Permit pandemonium

Visitor vouchers

Mr Mustard had plans to write about Residents permits but first a few words about Visitor Vouchers which completely derailed his plans on Monday afternoon as instead of working he helped a local friend who was expecting builders to sort out enough visitor vouchers to cope with the imminent arrival of the builders. She had phoned the Crapita Coventry call centre, they are also known as "help lines" and it turned out they were absolutely no help at all. Mr Mustard's friend needed to know where her order of Visitor Vouchers, placed a while ago, had got to. The answer she got was that they had run out of vouchers. When asked how her builders were going to be able to park legally she was told that was for her to sort out. Henceforth, Crapita Coventry shall be known as the "absolutely no help at all" line.

Later on she was told she was being sent half day vouchers for the price of full day ones (half day vouchers still have an official price of £2.08) and that the NSL traffic wardens would be told not to ticket. Oh, how Mr Mustard laughed at the notion that advantage would not be taken of the situation. So let us suppose "24 half day full day" vouchers were purchased and 20 were used for the builders. The rest got put in a drawer and forgotten about until 2016 when whilst looking for something else they are unearthed and used for Auntie Mabel who has just come to stay for a few days. She puts out 3 half day vouchers, suitably scratched off, the car is out of sight at the end of the road and it picks up 3 PCN. Will the council believe the motorist who says "my niece spoke to the helpline two years ago who said everything would be all right"? Whenever they tell you something concrete like that at Crapita, ask them to send you an email right now to confirm. Take their full name. If they won't do both of those things, they are fobbing you off.

Resident Permits

Now to Permit Pandemonium. Mr Mustard kept getting cases of PCNs being issued to people who had paid for a new or renewed permit and were waiting weeks or months for the new one to arrive and other PCNs issued to people whose permit had expired without them having been sent a reminder after two decades of receiving them. He hardly ever sends in Freedom of Information requests nowadays, but this topic was worthy of one.

Here it is in digestible chunks:

Mr Mustard thinks, but can't be entirely sure, that the correct answer to the question posed is "zero" but it might be that the council simply handed a carrier bag full of unfinished applications over to Crapita or they could be stuffed in a filing cabinet in a forgotten corner. No-one wants to admit that if it were the case. Whatever the truth, handover does not seem to have been a slick one.

Now this is where the numbers get very interesting. Mr Mustard put them into a table, like this:

Month	In hand	Applications	Issued	Backlog
From 12 May	0	3,075	3,708	-633
June	-633	3,021	2,019	369
July	369	3,067	2,541	895
Aug	895	2,514	2,595	814
up to 12 Sept	814	985	1,278	521

So in the first month Crapita sent out 633 more permits that they had received requests for. Such efficiency. More permits for less money, or some such nonsense!

Then in June & July far fewer permits were issued than requested. the reason for this may be that, Mr Mustard is told, the council database from in-house days, was not passed to Crapita or if it was they didn't convert it from the existing format into their preferred format.

This is why every person who tried to renew on-line found that their unique identifier had changed and they had to phone or email to get the new one. That is at least 12,000 residents who have had their time wasted. Mr Mustard knows, he was one of them. The council are at liberty to issue new unique identifiers to everyone but should send out notification of them in advance so that the transition for the resident is seamless and stress-free. It would also be an example of that rarely seen notion in Barnet, public service.

Mr Mustard then asked about the number of permits which had not been issued.

The combined answer is 842 which should be the same as the 521 at the top of the page. Perhaps there were 321 handed over form the council to Crapita that no-one took note of? That would mean that Crapita only issue 312 permits that no-one had requested. Perhaps lots of Capita CSG / Re employees gets given one on the quiet?

The answer to the date of the oldest permit application in hand but not yet issued was 1st August as a response was awaited from the customer, possibly to prove something afresh that he proved last year and which wasn't handed over.

If that is the case the permit that Mr Mustard was consulted about (and the related PCN the challenge to which was refused) which was requested and paid for in April and not yet issued (as at 3 September) so that must be the fault of Barnet Council not of Crapita unless it was in the unknown applications that we handed over after all. It doesn't seem very clear does it? the duties of each party. Maybe that was because no-one agreed in detail with Crapita what their duties were before gifting them the work as with blue badges where an Operating Level Agreement was only being cobbled together after the fact?

Overpaying Capita?

Mr Mustard saw in August 14 a Delegated Powers Report about extending the contract with Civica to refund all of the c. 12,000 Residents who are due a refund following the Judicial Review.

Note that in 3 months Crapita claim to have received 8,602 applications, or approx 34,000 in a full year. As 10% of the borough is thought to be inside a CPZ the 12,000 figure looks to be far more accurate than the 34,000. I do hope we are not paying Crapita per application processed and that if we are that someone at the council is properly checking the invoice. One for you Mr Reasonable at next year's armchair audit of the Annual Accounts?

Permit reminders

Finally we get to permit reminders. These are valued by residents who rely on them and have done for over 20 years. When the council fail, residents don't notice the expiry until the wake up call of an unfair PCN.

So it is impossible due to the lack of Crapita management functionality (it isn't the fault of a computer system) to know if the contracted for service was paid for or not. Why should the council pay for it then (they will already have done so of course). If this is also paid for by the item (although email reminders should be pretty cheap) then have we had value for money.

If this is what Crapita are doing in the simple sausage factory processing environment of parking permits and visitor vouchers what sort of complete mess are they getting more vital and complicated services into.

Why does any local authority use them? they are a false economy (if they are an economy at all). Only 9 more years? It feels like a life sentence.

There must be hundreds of ruthlessly efficient local companies who would gladly have tendered for this contract, if it had been offered on its own, and would have supplied local knowledge for free as well as providing local employment and loyalty.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Commissioning already starting to crash and burn

Cast your mind back to 2009 when the idea was born to do away with silos and have a structure which cut across council departments, a very difficult management task in Mr Mustard's humble opinion. Look, here are some pretty pictures so it must be a great idea?

The next picture brings back to Mr Mustard's mind what a lovely elderly patient said about a blonde nurse at the hospital where he was a finance manager early on in his career

"Delightful to look at but not an earthly of use"

Mr Mustard does take a different view. It is that silos are useful as they are easily understood and there is responsibility and accountability. Whose fault will something be in a commissioning council? no-one knows, not "me" obviously, you can blame commissioning and they can blame someone in a department or a contractor.

The next report shows you that even the council are finding the non-silo approach hard work.

Parking Improvement Project - Barnet Council - November 13 by MisterMustard

So those first two paragraphs really do set the tone. There are "various departments", two 3rd party contractors NSL and Capita (hey, you missed out Civica, they issue permits for the Saracens zone and are doing the Judicial Review overcharge refund exercise) (CSG is the new name for NSCSO in case you didn't know).

The there is a reference to "these complexities" and then we have "various" computer systems and one more, for enforcement and other functions, is currently being purchased and NSL are apparently leading on that.

What all this shows is that everything parking related would work much better if parking, and all the related activities, signs, line, permits, traffic management orders, were all under one competent manager, in one building, in Barnet, and not parcelled up into tasty morsels for an outside contractor to feast on (there is a statutory bar to certain functions being outsourced so why outsource half of the job and create the current dog's breakfast).

Even the report agrees "most importantly that responsibility for delivery sits within one single project board".

Interesting to see that customer satisfaction was the worst rated council service. This was found to be the case at the end of 2012. NSL took over on 1 May 12. Could the two events be related? An extra 30,000 parking tickets a year have shown up in the lack of satisfaction rating because many are undeserved.

Other points of the project report that Mr Mustard notes are that despite being probably the most interested and experienced citizen when it comes to parking tickets and that he had a meeting 4 days after the report was drafted with two of the people named in the report, that it wasn't sent to him at the time and he found it in an FOI response to another person. This is why he can publish it in full as it is already in the public domain.

Note this phrase

"there are also financial pressures on the Medium Term Financial Plan"

Has the council learnt nothing from the Judicial Review. Parking is not about revenue raising. You budget £7m from parking into the MTFP and if it looks shaky you try to get it back on track. You can put in a predictive figure but you shouldn't see it as a target. Please stop.

and this phrase

"whilst reducing the current risk to the MTFP and subsequently ensure parking income and expenditure is at least cost neutral going forward".

This whilst acceptable if the council are aiming for a no profit no loss result (which Mr Mustard doubts is the case) should not be a concern. There is no requirement to not make a loss on keeping traffic moving. It is a service that the council should provide, it should not be seen as a profit centre,

and here we go again

"the financial pressures cannot be ignored"

Yes they can. It isn't all about the money, is it?

It is in Barnet.

Until this mindset goes away there will always be negative feedback about parking.

The project sponsor is the Commercial & Customer Services Director. In the context of parking she cannot comfortably wear both hats which are mutually exclusive. If parking hits budget customers will be unhappy and if customers are happy the budget will be missed.  Difficult.

Whilst mentioning management have you seen how many people it takes to get anything done at the council? Commerce does not work this way.

On page two Objective 4 is screaming off the page like a Harry Potter Howler. Parking is not there to protect the general fund. This is wrong, both legally and morally.

Objective 8 would be funny if it wasn't such rollocks. Mr Mustard made an objection to the Accounts of Barnet Council to 31 March 13 that NSL owed the council (i.e. us) £137,343 for failure to meet Key Performance Indicators. These are apparently still being discussed. Don't talk about them, the rebate is due, it is a reward for failure and should simply be deducted off the next invoice.

Could somebody please go to the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 25th February 14 as Mr Mustard is double booked. Hopefully the Barnet Bugle will be there filming as ever (I'll buy you a pint of shandy some time Dan).

On page 11 there is more of that miserable channel shifting which Mr Mustard is dead against. Channel shift is an attempt to make residents use the communication medium that the council find to be the cheapest so they want to get you off the phone. Where to isn't stated, probably to a ghastly webform or self serve your answer on the Internet. If residents want to phone the council they should be allowed to and not forced towards the Internet especially as there are still lots of elderly people who drive but don't use a computer.

What happens when boroughs try to channel shift Mr Mustard from doing a parking ticket challenge by email (as Haringey and Camden have both found out to their cost), onto doing it by webform, is that he writes a letter. It costs Mr Mustard 50p or 60p but he doesn't care about that as he wants the information in a form that he can file where he likes on his computer and that stamp is good value to Mr Mustard. The council end up moving him from a fairly cheap method to the most expensive one. Barnet don't put it on the back of the PCN, which would be useful, but they do accept challenges to barnet@nslservices.co.uk and auto-acknowledge them.

If commissioning is causing this much trouble in parking what is it doing in all the other myriad services that have been contracted out to Capita?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard