Barnet Council - Curious about their finances? then ask?

Web page with more information here.

Finance staff don't bite, they just give you what you are entitled to, with personal data crossed out, and help you refine your request if it isn't clear.

Give it a try.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Internal audit now agree with armchair auditor Mr Mustard

For almost 2 years Mr Mustard has been reporting on the failures of the NSL contract. No-one at the council (well no-one in power anyway) seemed to care or even, Richard Cornelius told a public meeting that the contract was making savings, how would he have known? Finally, Internal Audit have caught up with Armchair Audit (forget External Audit who have their eyes on a bigger prize; the NHS).

Here is the accurate state of the One Barnet / NSL parking enforcement contract

Imagine if the enforcement and bailiff processes were also to be audited what a catalogue of catastrophe would come to light?

Mr Mustard has submitted some questions about this report to Audit Committee which is next Tuesday 29 April at 7pm at Hendon Town Hall with Lord Palmer (he is Monroe to the bloggers, a gentleman who now has bigger fish to fry in the House of Lords) and just to make his last chairing of a meeting memorable and exciting Mr Mustard is busy thinking up some devilish curve ball questions for him to try to hit out of the park.

Mr Mustard does hope that Monroe will be free for a glass of something refreshing in the Greyhound afterwards - an emailed invitation has been sent.

One Barnet, the commissioning Council, really isn't working.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Where did the NSL contract savings go to?

Parking contract savings - as safe as houses?

Calculator and cup of tea at the ready? then armchair audit time it is.

Back on 23 September Mr Mustard attended the Cabinet Resources Committee. It was receiving a report from Finance about the financial performance for the first quarter of the council tax year i.e. for April to June 13. For the first time in Mr Mustard's short but eventful life (since 10 March 2011 - ha, he is in his terrible twos phase) there was an overspend, of £2,384,000 (to nearest £thousand) and the biggest culprit was "Streetscene" (hard to tell exactly from the name what that encompasses but it will become clearer later) which was £2,163,000 overspent on a budget of £15,212,000 a spectacularly awful result which is 14% over budget.

Now Mr Mustard hastens to add that these were the projected outturns for the end of the year so there was still 9 months remaining in which to get back on track (or go further off the rails!) but clawing 14% back, or 7 weeks of expenses to put it another way, looks like a mighty ask.

The way in which the figures were presented was insufficiently precise at the Directorate level for Mr Mustard and this is how the streetscene budget problem was presented in the written report:

The Street Scene Directorate is forecasting an overspend of £2.163m which includes:
•   An overspend of £1.081m in  the Special  Parking  Account. This  is  due to cost pressure on the NSL contract of £0.800m plus shortfalls in income of £0.378m.
•  The Parking service is forecasting an overspend of £0.434m, due to shortfalls in off street parking. (this is a different overspend to the one above)
•  An overspend of £0.380m in the Waste service is a result of domestic refuse staff cost pressures, however it is anticipated that the May Gurney contract negotiation should bring this back in line.
•  An overspend of £0.170m in  Street Lighting  is  as a result  of budgeted savings that will now not be achieved during the year.
•  A Highway Maintenance overspend of £0.246m is a result of winter maintenance pressures.

That was all far to vague for Mr Mustard (who had failed to notice Appendix 2 where the answer to his question was to be found) so he asked for a breakdown of the £2.163m and he was helpfully sent a copy of the table although he could have been pointed at it. Here it is:

Description	Budget V1	Q1 forecast	Variation
	£'000	£'000	£'000
Street Scene Management Team	647	631	-16
Business Improvement	333	332	-1
Mortuary	136	134	-2
Street Lighting	6,339	6,509	170
Transport	-6	-131	-125
Highways Inspection/Maintenance	508	754	246
Parking	-747	-313	434
Parks, Street Cleaning & Grounds Maintenance	5,052	5,084	32
Street Cleansing	4,236	4,240	4
Waste	2,911	3,291	380
Recycling	3,278	3,238	-40
Streetscene	22,687	23,769	1,082
Special Parking Account	-7,475	-6,394	1,081
Total	15,212	17,375	2,163

Variations in red are underspends so no need to worry about those.

The street lighting overspend is last year's budget failure carried forward. Surely we can just buy fewer lamp posts? It's not as if anything appears to be wrong with the ones that are being taken out.

There is winter pressure on highways maintenance. Mr Mustard seems to think that much greater sums have been spent in previous years and this lack of spend will shortly show up as potholes.

Parking refers to the anticipated spend in off street car parks. Mr Mustard thinks that this would magically come back to what it was if the system and charges are put back to what they were when he started blogging i.e. install cash parking meters (and card) and make prices those of 2010 or lower until there is 90% occupancy of car parks most of the time.

The waste overspend of £380k is expected to be salvaged from changing to in-house and away from May Gurney (except that they are going to continue to run the Summers Lane recycling depot - shiny new signs everywhere and a most useful facility). When the dust settles, we'll see.

So everything except for on-street parking, permits and PCNs is £1,082,000 behind budget and the Special Parking Account (on-street parking, permits and PCNs) is very nearly the same at £1,081,000 behind budget. The annual increase in the SPA budget was always going to be hard to maintain and Mr Mustard has told the relevant councillors to wean themselves off this income stream which just shouldn't be there. So instead of ripping almost £7.5m out of the pockets of the motorist (the majority of whom are also residents) a mere £6.4m will be filched instead; both surpluses are obscene.

The SPA budget problem was explained as "Cost pressure on NSL contract plus shortfall on income". The shortfall is easily fixed with cash parking meters but the NSL overspend had Mr Mustard foxed as it is a fixed price contract. So he asked for a breakdown, the one that should have supplied to councillors in the report (which to be fair Cllr Alan Schneiderman did pick up on in the pre-scrutiny meeting) and here it is:

Reason	£,000
Vacant Managers Post	-41
Agency Costs (parking manager back fill) and Pension strain	107
Signs and Lines	100
NSL Parking deployed Hours and bit payments.	821
Software license and support	-7
On street parking/parking suspension fees/Parking permits	378
DLO charges for suspensions	143
Reduced SLA with Parking Design team	-421
Total	1,080

So we have had an interim parking manager since the NSL contract started on 1 May 12. Why? is the startlingly obvious question. Why we employ someone who has to travel miles when there must be perfectly good candidates available locally is hard to fathom. Has the council even advertised or is it that the reputation of parking at Barnet is so bad (as has been reported to Mr Mustard by another council parking department less than 20 miles away) that there are no takers? It's not as if parking is a temporary thing, there will be a need for a parking manager into the next decade at least. Anyway that is £66,000 to the bad.

Nice to see real money being spent on signs and lines. Only another £900,000 needed.

We'll come to the £821,000 in a minute in yet another table.

Is it any wonder that the income from on-street parking and permits is down. Prices were increased markedly and that caused behavioural changes and suppressed the income. Making it harder to pay also had an effect; cash is universal and the meter removal policy has hit the council hard. Permit income will slowly recover now that they are £40 again.

Then we have the usual inter department budgeting which seems to be such a waste of time, moving money from the left pocket to the right. An extra £143,000 paid to the DLO (Direct Labour Organisation) for suspensions. How many suspensions are going on and what does one suspension cost? This figure seems high.

Now Mr Mustard was concerned about cost pressures of £800,000 on the NSL Ltd parking enforcement contract, you know the one which was advertised as saving us £600,000 and here is a screen print from the council's website which is looking rather out of date

Then Mr Mustard asked for a breakdown of the figure of £821,000 as he likes everything to be clear. Here it is.

	£’000	£’000
2012.13 budget (NSL Contract)		3,020
Savings 13.14		-349
13.14 budget		2,671
13.14 Spend
Deployed hours	541
BIT Payments (Contract management KPIs)	291
Basic Contract Payment	2,635
NSL Non-Scheduled Items	25
13.14 projection		3,492
Difference		821

Now the standard monthly payment to NSL this year is £212,755.64 giving a base annual payment of £2,553,067 and on top of this about £25,000 a month (yes, a month) is paid through NSL to Verrus for the largely unloved PayByPhone system giving another £300,000 per year (2012/13 payments came to £290,559). This seems an extraordinary amount for processing payments willingly made of £2,945,682 from Pay & Display (as it was quaintly described in the SPA) and another £300,000 or so of car park income. A fee equivalent to 9% just for holding your hand out and taking money seems like remarkably poor value.

So last year £3,020,000 was budgeted for NSL and base fees & charges amounted to £2,843,626 and the rest was swallowed up an extra hours payment of £104,000 and by one-off transition costs such as redundancy payments. In version 2.5 of the Business Plan, which went through a dozen iterations, are the projected annual costs of parking enforcement for the 5 year term, viz:

Projected costs of Options	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15	2015/16	2016/17	Total
	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s
NSL – Cost of Contract	3,246	3,220	3,328	3,328	3,328	16,451

which leaves no scope for a saving of £349,000 in this financial year 2013/14 and ignores inflation. Mr Mustard asked under Freedom of Information legislation for the NSL contract and he did receive most of it although the financial information was, of course, redacted. Thus Mr Mustard can't tie the actual payments to the budgeted figures but a budget of £2,671,000 against an annual payment of £2,850,000 is utterly unrealistic.

What the budget also shows is that there is no budget for the KPI (Key performance indicator) performance payments which might amount to another £291,000 in 2013/14 except they can't as the performance was stuck at minus 6 at the start of the year so it should be 6 months before a KPI payment is due assuming performance improves every single month. Mr Mustard will be checking the actual KPI measurements at the year end.

Now the really shocking figure is the one of £541,000 for deployed hours which should have said "extra deployed hours". Now why are the council trying to save £600,000 p.a. and then negate 90% of the proposed savings by  spending on extra enforcement hours.

Now call Mr Mustard suspicious if you like but an extra £541,000 spent on enforcement is likely to lead to a net PCN income of at least £1million. That wouldn't be the motivation, would it?

We know that the contract was failing all the way through 2012/13 and so the solution looks like rather than termination is to throw money at the contract to make it work in 2013/14 and it is one of the few contracts that the council enters which works this way,i.e. the more you spend the more you gain, always assuming that all the extra marginal parking tickets don't just lead to extra appeals to PATAS.

One final point is that NSL are entitled to 50% of the savings they generate on the contract. No "options proposals" were suggested in the first year of the contract. The 50% saving is meant to encourage and reward innovation. 

There hasn't been any.

This is an early One Barnet contract. It hasn't made the anticipated savings. Let's hope that NSCSO and DRS are better (don't hold your breath).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Chasing the One Barnet cheese ( £1bn special)

Mr Mustard doesn't plan to enter the cheese rolling competition preferring to buy his at Waitrose. The first prize is the cheese weighing 6 or 7lb, the second prize is £10 and the third prize is £5. Lots of info here.

Some large companies have entered for the One Barnet £1bn competition but the course is starting to look a little steep and entrants are starting to worry about damaged reputations and if the prize is worth the candle. On that topic Mr Mustard has a message for you, BT, Capita and EC Harris (no-one else left in the running is there?) that he will be checking your invoices every single month for the entire life of the contract. He will be vetting every single item, doubtless as a double act with Mr Reasonable, and making sure that the client side at Barnet Council do the jobs they are paid for and penalise every single contract breach. You will probably wish you had never bid and won. Stop and think now before you go on. Also remember how incompetent Barnet Council are and how what you supply will be that much more difficult to achieve than what a well run council can manage.

These contracts are complex and Barnet Council haven't even managed to stick to timetable despite being overrun with supposed expert (definitely expensive) consultants to do all the hard work whilst the senior officers struggle on at the same time with business as usual and don't manage to do either properly.

Here is a recent message from Craig Cooper, the unCommercial Director (sorry Craig I have been a bit slow getting this one into print, had other more pressing items to deal with, bloggers have to prioritise as well you know)

---

From: Barbour, Helen - On Behalf Of Cooper, Craig

Sent: 21 June 2012 - 12:39

To:

Subject: New Support and Customer Services Organisation (NSCSO) and Development and Regulatory Services (DRS) Project Timescales

Dear Colleague

As you will have read already in the fortnightly messages, the project teams have been working hard to finalise the NSCSO and DRS project timetables to make sure that both of these projects run smoothly in the final stages of transfer and that they don't both go live on the same day.

We have now had approval from Council Directors' Group on the new project timings and I would like to update you on what this means for you.

We have tried to set a realistic timetable with some level of flexibility and contingency built in which means we are confident we can work within these timescales. We have planned both projects to allow enough time for a thorough evaluation and a 12-week mobilisation period, to ensure a smooth handover to the new providers. Although the two mobilisation periods will overlap, we have agreed that NSCSO will go live slightly before DRS.

Here is the timetable for awarding the contract to the new provider, the mobilisation period and the final transfer date:

NSCSO

Week beginning 28 November meeting papers for Cabinet Resources Committee, with a recommendation of the preferred bidder for NSCSO, will be published on the council website. This means you will know who the evaluation team are recommending as the new provider. There will be staff briefings on the preferred bidder recommendation during this week.

Week beginning 6 December 2012 Cabinet Resources Committee will make the final decision on the new provider for NSCSO.

Week beginning 12 December 2012 the Overview and Scrutiny Committee will meet and following this, the letter to bidders informing them of the decision will be issued.

Week beginning 8 January 2013 mobilisation of staff will begin. This will include three-way meetings where the new provider will consult the unions on their proposed measures, staff briefings and one-to-one meetings with the new provider. We will tell you more about what the mobilisation period will entail at staff briefings in the autumn.

Week beginning 1 April 2013 all in-scope staff will transfer to the new provider

DRS

Week beginning 7 January 2013 meeting papers for Cabinet Resources Committee, with a recommendation of the preferred bidder for DRS, will be published on the council website. This means you will know who the evaluation team are recommending as the new provider. There will be staff briefings on the preferred bidder recommendation during this week.

Week beginning 14 January 2013 Cabinet Resources Committee will make the final decision on the new provider for DRS.

Week beginning 21 January 2013 the Overview and Scrutiny Committee will meet and following this the letter to bidders informing them of the decision will be issued.

Week beginning 11 February 2013 mobilisation with staff will begin. This will include three-way meetings where the new provider will consult the unions on their proposed measures, staff briefings and one-to-one meetings with the new provider. We will tell you more about what the mobilisation period will entail at staff briefings in the autumn.

Week beginning 6 May 2013 in-scope staff will transfer to the new provider.

I hope that having some more clarity on the timescales is useful. We will continue to tell you as much as we can as early as we can, but I do appreciate that this is a period of uncertainty which can be extremely difficult for staff. As we get closer to the decision on the new providers, and to transfer, we will remind you of the key dates above and will continue to communicate with you through the email updates, staff group, staff briefings and the intranet.

If you do have any questions about the timescales, or anything else regarding the NSCSO or DRS projects, please send an email to onebarnet@barnet.gov.uk or speak to your manager or staff group representative.

I would also recommend all staff to attend one of the TUPE workshops and the Change and Me Workshop, if you haven't already done so.

Craig Cooper

Director of Commercial Services

London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP

Tel: 020 8359 7082

Mobile: 07979 973042

So the Commercial Director is pressing on with the bonkers idea of outsourcing two major chunks of work at more or less the same time instead of trying one and sitting back for 6 months to see how it goes before outsourcing the other chunk and also signing up for 10 years which will make getting out very hard (without paying a huge sum of money). 

What Craig doesn't mention in his email is the horrific slippage that has occurred in the timetable. Let us go back to a chart which was produced in October 2010 

This chart is part of a short report which cost £19,000 and you can see that mobilisation should have happened 6 months ago and will be at least a year behind. As Mr Reasonable has just pointed out that just means more fees for consultants.

Perhaps the officers don't know what they are doing. 

Perhaps the expert consultants aren't so expert after all.

Perhaps the councillors don't have a grip on officers and what they are doing(no perhaps needed)

Perhaps we need to call a halt and get someone independent in to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis and see if any money is really going to be saved. Take a look at what has just happened in Bournemouth, 35% of the projected saving has been removed. In Barnet the savings are all lovely projections, will they come to pass? Mr Mustard doubts it. 

Come on councillors, start poking in all the dark corners and challenging all of the figures. Apply some rigorous scrutiny before it is too late.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Data Transparency - an armchair audit

Over on the Famous Five Barnet Bloggers website is the complete Code of Recommended Practice for Local Authorities on Data Transparency. 

Barnet's councillors like to waffle on about how open and transparent they are. 

It's time for an armchair audit

to see if they are 100% speaking the truth or if it is just spin. Here is the minimum that the Communities & Local Government Department recommends ( Uncle Eric in effect says "do at least this" ). Comment in red by Mr Mustard

Picture credit : Ventnor Blog



12. As a minimum, the public data that should be released are:

Expenditure over £500, (including costs, supplier and transaction information). Any sole trader or body acting in a business capacity in receipt of payments of at least £500 of public money should expect such payments to be transparent. 

Barnet Council are half way there on this item. They redact far more data than they should. There is no need, for example, to redact the name of a firm of Solicitors when the details of the case are not listed. More seriously it appears that they leave off data which they do not want in the public domain, such as the £1,000 a day payment to the Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Travers.

 

Senior employee salaries, names (with the option for individuals to refuse to consent for their name to be published), job descriptions, responsibilities, budgets and numbers of staff. 'Senior employee salaries' is defined as all salaries which are above £58,200 and above (irrespective of post), which is the Senior Civil Service minimum pay band. Budgets should include the overall salary cost of staff reporting to each senior employee.

This is published once a year for the council tax year ended 31 March as a note to the Accounts of the council. The information is therefore always at least 4 months out of date. The names, except for the Directors, are not published although the public can usually link names to positions. The main problem is that Barnet Council are a bit sloppy with titles, which are often confusingly similar, so it is easy to err and they have more reshuffles than the PM. Some stability in the management structure should lead to improved management.

The information is also on the council website although it is for 1 October 2010 so not exactly up to date (like much of the website - probably due to the new one being worked on and that is well behind schedule)

An organisational chart of the staff structure of the local authority including salary bands and details of currently vacant posts.

Only the top levels are published. The requirement seems to be of the entire council staff. Now that would be be interesting and a lot smaller once everything has been outsourced.

The 'pay multiple' - the ratio between the highest paid salary and the median average salary of the whole of the authority's workforce. Mr Mustard has not seen this information. Just to remind you of your schooldays, the median is the value which separates the bottom half of a set of numbers from the top i.e. of the 3,000 council workers 1.500 will earn more than the median and 1,500 will earn less than the median.

Councillor allowances and expenses. These allowances, the subject of controversy as they were increased markedly at the same time as the budget was being cut for service users, are published here at item 9.

Copies of contracts and tenders to businesses and to the voluntary community and social enterprise sector.  

Many contracts were found to be missing earlier in the year when it was discovered, by bloggers, that the council's externally provided security guards, including those working with vulnerable children, did not have a contract or Security Industry Association registration, or CRB checks etc etc etc. That didn't stop the council from paying a succession of MetPro companies £1.4m The council has had to mount a rearguard action to get contracts in place and Mr Mustard has seen many Delegated Powers Reports authorising new contracts to be entered into for computer related services where contracts had expired.

Contracts are not published and if you do ask for them they come with so many redactions ( crossings out) that they are a confusing read and not transparent. Mr Mustard is going to have to have further recourse to the Information Commissioner who so far has found twice in favour of Mr Mustard and not all all in favour of the council, to get the redacted information supplied for the May Gurney contract. By contrast Mr Mustard asked Hackney Council for a copy of their contract with May Gurney and received it without a single crossing out. Well done Hackney Council, boo hiss to Barnet.

Barnet Council are resisting the release of a contract to local resident John Dix, see the whatdotheyknow site here. You will know John better as Mr Reasonable. Someone at Barnet Council is having a little joke, it looks like a Lustigism to Mr Mustard, in describing his request as manifestly unreasonable. Mr Reasonable is reasonable as well as polite and intelligent and he probably knows more about Barnet Council than most councillors so best be careful Barnet Council.

Grants to the voluntary community and social enterprise sector should be clearly itemised and listed. 

Now Mr Mustard has seen details of recent grants listed in DPRs but can't easily find on the council website one page giving a nice breakdown of the grants by year. Would the blog monitoring officer please let Mr Mustard know if he is wrong.

Policies, performance, external audits and key inspections and key indicators on the authorities' fiscal and financial position. 

If you flail around the council website for long enough these are there somewhere.

The location of public land and building assets and key attribute information that is normally recorded on asset registers and 

Now this is a tricky one. The council own a vast amount of public land and building assets. Mr Mustard has not seen a register of it anywhere and searching for "asset register" on the council website didn't help. This document gets shorter every day mind you as schools become academies, as the council close libraries and museums, sells off playing fields, properties within parks and anything that isn't nailed down. The council would sell the bloggers if they could but we can't be bought.

Data of democratic running of the local authority including the constitution, election results, committee minutes, decision - making processes and records of decisions.

This is on the website although it takes some finding if you don't know where to look. Mrs Angry would probably say that by definition the council fail this item because it isn't democratic. 

It looks like there is some way to go before Barnet Council can say it is open and transparent. Mr Mustard's armchair audit awards you a 2/10. Must try a lot harder. 

Note to councillors. Stop saying how open and transparent the council is. It is not a true statement

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard