessions?), promoted the sharing of essential best practice. After the learning sessions had taken place, the awards commenced. With a record breaking audience in the history of the sixteen year history of the awards, the winners of the LGC Awards 2012 were announced.

An evening of mutual back slapping and too much booze for some. Council Tax payers will have the One Barnet headache for the next 10 years.

Who was there, yes good old Nick Walkley and as a judge no less, and now try not to laugh, what category was he judging? "Most improved council of the year". How would he know?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-16109206

Look who the sponsor is. Is this what we get for paying Agilisys £250k+ in a month. A day out for Nick and all the booze he can drink (he may have paid for his own beer, one never knows).

Councils put themselves forward for these vanity awards and sensibly this year Barnet Council decided to keep a low profile. A good decision.

However, given that Barnet Council would win an award for Worst Procurement Achievement then Mr Mustard, for one, thinks that non-stick Nick's time would be better spent sorting out Barnet Council than gadding off to the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard