Put Council Tax up - a petition

Options 2 & 3 resonate with Mr Mustard

Oh dear poor Richard Cornelius, yet another email into his inbox from Mr Mustard. Richard gets at least one a week from Mr Mustard and many get put onto the too difficult pile. Others, like this one following on from the fantastically full One Barnet Question Time, don't call for a reply:

Dear Cllr Cornelius

On Thursday evening John Dix ( Mr Reasonable ) suggested you look again at increasing the level of council tax. I agree with him. Holding down council tax artificially by cutting services to the less well off so that you can score political points does not strike me as prudent or proper. Every other bill for my house has gone up with or above inflation as have food, vehicle costs etc. You are disadvantaging the public purse if you carry on as you are. By all means don't increase council tax if that can be achieved by dint of in-house efficiency savings, but don't do it and then cut services.

I note that in a report on business planning presented to cabinet on 20 February 2012 that residents were reported as not fundamentally opposed to the raising of council tax (Page 86 of 320).

If council tax was increased by, say, 2.5% on my band E property (and please forgive me for not understanding how the complicated grant system works as I think there are some government clawbacks but don't know the details - it is the principle that interests me - you can get officers to work on the fine details as to how much of an increase could be made without penalty) then I would pay a mere extra £43 a year (less than the cost of a cup of coffee a week, isn't that what Cllr Brian Coleman said to justify the £40 to £100 CPZ permit charge increase? - i.e. insignificant) and an extra income of around £4m p.a. would accrue to the council (£153,385,750 * 2.5% - In fact over a decade the attached spreadsheet (now below) shows you could have an extra £44m coming in.) This would go a long way to making the savings currently being guessed at for One Barnet of £111m.

You could reverse some of the more unpopular cuts e.g. re-open Friern Barnet library and put the charges for the elderly and disadvantaged back to where they were and row back on some of the Council Tax Support cuts. You could become less dependent on the parking income, which is rather dangerously built into the budget, and put the permit charges back to what they were and scrap the unpopular private events in parks scheme etc.

The above are obvious examples purely intended to give you the flavour of what could be done with more money.

Quite simply you would give yourself some time & wriggle room to implement more popular & useful policies, scrap One Barnet as it currently stands and instead look properly in full detail at each department in turn and cost the in-house option.

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

 

£
Year	Start of year	+Inflation	Extra income
		at 2.5%	(cumulative)
1	159,385,750	163,370,394	3,984,644
2	163,370,394	167,454,654	8,068,904
3	167,454,654	171,641,020	12,255,270
4	171,641,020	175,932,045	16,546,295
5	175,932,045	180,330,347	20,944,597
6	180,330,347	184,838,605	25,452,855
7	184,838,605	189,459,570	30,073,820
8	189,459,570	194,196,060	34,810,310
9	194,196,060	199,050,961	39,665,211
10	199,050,961	204,027,235	44,641,485

Mr Mustard sent this email to every councillor as he likes them all to know how he is thinking and otherwise how would they and he blind copied it to a few of the usual suspects. One of his friends suggested a petition and that she would support it. Mr Mustard decided to take up the suggestion and you can find the petition here. 

If you agree with the petition please sign it and tell your friends. 

If you don't agree please add your comments at the bottom. 

If you neither agree nor disagree you probably aren't reading this blog!

By using the Gopetition service rather than the one on the council website the council cannot send you any messages telling you why they are right as they did to the people who signed the library petition, including Mr Mustard, which annoyed him considerably. Not a smart move by the council to repeat all the old arguments that had been aired before people decided to sign the library petitionin the first place.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Headline 2023 - DRS outsourcing a success

Actually Mr Mustard doesn't think that the headline will be that as either the outsourcing won't get off the ground because too many staff are affected and seem to be putting spokes into wheels or because after 5 years the councillors will realise it is an expensive disaster, or maybe even just not value for money ( Vfm for short ) and like the current long term leisure contract which Barnet Council wish to buy negotiate their way out of they will try to do the same for DRS. Bizarrely the argument for quiting outsourcing will be the same as for entering into it, in order to save money.

Let us firstly attend the official contract signing ceremony:

http://saltertshirts.spreadshirt.com/bad-deal-A8368778

Anyway let us for the sake of this post pretend that the DRS outsourcing runs for the full 10 year term ( ask yourselves why it is a 10 year term - it's because that is what the providers want it to be - is the tail wagging the dog? ). Why will it appear to be a success? because each year Barnet Council applies inflationary increases to its charges ( except parking which it mines like a rich seam of gold with hyper-inflationary increases ) and the reports presented on this topic have ignored the question of inflation. Firstly you need to see the report. It is on the council website so it does not present a problem if it is replicated on Scribd - the good thing about which is that it makes it easy to put the report into a pretty box below.

Click on the below title to be transported to Scribd if you want to download the report to your compuer.
DRS Business Case - Barnet Council

Now have a look at that report and then tell Mr Mustard why he cannot find the word "inflation" anywhere in the report.

You can download the whole thing and print it out if you wish, including from the council website here. I am going to keep the maths as simple as possible as that way lies understanding and it is possibly why councillors get given 160 pages reports full of numbers and tables - so they don't bother to enquire closely.

Firstly take a look at para 6.2 on page 8 so you get an idea of the affected services as DRS is an artificial group of services lumped together into a big fat tasty bundle for outsourcing.

Para 6.5 says that extra income over 10 years will be £10,303,005 ( a stupid figure. It should have been rounded to £10m - this is part of the strategy to bamboozle and appear precise when the figure is just a guesstimate - an aspiration ) This table is repeated for no good reason other than confusion in para 9.7.

Para 9.8 is very interesting. Most of the benefits are expected to accrue by Year 4 so why not stop the contract there as extra benefits will be needed in years 5 to 10 and there are none to be had. A different solution will be needed.

Now jump to page 30. Actual income in the year ended 31 March 2011 ( assuming that is the year from the heading of the expenditure column ). The meat of the breakdown is in the secret appendix E but no matter. We know that total income is £10,286,706.

Now let us apply annual inflation increases to that income. Here is the table that Mr Mustard has knocked up for you.

Effect of inflation increases on DRS income
Inflation	4.477%	104.48%
Year	Income £	Extra
		Income £
0	10,286,706
1	10,747,242	460,536
2	11,228,396	941,690
3	11,731,091	1,444,385
4	12,256,292	1,969,586
5	12,805,006	2,518,300
6	13,378,286	3,091,580
7	13,977,232	3,690,526
8	14,602,993	4,316,287
9	15,256,769	4,970,063
10	15,939,815	5,653,109
Total extra income		29,056,062

So with inflation at the average rate for 2011 of 4.477% , you can see that inflation alone, if it stayed at this sort of level, would generate nearly 3 times the extra income than is being "guaranteed" ( if it really is, I am sure that the guarantees will be stuffed full of clever city lawyers' get-out clauses ) 

In case you are interested an inflation rate of just 1.75% would generate the required extra income of £10m.

In future reports by officers to the committee once the outsourcing is under way ( if it ever gets there ) there will be a lot of crowing about how fantastic the provider has been in generating extra income when in fact it was inflation price increases that will have done all the hard work. 

Are you reading this Mr Craig Cooper, Commercial Director, whose name is on this report. Are you going to revisit the basis of this contract and start to earn your £132,480 p.a. based on the free advice of a blogger. Please do email me to tell me what is going on as this contract progresses along its bumpy road. I think that in the future, all reports need to separate out the extra income due to inflation from the extra income due to improved sales and new lines of business, don't you?

Does anyone at the council ( don't lower your heads consultants ) feel the tiniest bit embarrassed that a part-time blogger has pointed out such a huge issue ( "issue" is a weasel word used by the council to describe a blunder or a problem ).

Do you remember Councillor Coleman when you were presenting your proposed inflationary increases to EPR charges about a month ago that you said "there is plenty of government detail for bloggers to comb through at midnight" ( or at least that was the gist of it ). This blog demonstrates what good value that is for the council. A pity that more councillors and officers aren't doing this sort of thing in their normal hours or it wouldn't be necessary. Fortunately super-bloggers need less sleep than ordinary mortals.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The second interesting Xmas Eve DPR

Here is the DPR to implement annual inflation increases for the Environment Planning & Regeneration directorate starting on 1 February 2012.

1508 EPR charges 2012-13

Mr Mustard notices that this increases the price of a Resident's CPZ Permit from £100 to £105 despite Cllr Coleman saying at the recent Cabinet Resources Committee ( 14 December 2011 ) that these were being looked at again. Maybe they are but the proposal to increase them by 5% has still been published. Keep your eyes peeled.

Maybe this is procedurally correct but somehow Mr Mustard doubts it as this DPR is signed by Pam Wharfe who has form for signing DPRs that don't accord with the constitution e.g. RM Countryside and the removal of parking meters.

Barnet Council regulation issue DPR signing kit

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Where were those 5 extra Officers earning £50k+ p.a. ?

Mr Reasonable kindly let me know that the first set of unaudited Accounts for the year to 31 March 2011 were ready to look at. He has already given them a good blogging here: £1 million to leave Barnet Council

Mr Mustard has taken a look at the salary levels that have to be put in the notes.

Although inflation is generally low in the UK, in the parallel universe that is Barnet Council, it seems that inflation is rampant. The notes to the Accounts have to include all staff paid over £50k in £5k bands.

I have put the tables of 2 years together.

Each set of Accounts shows you this year and last year.

So you have 2011 & 2010 in the latest Accounts and

2010 and 2009 in the Accounts of last year

and of course the figures for the year to 31 March 2010 will be the same in both sets, will it not ? Let's see:-

35.      Officers’ Remuneration
	Accounts to 31 Mar 11	ch		Accounts to 31 March 10
Remuneration band	2010/11	2009/10		2009/10	2008/09
	#	#		#	#
£50,000 - £54,999	195	166		177	167
£55,000 - £59,999	122	92		95	79
£60,000 - £64,999	61	60		60	64
£65,000 - £69,999	63	59		58	37
£70,000 - £74,999	40	27		27	35
£75,000 - £79,999	20	16		14	15
£80,000 - £84,999	10	14		15	12
£85,000 - £89,999	16	13		12	7
£90,000 - £94,999	10	7		3	5
£95,000 - £99,999	10	3		3	2
£100,000 - £104,999	5	5		4	1
£105,000 - £109,999	2	4		3	5
£110,000 - £114,999	2	-		1	4
£115,000 - £119,999	2	6		4	1
£120,000 - £124,999	3	4		2	1
£125,000 - £129,999	2	1		1	-
£130,000 - £134,999	2	2		2	2
£135,000 - £139,999	3	3		2	1
£140,000 - £144,999	-	1		1	2
£145,000 - £149,999	2	1		-	1
£150,000 >_	8	8
Totals	578	492		487	444

Now what do you notice ?

- The number of higher paid employees is rocketing from 444 to 487/492 to 578 in 3 years.

- When the Accounts were signed off for 2010 there were 487 higher paid employees and suddenly now there were 492 of them for the same financial year. Where were those 5 employees. Perhaps there weren't any Contracts of Employment for them and so no-one knew they existed ? Or can't the bean-counters count ?

This table doesn't include Contractors as they are not employees so there are actually more high paid employees than the table shows. At least 5 that Mr Mustard knows of.

Two examples are :

Mr Andrew Travers, the £1,000 a day consultant Deputy Chief Executive and

Jason Wheatley - Interim Resourcing, Performance & Talent Manager ( the Audit Committee yesterday evening was certainly a right performance - they must have had some coaching although there was a distinct lack of talent in evidence amongst Officers although plenty from Councillors who were rocking the OneBarnet boat ) who was paid £104,500 in the year ended 31 March 2011. Actually not quite true, he wasn't paid it but his company Advance HR Consulting Ltd was.

So who signed off these incorrect Accounts in 2010. Oh no, it was Mr Travers. ( Sorry Lord Palmer, your name is on them as well but Mr Mustard takes the view that day to day preparation of these was not within your control, you sign more as a honorary duty because you are quite entitled to rely on the work of someone paid £1,000 a day. ) Hey, Mr Mustard has an idea. You are a proper Chartered Accountant and could be the Chief Finance Officer instead of being a Councillor. How about it Lord Palmer ? The money is good although we do need a bit of a reduction against the current excessive fees.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard