Who's the daddy?

Bloggers often wonder who is running the council, whether it is councillors, officers (a poncy name for staff, or more exactly the senior management team) or Capita and the answer is probably done of them. It is a runaway horse which goes where it wants.

Mr Mustard decided to go to the first meeting of the new Community Leadership Committee even though it sounded pretty awful but he happened to have a free evening so off he trooped. First though, he banged 11 questions in.

Here are the papers:

Community Leadership Committee by MisterMustard

Mr Mustard was initially struck by the modest size of the budget, £1.9m and that 10 councillors were going to have regular meetings about this tiny sum. He also thought it showed the lack of concern for Community Leadership in the borough. Then you will note that £800,000 of this budget is to be axed, the most savage cuts to any council budget.

Anyway, what annoyed Mr Mustard first of all was the usual sloppy presentation by officers and the omission of vital facts and so he set to and asked for what was missing (one councillor also planned to do this but Mr Mustard got in first). here are the first 5 questions:

So although it was said that a saving of £200k was possible from organisation efficiency in the running of cctv (a seemingly bottomless well of future aspirational possibility) which probably means staff cuts and really the report should say exactly how (and councillors should ask how) they was an extra £8k from axing MOSAIC. Thus the total was wrong and there was a lack of detail. 

Mr Mustard asked the supplementary question if Capita would provide Callcredit (Cameo) for free. The answer was that it was part of the Contract.

At this point it was obvious that councillors were being asked to approve something which was already contracted for elsewhere so for officers to ask councillors to approve this saving on MOSIAC without telling them they had already committed the council to CAMEO was somewhat naughty. Of course David Longstaff was part of the Cabinet and so he should have known this was part of the NSCSO contract except he probably never read the 2000 pages. To be fair to "goldenarse" he wasn't very happy with the situation once Mr Mustard got stuck into his extra questions and he did answer clsoed questions with a yes or no whereas others might have tried to ride them with a load of waffle.

Mr Mustard's extra question for Q2 was for an explanation of table 2.1 as he couldn't understand why the £10k was not in the first column but was in the second. There was no heading for this table, by the way, but Mr Mustard worked out it was currently planned spend (before the axeman cometh). Here it is:

The answer given by Steven Evans, Assistant Director of Commissioning Strategy, was that the table was wrong. He doubtless doesn't regard £10,000 as material as he probably costs the council that much every month (Mr Mustard is happy to publish the actual salary band & pension cost if it is provided to him). Oh dear. How is it that errors keep on appearing in reports and that no-one spots them, or bothers to correct them, before they jump off the page at Mr Mustard. This table is just so obviously wrong.

So the answer to question 3 is basically a lie as there is already a contract with Capita as Chris Naylor the Chief Operating Officer had been quick to tell Mr Mustard on twitter. He knew he had hit a nerve when Mr Mustard has the COO asking him on twitter what is wrong with Callcredit (Cameo). Possibly nothing is the answer but given the established market leading position of Experian (MOSAIC) and the lack of complaint about it, to change is not worth the bother.

For question 4 the council had to ask Capita for the answer as the council didn't know the answer which is a terrible admission that a proper comparison had not been done before the Capita contract was signed.

It seems, from the answer to Q5 that Capita don't really have a product at all (except they add their own data into it which is of course council data) and are just badging someone else's product and you might as well cut out the middleman and save money. Mr Mustard wonders if they added more or less than £8,452 into the contract price for it. Doubtless the answer is top secret.

More questions:

The answer to Q7 was pretty pointless in talking about other data sets as the council's corporate mind was already made up. It is easy to say the sets do not vary widely when do detail is given. A typically vague council answer.

The answer to Q8 shows how hopeful this £200k saving is. They think that once the 5 years are up they can make the equipment last longer. Of course one of the reasons for replacing the cctv network was that it had become old technology and needed replacing. The same will be true of what we have just purchased. the council are also over a barrel with this supplier and will have to take whatever terms they are offered in year 6 or start over again. Come back to this posting in 2017 and see who was right.

The final question:

So the council haven't done any market testing but think they can persuade local businesses to cough up £600,000 for unknown cctv services. Mr Mustard has his doubts. The council should not go into competition with other local businesses.

So do councillors run the council? It doesn't seem so based solely upon the knowledge of the chairman of this meeting who presumably reads the agenda before it goes out and should have picked up that he was being asked to chair a meeting about a fait accompli.

Do the officers (senior management) run the council. They present vague reports which don't add up and try to pull the wool over the eyes of councillors. That isn't going to end well.

Do Capita run the council? One thing Mr Mustard doesn't like about the Capita deal is the lack of transparency about whether officers (senior staff) are employees of the council or of Capita as their raison d'etre are different (Capita's is to make money, the only reason a commercial company exists) and neither Stephen Evans nor James Mass appear in the list of highly paid employees in the notes to the 2014 Annual Accounts which makes me think they are now Capita folk. Mr Mass was previously with Impower. Mr Mustard recalls that one of his previous reports to committee about the future cctv system, which is already being cut, contained a massive blunder figure wise. Lets hope he checks his work better in the future. We can't afford to let Capita run the council as they are doing so badly on residents permits, telephones, customer service, payroll, councillors' IT etc.

Mr Mustard will keep asking awkward questions until such time as reports are complete, concise and accurate.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Committee Room 1 - Den of Incompetence

Guess which box Mr Mustard thinks the council are in (no prize)

Mr Mustard does to lots of council meetings. He reads lots of rubbish reports which should not have reached the committee. The committee pass them anyway even if they are utter tosh. Mr Mustard decided to do something about it. Here is what he wrote to the leader of the council and copied to very councillor so that they can be in no doubt of the standard he expects to see.

To make sense of it you need to see all the questions and answers from the meeting

Public questions by MisterMustard

and now what Mr Mustard wrote:

Committee Room 1 - the Den of Incompetence

I expect you will recall Richard, from Constitution Committee of 10 April, that I commented for 5 minutes upon the disappointing way in which the previous meeting had been handled.

I also asked 29 questions as there were that many points which required clarification in just 2 sections of the constitution, the ones relating to procurement.

The conclusions I have drawn from attending many meetings are:

1          Chairmen are in too much of a rush.

2          Some councillors make no input whatsoever

3          Not all councillors read all of the papers in advance

4          Reports are strewn with errors

My comment concluded with me asking to see more and longer scrutiny meetings and self evident proof that every councillor has thoroughly read the papers. The way in which I expected that to be demonstrated was by councillors coming to committee meetings armed with questions which they want answering and with the Chairman having gone through the report before it is published so that all glaring errors and inconsistencies are removed. There should be little left for the public to ask about if reports are clear, concise and accurately written in plain English.

Now roll forward to Cabinet Resources of 18 April 2013 and the situation was still dire.

I looked in detail only at the CCTV item. The report had been prepared by James Mass, an iMpower consultant who has been seconded to the council and for whom we are doubtless invoiced a pretty penny.

I asked 9 questions and some need further discussion.

Q1       The answer revealed that the numbering of the appendices was incorrect. Seemingly no councillor attending had noticed this nor had any officer or if they had they couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. Could the reason possibly be that they don't read very carefully, if at all?

Q2       This answer is not exactly clear, accurate or helpful. The document which has now been produced refers to an Options Appraisal undertaken in November 2011 and is the very document I asked to see and should now be sent to me please. The point of my question was to look at the thought process and methodology at the earliest stage so I could see how we had got to where we were. What the document produced shows me is that in procurement the council allows the tail to wag the dog. The final question in the soft market testing report asks the supplier what contract length they would find ideal. What the council should be doing is deciding what length contract the council would find ideal, probably the lifetime of the equipment, and telling the contractor that is the contract period they can bid for. We are nowhere near out of the woods with procurement disasters if this is the typical way of going on.

Q3       The answer should simply have been "No". In answer to my supplementary question, Cllr Thomas had to admit that a one third reduction in staffing was a possibility.

Q4       Councillors should have had this information made available to them in the main report if they want to make considered decisions about options. Now take a good look at the answer given in writing. I only had 2 minutes before the meeting to study these and prepare my supplementary questions. A pity as the answer I have been given is wrong. You only have to glance across the rows and then look at the total for the in-house option to see that it is wrong. It jumped off the page at me today.

No councillor thought to ask why the contingency for the in-house option was £346,385 and £zero for outsourcing. Doesn't a contingency of £346,385 when spending a capital sum of about £947,000 (there is not a clear table of capital costs) strike you as a bit over the top? It is 36% and seriously skews the options in favour of full outsourcing; anyone would think that the report had been deliberately slanted that way with in-house costs over-stated to make the in-house option look unattractive.

You will recall that Mr Mass said that the extra £20,000 on consultancy was to pay an additional expert in specifying the CCTV and setting it up. Surely if we are paying an expert £20,000 we won't need a contingency of £346,385? Once that is taken out of the equation and Table 4 is updated with the correct figure for implementation costs it starts to look rather different, viz:

£	Out-source	Half way	In-House
Transition costs	215,250	215,250	322,875
Contingency	0	0	0
Income	(350,661)	(304,060)	(304,060)
Expenditure	6,577,821	6,881,390	6,552,547
TOTAL	6,442,410	6,792,580	6,571,362
CURRENT COSTS	7,255,920	7,255,920	7,255,920
Implementation costs	247,000	220,000	214,000
NET (BENEFIT) / COST	(566,510)	(243,340)	(470,558)

A 1.5% saving (the difference between projected outsourcing and in-house costs is only £96,000) does not seem enough compensation for the loss of direct control, data security risk and loss of flexibility which goes hand-in-hand with outsourcing.

The answer given by James Mass to my supplementary question was that there were an extra £20,000 of consultancy costs for the in-house option. Now go to page 56 of the report pack (page 18 of the CCTV section) and read this "Option 3: 250,000 additional consultancy costs to support specification of system". No councillor spotted this £230,000 sized error and nor did any officer who touched the report before it was issued. Sloppy work all round I would say.

Mr Mass is on secondment. Can we send him back to iMpower because we don't seem to be getting value for money?

I consulted Mr Dix about this report. This is what he had to say:

I don’t get the reason for the additional £107k transition costs for the in-house team - it is counter intuitive and not supported by any clear evidence. The contingency issue is fundamentally flawed because, subject to the judicial review, Capita will be responsible for procurement and, if anything, they claim to offer the best possible procurement opportunity because of their centralised resources. As such there is absolutely no rational for the contingency. They have also included £250k in option 3 expenditure for system specification yet in the document they have specified exactly what they want. Perhaps a small budget to fine tune the details but £250k seems completely out of proportion. That is the balancing figure with the contingency and transition costs that makes the in house option the least attractive instead of the most attractive. Without a doubt this is the most biased and unsound analysis I have seen and, based on the incorrect figures given at the CRC in reply to questions, incompetent, on the basis that they can't add up. Richard Cornelius should be utterly embarrassed that officers put out this flimsy business case in the name of efficiency and best value.

Q9.      Given that I showed that it might be possible to perform the service Sussex style for about half the cost in-house I think that what councillors should have done at CRC was to have asked for the Outline Business Case to be updated with more accurate figures and have it brought back to the meeting. Is it any wonder that the council ends up in so many judicial reviews when it is so cavalier with the money of residents?

Summary

Now how can councillors be giving due regard to their duties and value for money when they are galloped though an agenda of 171 pages in 44 minutes flat. I wrote down the time from my mobile phone that items 5, 6 & 7 were agreed at. They were all at 20:12

Item 8 at 20:14

Item 9 at 20:17 and so on.

You need to slow that Cllr Thomas down and every councillor needs to start asking questions. The subject matter is more important than an early dinner.

I will tell you this to your face Richard but officers and consultants are incompetent, reports are riddled with errors and councillors aren't doing the job that they get well rewarded for. You all need to pull your socks up to the point where no member of the public, in their spare time, can make you look to be such a blisteringly incompetent shower. I do hope that the next report I study is 100% accurate.

Have a nice weekend.

Best regards

Mr Mustard