"Learn from their success and mistakes"

Well how interesting. The heading was taken from the Capita conference brochure ( below ) which you can download in full here. So it is success in the singular and mistakes in the plural

Here is the brochure for your delectation and delight.

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So there you will see one Andrew Travers, the £1,000 a day Chief Financial Officer, speaking at a Capita conference ( Mr Mustard wonders if Capita are paying him for today or if Barnet Council tax payers are? ) So will he be speaking about success or failures? Make you own mind up, although the following might help you.

As luck would have it, the corporate performance results of Barnet Council for the 3 months ended 30 September 2011 are out today. You can get them, and lots of other stuff, on the Barnet Council website here or in the box below.

Corporate Performance results Q2 2011-12 Barnet Council

You don't have to go far ( summary on page 4, detail on pages 16/17 ) to see the results for the two targets set for the Deputy Chief Executive and they are both red i.e. as bad as it is possible for them to be. In fact his directorate is the worst performing of all of them with all of his targets in the worst performing category. None were pretty and Corporate Governance weren't far behind in the poor performance stakes. Notice also the DoT ( direction of travel ). Things are getting worse.

Who would want such a low performer to speak at their conference, oh Crapita do, absolutely nothing to do with them bidding for huge contracts at Barnet Council and hoping to curry a bit of favour ( see Mrs Angry's blog on this subject, she was on the bed ball this morning ).

Wouldn't your time have been better spent in improving the performance of what you are paid a vast amount to mismanage ? rather than gallivanting off to the Lancaster Hotel ? Enjoy your lunch.

If amongst Mr Mustard's readers today there are any delegates to this conference would you please send him a copy of the Travers handout. Much obliged.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Red & green pies Q1 2011-12

Thank goodness someone at Barnet Council has realised that the previous graphics used were not one's which the brain interpreted easily. Our brains cope easily with pie charts. The pies are pretty. Pretty appalling! 

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Performance is going from bad to worse. It's obvious from the pie chart format that things are pretty rotten - look at the size of the red segments.

Have you ever seen so many missed targets? Some, like pledgebank, will probably be red for ever, well at least until the day that pledgebank is quietly dropped ( there won't be a press release for that ).

Instead of messing about with One Barnet Mr Mustard thinks that you should spend your time having a radical rethink of waste and recycling and start again with a clean sheet.

In the perfect world how would waste and recycling be organised?

How can the amount of waste generated by people be reduced in the first place?

Look at that. Only 48.3% of telephone calls were answered within 20 seconds. That probably means that a huge number were never answered at all. It's a shambles and a disgrace. On emails, 1 in 5 were not answered within 10 days. Get back to basics Barnet Council. If you scrapped One Barnet and started to become boring reliable council, no stupid schemes like Pledgebank and the Innovation "Bank" giveaway then you would find that the number of complaints plummeted and the Barnet bloggers would reduce their output, because if you were perfect there would be nothing to pick up on. Now there's an idea worth some thought.

Is it really a good idea to reduce the number of vendors ( suppliers ). You presumably want to support local businesses? and you also need to have at least two in competition for every service in order to keep them on their toes and the price down.

Now these figures for parking income. Down from 3.1 to 2.6. Is that £millions because you don't say what it is. Why has the income gone down.

Well these are the probable reasons :-

When PCN's fines were increased people responded by better compliance ( a good thing )

When car park & permit charges went up some people decided to park elsewhere and avoid the charges ( personal budgets are tight )

Everyone stocked up on £1 visitor vouchers and won't be buying them at £4. My future visitors will be asked to park in The Spires.

Mr Mustard has already predicted that the roads will be worse than ever this winter ( I hope you are reading this Cllr Rutter ) and look even in summer the council cannot keep up with filling in potholes which means that there will be more compensation claims for damaged wheels than there could be. For want of a nail...

Overall performance - pie-eyed!

Pie-eyed ( from Time magazine )

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard