Barnet Council - alleged to target ethnic minorities

 

The above clips are from the Daily Mail - this story was also in other papers. You can read the entire story here.

Barnet Council, for a while, were really good at publishing data on all sorts of topics but have become less so, by order of a particular councillor according to information given to Mr Mustard. When Fixed Penalty Notices were first issued in Barnet for environmental contraventions the contract was with NSL as they had already their enforcement foot in the door. When sent out to tender it was won by Kingdom. The problem with these contracts is that they reward contractors for issuing and collecting more FPNs, there is a revenue share arrangement, with Kingdom getting the lion's share of the revenue, 70%. 

Is this a good deal, well Kingdom have built up reserves of £8m so Mr Mustard would, if he was employed by the council, be looking for a better deal based on open book accounting i.e. to establish what the true costs are and then agree a modest profit uplift.

Remember that what Mr Forrester says is an allegation although made within a witness statement which will have been verified by a statement of truth. Mr Mustard thinks this would be a stupid matter to lie about as if ethnic data must be measured the answer will be a checkable fact.

Current data about FPNs is at this location but doesn't include any data about ethnicity.

Previously there was such data when NSL were issuing the FPNs.

In order to make any sense of the ethnicity data you need to know the ethnic breakdown of the residents of Barnet and even that will only be an approximation as every day it changes and as people who visit the borough could drop litter.

As Mr Mustard tweeted recently, there have been zero penalties for dog fouling (really for not clearing up afterwards) the pooper scooper penalty

Mr Mustard now sees that the FOI response is at odds with the council's own dataset in which 0.01% of penalties were for dog fouling, an inadequate focus on what really matters, Mr Mustard would rather tread on a fag butt than in dog mess.

Something is suspect though, given this council response.

Mr Mustard has been contacted in the past by residents of Mill Hill, above the shops, who have nowhere for wheelie bins to be stored, who would put their rubbish out on time and see it not collected and then be hit by a penalty despite being innocent of any wrongdoing & having to pay because they were in a profession where they couldn't afford the slightest blemish on their character, fixed penalty notices can be enforced in the magistrates court. Perhaps this is why timed collections haven't been expanded across the borough, because barnet Council can't keep up with their own colelction schedule, oh yes, Mr Mustard remembers now, the council ran out of the correct coloured bin bags!

The end, for now.

Do Fixed Penalty Notices work?

Hundreds and thousands of Fixed Penalty Notices are being issued in the name of Barnet Council for littering, fly-tipping, dog fouling and fly posting. A 6 month trial started in July 2016 and has continued each month without a proper tendering of the contract in accordance with EU procurement law (imho).

The sums involved are large.

These are the values of paid and unpaid Fixed Penalty Notices for the first 4 months of 2018

 

The percentage paid column for April 18 will doubtless be up at the 50%+ level given more time for payments to be made.

The Environment Committee is meeting on Tuesday 5 June & Mr Reasonable has asked the council to tell him what income the council themselves have derived from the non-contract. Mr Mustard thinks the answer is nothing at all, as during the initial 6 month trial period NSL Ltd were allowed to keep all of the income & no-one at the council thought to renegotiate as time passed . That was a council employee playing a game of contract negotiation during which NSL had all aces and the employee had nothing as NSL have the data from other boroughs and so know how many FPNs they can issue per shift & what they cost, so naturally they wouldn't have agreed to the deal if they were going to lose money on it.

Since then the non-contract has been allowed to run on and eventually we might have a proper procurement exercised concluded.

In the meantime, did Barnet Council obtain best value? It doesn't look like it.

The EU procurement threshold, at which a contract should be tendered, is £181,302 p.a. Let's call it £15k a month. The first month in which £15k was paid was September 16 and it hasn't dropped below that since. The director in charge of street scene should have noticed this a year ago and acted. However, if all the money was going into NSL's pocket then it might not have been flagged up, although there are meant to have been monthly meetings about the progress of enforcement (Mr Mustard will do an FOI for the records).

Here are the monthly figures for the 22 months that the trial has been followed by out of contract enforcement action.

Mr Mustard thinks that the blunt instrument of a Fixed Penalty Notice does not deter, except the person who wouldn't dream of littering in the first place. This is because he thinks that over the last 2 years the amount of littering and fly-tipping in Barnet has increased and this may well be a consequence of reduced street cleaning and bin-emptying activity by the council. If the public realm looks less tidy, thanks to the council's reduced activity in that area, the public conclude that the council don't care and so why should they and down goes the litter and the dumped mattresses onto the pavement.

Amazingly the council only issued 4 FPNs for dog fouling (as in fouling by dogs that wasn't removed) and 8 for fly-posting. It looks like the target has been soft enforcement.

Mr Mustard has been contacted by two businesses who have proper arrangements with licensed waste carriers (one of them the council & the other Veolia) with one paying out £8,000 a year to ensure the proper disposal of their rubbish, who have been given FPNs for fly-tipping. The trouble with the FPNs is that unlike parking PCNs, which have a strict timetable and no additional costs for Appealing, if you want to dispute a FPN there is no formal mechanism or rules to do so (the system rather assumes guilt) and you have to wait until a summons to the Magistrates' Court arrives and then you need your solicitor together with the attendant time & expense and then somewhat summary justice is dispensed.

The committee meeting is on Tuesday, so if you want to ask any questions you need to email them in by 10am tomorrow. Mr Mustard is off to do that now.

Before he goes he will caution you against dropping a sweet wrapper or a cigarette butt or in fact anything at all and if you are a business don't let anyone you know re-use anything of yours without you first of all having removed anything which identifies the business as it will be assumed that a dumped box bearing your business name will have been dumped by you.

Mr Mustard suspects that this example is just the tip of the iceberg which was put into reasonable order after the MetPro scandal and is now back in turmoil.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Do you suppose the council is doing anything to find out why people dump, like asking the ones they have caught, and then doing anything to change behaviour? No, Mr Mustard doesn't think so either.

Selective attention to litter

with credit to the Barnet Press

The above items appeared on adjacent pages. The council crowing about how many Fixed Penalty Notices have been issued for littering (Mr Mustard will not defend you against one of those as he is against littering) and Richard Logue, a fine citizen from Mill Hill, bemoaning the fact that he and his team couldn't stand the state of his local park any longer.

A few points spring to Mr Mustard's mind:

1. If the council are issuing 12 FPN a day then their educational messages are not getting through. Any FPN is a failure to educate residents, and visitors, to not drop litter in Barnet. The state of the borough may make them think littering is normal. The cleaner the borough the less likely littering is to occur.

2. The penalties collected are retained by NSL under the terms of their contract. NSL are not a charity so it seems doubtful in the extreme that they are making a loss on it so we, the council tax payer, must be overpaying. It is also a question of public policy. Negotiating a deal where a private company directly profits from public wrongdoing, they are paid a fixed price so the more penalties they issue the more profit they make. It just seems wrong to Mr Mustard. He suspects that they will go for the easy targets like fag butts rather than tackling the big stuff, like bags of shop rubbish and dumping of fridges & mattresses.

3. The cleaning of parks does not have a high enough priority if 10 bags of waste can be removed from just one park. Are there sufficient bins in the park and are they emptied frequently enough?

4. Volunteers should not have to make up for Barnet Council's policy & performance deficiencies.

5. We all pay council tax because it is cheaper to pay collectively in order to keep our public spaces clean. Mr Mustard is not going to pay twice by also volunteering to clean up his local park (besides which most of his time is taken up in fighting parking PCN).

6. It is for the same reason that he won't volunteer to play at being a librarian.

7. If you want to be a volunteer then there are plenty of more worthy causes than Barnet Council, such as Age UK and the North London Hospice where your time will be genuinely appreciated, rather than just as a political message.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard