Mill Hill Lovers

If you live, work or visit Mill Hill please read on.

On the Mill Hill Residents' Association website there is a link to a petition that they are getting up to try and prevent car parking charges being applied in two small car parks. The more people who sign the more likely it is that the council will listen to the residents. If you live in Mill Hill please think about joining as it is only £10 for the year and there is strength in numbers.

Whilst Mr Mustard is paying this virtual visit to Mill Hill he would ask you to mark your diaries for the 10th Annual Mill Hill Music Festival which will take place from 15 to 22 June. Go back and click on the link for further details.

Mill Hill is a great little place. Please do what you can to keep it that way. Petty parking charges do not make town centres better places to visit.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

P.S. How pleasing it was to see an apostrophe in the correct place; Mill Hill contains Mr Mustard's type of people.

Parking - a balanced approach needed

Councillors Dean Cohen and Richard Cornelius have got an easier job than the car balancer, John Evans.

All they have to do is to balance the needs of motorists to be able to stop in the High St against the available space and to provide fast and convenient payment methods. Just 2 years ago the only complaints that Mr Mustard can recall were occasional ones about traffic wardens being over-zealous which comes with the territory. There were hardly any complaints about parking meters, being out-of-order would be the only ones (compounded by the council's failure to fix them - engineers posts were vacant for a long time) but really before April 2011 there wasn't a problem with parking. Then in April 2011 along came massive parking charge increases and the destruction of parking meters (of which there are still 10 hiding on the streets somewhere) and the outcry started and hasn't yet abated and at the rate we are going will be a major local election issue in May 2014. 

Let us look at the charges in, say, North Finchley a High St that Mr Mustard used to visit when you could park outside the bookshop for free for 30 minutes and now only visits to go to Cafe Buzz, of all places, and then he parks on the edge of the zone (where the blogger bus gets spotted by twitter friends) and walks in.

Lodge Lane car park				High Rd, N12
			Proposed
up to	Apr-09	Apr-11	Sep-12	Aug-12
minutes	£.p	£.p	£.p	£.p
15	0.30	1.00	0.75	1.00
30	0.50	1.00	0.75	1.00
45	0.80	2.00	1.70	2.00
60	1.50	2.00	1.70	2.00
90	2.50	3.00	2.70	4.00
120	3.00	5.00	3.60	4.00
all day	3.00	5.00	5.00	max 2 hours

So imagine Mr Mustard had been passing through N Finchley in 2010 and wanted a cup of tea (and he loves a good cuppa; blogging is thirsty work) he could have pulled up, slipped 20p & 10p pieces into the meter and popped into Cafe Buzz and paid £1 to sit down with a cup of tea or £1.10 to take out (these are current day prices). Mr Mustard would not have chatted to Helen Michael because neither of them were infamous at that time (now things are very different).

Move forward to 2012 and now the minimum charge to park is £1 which is the same price as a cup of tea. It will soon be 75p which is two and a half times what is was three years ago. Inflation is bad in the minds of Barnet Council. 

The new parking prices are a bit odd. In Cafe Buzz 1 cup of tea is £1 and 2 are £2. In the Lodge Lane car park to park for 1 hour will be £1.70 and for 2 hours £3.60 which is twice as much plus an extra 20p. The message this sends, "please don't stay long". The same applies for 30mins and 60mins parking where an hour is more than double half an hour.

In addition, the usual idea is to have short stay on the High St and try to nudge longer stay motorists to car parks but a saving of 25p or 30p is not sufficient to change behaviour especially as you lose 5 or 10 minutes getting to and from the car park.

These anomalies are because the council are simply tinkering with the current broken system instead of going back to the start and deciding from a clean sheet what sort of parking strategy they should implement in order to save the High Streets which everyone wants to keep.

In the meantime the council should simply roll back the prices to 2009/10 rates and install parking meters that take coins and cards i.e. back to when things worked. Barnet Council are fond of prototyping. Why not prototype for 3 months putting the (coin) parking meters back in one town centre, and vocal N. Finchley is the obvious choice, and choose more sensible pricing. If at the same time some shop-keepers (those like cafes and newsagents that accumulate lots of change) put up "we give change" and "we sell parking vouchers" signs then we might really start to get somewhere. Leave pay-by-phone as a choice, not as the only choice, and it will naturally increase in popularity over time.

Remember Barnet Council that you make more money out of issuing parking tickets than you do out of parking charges so you can afford this experiment because it won't cost that much.

It is a pity that Cllr Brian Coleman had such a mad strategy in 2011 as it is his type of brook no opposition plan that we now need (of course, the plan has to be the correct one!). We need strong action, not pussy footing about. Brian, of course, had completely the wrong plan but if Richard and Dean, you could become decisive in favour of Town Centres for a little while, it would be appreciated.

Thank you gentlemen.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

What the High Street is up against

The following poster shows you the charges for the car parks that are within 100m of Chipping Barnet High Street. They are the car parks that shoppers have to use if they can't find a space on the High Street itself which is likely as the number of spaces is not that great.

Sensible shoppers will go into the Spires Car Park as it is cheaper or park on Hadley Common in the afternoons when the restrictions are off.

Just look at the price though. As soon as 90mins have gone you are in for a fiver. £5 for 91 minutes, ridiculous.

If you have only a few things to buy and are going Cricklewood way you are only about 2 miles from Westfield.

Here is the Westfield parking tariff for the first 2 hours of your stay. 

You can see the attraction can't you ( Mr Mustard can't see the attraction of shopping except for new motorbikes but he realises that other people like this sort of thing). Mr Mustard wants a thriving High Street. The council needs to play its part in ensuring this is the case by providing plenty of reasonably priced parking spaces.

Even if you stay a little longer you can get 3 hours parking for your £5. There are 3,066 available spaces at Westfield at this moment and zero chance of getting a PCN and payment is made into a nice machine.

Barnet Council car parks don't look competitive to Mr Mustard.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Will the Parking Contract Award be appealed?

"It's not cricket" is the cry to be heard at football stadia around Barnet!

Barnet Council don't have a good reputation in procurement for sticking to the rules very well and so there is every chance that somewhere in the award of the parking contract they will have fallen foul of EU guidelines or their own procedures. Here is the paperwork which was presented to the Cabinet Resources Committee on 14 December 2011 and following which a vote was taken to award the contract to NSL whose numerous failings can be read about on the internet.

Barnet Council Award of Parking Contract

We are now in the "Alcatel" period which is a standstill period of 10 days to allow time for an appeal to be launched. It saves time and money to give the losers time to stop and think and avoids a council wasting time and money getting going with the new provider and then see the award overturned.

Barnet Council are so coy about the names.

Let Mr Mustard see if he can take some lucky guesses at who Companies A, C & D are for you.

APCOA must be in the running and sound like Company C. They operate parking enforcement for loads of authorities and so patently can do the job. Mr Mustard expects they will appeal on the grounds of lack of objective scoring.

Company A looks like it might be Mouchel who came first in the scoring at the PQQ stage, 8 points ahead of NSl and magically dropped to second and 4 points behind NSL in the final round of scoring. Either scoring isn't consistent or something funny has gone on. Now Mouchel do have some financial woes but as long as they don't touch client monies and are paid at least a month in arrears they could still be used as replacing them would be easily achieved should they go under. They do have form for appealing, against Westminster Council's parking contract award, and so hopefully they will flex their muscles here in Barnet.

Company D is clearly On Time Parking whose cheerful operator rescued Mr Mustard's broken down motor from the side of the road once many years ago. They are local which is good and keeps the jobs locally. They might well have proved to be the wisest choice. A growing local company keen to impress. Mr Mustard is uncertain as to whether they will put the money into an appeal but it might be a worthwhile investment to help them break further into the market. Big money is available in fees for the successful operator. Hammersmith, Haringey and Fulham boroughs already use them.

We will know the answer in the next 10 days. Howzat!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The tender tender.

Future of the Parking Service update - 13 December

Wednesday, 14 December 2011 09:57 
Henderson, James

As you are aware, the Council is currently in the final stages of the procurement of Parking Enforcement and Related Services. Indeed it is.

A recommendation for the award of contract will be made to the Cabinet Resources Committee on 14 December 2011 and this will be followed by a five day call-in period. Mr Mustard will observe with interest. Let's hope that all of the councillors have carefully read all of the papers.

We expect to formally inform bidding organisations of the outcome during week commencing the 3 January 2012. That will make someone's year.

There will then be a 10 day Alcatel period for any bidders to consider a response to our decision. Bidders will also be given the opportunity to receive detailed feedback on their bids. The Alcatel period is a 10 day standstill period set out by the EU to allow unlucky bidders to find out why they lost and take action.

During the tender process, all staff within scope of the procurement have been regularly updated with information regarding the progress of the tender. In the most general of terms.

Given the publicity and commercial sensitivity surrounding this tender, it is important that parking staff do not discuss any aspects of the tender or related operational matters with individuals or organisations outside of the council. As if they would be so unprofessional as to do this.

This relates particularly to members of the media and of course parking companies. Bloggers are media!

Should you be contacted by any outside organisations regarding the tender, please refer them in the first instance to Martyn Carter, Procurement Manager in the Corporate Procurement Team.

Should you need any further information in relation to communication with individuals or organisations, please contact either Martyn, John McArdle or Declan Hoare. If you are about to be forced to work in East Croydon against your wishes, tell who you like.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Parking problems persist

Come on people, get on your bikes, not to find work a la Norman Tebbitt, but to get to work. You surely aren't going to let the fact that it is 3 degrees below zero stop you from working up a sweat cycling to work. OK then, a little scooter, for short distances, 10, 20, 30 miles they are great. For longer distances you might need a real motorbike. No problems with parking.

For you car drivers, and it is sometimes essential that you do have a car in order to do your job properly, here is the recent news from the intranet ( can Mr Mustard have access to the intranet under FOI rules? ). Maybe with Cllr Rams' new found enthusiasm for openness and transparency anyone will be able to access the intranet?

---

We have had a strong response to the First Team message about parking at NLBP. Over the last ten days, we have received over 100 emails with ideas of ways to improve the parking situation at NLBP. Mr Mustard wonders how many of them simply said to buy enough parking spaces and stop being so tight. He has heard of meetings being delayed for 30 minutes whilst the attendees went round and round the car park looking for a space. What does that cost in terms of wasted time?

As more workers move over from Barnet House and with the return of Middlesex University to the site, parking has become a serious issue, with staff sometimes taking unreasonable amounts of time to find a parking space, and also that we are inconveniencing our residents by parking in neighbouring roads. We have under-estimated the number of cars that staff have; what, one each, goodness me!

Ideas have included borrowing the Middlesex University places, creating a short stay parking zone for use by ‘essential’ car users, putting on a shuttle bus between Barnet House, Arnos Grove and NLBP, and better managing usage spikes like conferences. Thank you to all those staff who contributed to the debate. Thank goodness the staff have some ideas because we don't have any. Staff should walk from Arnos Grove, it's only a kilometre. It will help with fitness levels.

In the short term, 48 parking spaces have been borrowed from the Emerald Suite for use by council staff. These spaces are at the very back of the site behind the old Barnet College building. Negotiations are also underway to borrow back the 68 spaces used by Middlesex University in the multi-storey car park. Hallelujah.

To solve the problems over the long term, a new policy will be introduced in the coming weeks. This will involve a reissue of all passes and will include a charging scheme in order to control the distribution of permits. Staff are also encouraged to utilise the car sharing forum on the intranet. What a stupid idea. Charge the staff to park at work. Did the council learn nothing from the CPZ responses. People do not like to pay for parking. They simply move to the edge of the zone. Car sharing is a great idea in theory but much more problematic in practice; one user is a ROSPA or  IAM qualified driver and the other is a homicidal maniac who is always on 2 wheels. Will the car sharing last for long; no! Forget the stick; what about the carrot? Pay people to give up their cars and travel by some other method.

Exact details will be communicated shortly, but it could involve a modest one-off charge for a permit for most staff. Daily charges will apply for consultants and interim staff and day visitors. Keep reading First Team for further information. Modest, in One Barnet terms, that will not be modest. It will be if you are Andrew Travers, the Chief Financial Officer, on £1,000 per day but if you are on the minimum wage it won't be funny.

Staff are again reminded of the importance of being good neighbours and are urged to avoid parking in adjacent residential roads. As long as staff park legally in the side roads in N11 there is not a problem. Residents do not own those roads. We all have to share.

More stupid intranet remarks soon.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

One Barnet = No space to park

It is Saturday when Mr Mustard normally rests and has personal things to do. I still do have to dig up my potatoes ( that bit of the boring blog was true ) but some wag has sent me this picture of two people directing traffic in a private car park and suggested that it could be depicting the Chief Executive, Nick Walkley & friend.

no space to park at NLBP

Nonsense thought Mr Mustard, non-stick Nick is on £200,000 a year, he has much more important things to do with his time than worry about parking spaces, the following for example:

The consultation on the Business Plan & Budget for 2012 to 2015.

The survey about Adults Social Care.

The One Barnet programme to outsource everything possible,

and last but not least why the council decided in June to go on the offensive and try to secretly attack Mr Mustard via the office of the Information Commissioner for not registering under the Data Protection Act ( when he didn't need to ). If this attack, which drew on European Law (Case C-101/01 Criminal Proceedings against Bodil Lindvist ("ECJ Case C-101/01) which goes back to 2004, had been successful then every blogger in the land would have had to be registered or stop blogging to avoid a fine. One would think that the council might have stopped to wonder why every blogger who had started blogging since 2004 had not registered?

This reflection would include their very own Councillor Robert Rams whose rather dry blog is mostly about Barnet Council but also about other matters not related to his private and family life. 

Rams is registered under the DPA ( like all councillors ) in order to deal with the business of his constituents but not for any other reason, so not for blogging.

Mr Mustard notices that Rams first blogged on 3 March a whole week before Mr Mustard who started on 10 March. Why on earth didn't Barnet Council go for him first; does anyone have any idea?

Now back to the thorny parking problem. Mr Mustard has been sent the weekly message from more than one source and here it is.

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From: First Team
Sent: 18 November 2011 14:40
To: AllStaff
Subject: Weekly message from the Chief Executive

The matter that has filled my inbox and conversations with staff this week has been parking at NLBP. As someone who travels to NLBP by public transport it’s not an issue I experience first hand, but the combination of more staff on site and greater use of the conference facilities has created a real problem.

I also know that a small number of staff are now parking in side streets. It’s clearly not acceptable for us to be inconveniencing our residents, so action needs to be taken.

First Team will set out the short-term actions agreed to ease parking pressure but we also now need to find a longer-term solution. The challenge is to find a solution that ensures:

staff are not redirected to side-streets
the cost to the taxpayer for staff parking is minimised

staff who need a car as part of providing effective public services are able to go about their business efficiently.

I doubt this is a problem that has one easy solution (and it’s worth reflecting that our car parking provision is greater than most councils) so we intend to work through a series of options and measures to see if we can find a sustainable solution.

First Team will have more detail on Monday and we will keep you informed as proposals are worked up.

Nick

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If anyone had the right to be "worked up" this week it was Mr Mustard, but when the failed secret ICO mission was uncovered he wasn't worried as he could pay the proposed fine and really he just thought it a bit sad that the council had resorted to such steps. It has been described by him as a curious episode and has left him bemused and wondering what the next trick will be.

Anyway, enough about Mr Mustard. Back to the weekly ra ra message ( or is it a brrm brrm message this week ? ).

Mr Mustard thinks that staff are more worried about losing their jobs or being pushed into a call centre which isn't fit for purpose. The idea that a call centre can deal with council tax, exemptions, council tax benefit, council tax summonses and liability orders, adult social services, parking tickets, recycling, rubbish collection etc etc etc  is just unworkable. The call centre will have to be segmented like an orange ( a lemon really, but they don't have segments ) and then it won't be a call centre. It will be a collection of specialist departments sitting in one room.

The thing is that staff probably don't or won't talk to the Chief Executive about the insecurity of their jobs and the whole One Barnet outsourcing nonsense as he doesn't listen ( is what I am told ) and he is hardly likely to drop One Barnet because a few, or even loads of, staff ask him to. That is just to mark yourself out as a troublemaker and find yourself by some mysterious coincidence looking at a P45.

I suppose the Chief Executive wants some brownie points for going to work by public transport. Mr Mustard's question is how does he then get to meetings? chauffeur driven car, taxis, the bus, cadges a lift from staff? Mr Mustard expects that someone will answer this question in the comments box.

If there is greater use of the conference facilities then isn't extra income coming in which would cover the cost of the extra parking spaces that the college no longer use, or are there just more pointless meetings?

If a "small number" of staff are parking in side roads then why is this such a huge problem that needs the attention of the Chief Executive? ( surely the staff are parking considerately where there happens to be a space which is unrestricted and available to any member of the public ). The biggest problem with parking is that the council increased the cost of residents' permits from £40 to £100 ( for the first car ) and for visitor vouchers from £1 to £4. Now that's what Mr Mustard calls a problem and it was one of the two reasons why he started this blog.The other was that Residents Forums are so undemocratic.

Here is a simple way to reduce costs to cover the cost of renting extra parking spaces ( and how long before North London Business Park is devoid of people once the outsourcers have moved all the jobs to Bangalore ) is for executive pay to be capped at £100,000. Job done.

A typical Barnet Council statement. "Our car parking provision is greater than most councils". A statement for which no supporting figures were provided or could easily be found on the Internet.

More detail on Monday. Mr Mustard can't wait.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard