Barnet Council - the soap opera

If you want to leave now you will be forgiven. This will be a long and confusing posting. HR are so on top of their game that incorrect FOI answers get sent to Mr Mustard and it's only because he can see through the fog that eventually he gets the right answer (possibly). It all started with this DPR

1645 - Interim HR Management Structure

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Mr Mustard has the notion that DPR should make things clearer not more muddled but they often don't seem to. Here, without the truly boring bits, but leaving in the fairly boring bits, are the two versions of the FOI answer that he received:

 

I write further to my email of 12th July 2012 acknowledging your request for an internal review into the handling of your request for information.

You have requested an internal review of the Council’s response in relation to your request for:

I understand that Jacquie McGeachie is no longer the interim Assistant Director of HR and is working on some sort of special project for Nick Walkley.

Please tell me the nature of the special project and provide the job description for it.
Please tell me when and where it was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed. Is Ms McGeachie now on the payroll and if not through which company is she being paid?
Please tell me what salary scale applies or the daily rate paid to the agency.

I note that Sarah Murphy-Brookman is now the Assistant Director of HR (the report to the Remuneration Committee does not say if this is an interim post or not).
Is this a permanent posting or an interim one?
Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months, and if so in what way?
Please tell me when and where the post was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed.

Ms Murphy-Brookman previously filled the role of Head of Business Partnering and Change.
Please provide a copy of the job description for that post including the pay scale. Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months and if so in what way?
Please tell me who is now filling the post.
Please tell me if that person is now on the payroll under PAYE or are provided by an agency and which one.
If paid through an agency please tell me the daily rate.
If an employee paid under PAYE is the posting an interim or permanent one?
Please tell me when and where the post was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed.

This request was replied to on 24th May 2012, the response is copied in below, and you were provided with a copy of the Role Profile for the Head of Business Partnering and Reward. You found this response unsatisfactory and requested an Internal Review which we received on 30th June 2012.
The response you received was:
Please tell me the nature of the special project and provide the job description for it. An HR consultant role has been created, there is no Job Description.  Please refer to DPR no. 1645 for the detail. http://barnet.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=123

Please tell me when and where it was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed. Is Ms McGeachie now on the payroll and if not through which company is she being paid?

The HR Consultant role was not advertised.
Ms McGeachie is not an employee of the London Borough of Barnet
The AD Consultant role has been filled on a temporary basis through Hays
Please tell me what salary scale applies or the daily rate paid to the agency.The DPR sets out the salary scale. The day rate paid to Hays is £575
I note that Sarah Murphy-Brookman is now the Assistant Director of HR (the report to the
Remuneration Committee does not say if this is an interim post or not).Is this a permanent posting or an interim one?This detail is set out in the DPR
Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months, and if so in what way?
This detail is set out in the DPR

Please tell me when and where the post was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed.

The post was not advertised
Ms Murphy-Brookman previously filled the role of Head of Business Partnering and Change.

Please provide a copy of the job description for that post including the pay scale. Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months and if so in what way?

A copy of the Job description is attached
The pay scale for this post is set out in the DPR
Please tell me who is now filling the post.The post has been filled on a temporary basis through Hays
Please tell me if that person is now on the payroll under PAYE or are provided by an agency and which one.

The post has been filled on a temporary basis through Hays

If paid through an agency please tell me the daily rate.The daily rate paid the to Hays is £532
If an employee paid under PAYE is the posting an interim or permanent one?Not applicable
Please tell me when and where the post was advertised and how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed.

The post was filled through HaysInternal Review

I have undertaken the Internal Review and the outcome of my review is set out below. I have processed this review request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

I have looked at your original request and the answers provided. Whilst some of the information provided and answers given were correct, I do agree that some of the information provided to you did not directly answer some of the questions you had asked. Additionally, I am afraid that some of the answers to the questions were slightly incorrect, in that the answers given referred to a different post (the Head of Business Partnering and Reward) rather than that specifically asked about (the Head of Business Partnering and Change). This appears to have been caused by a genuine misunderstanding of the detail of your question. The Role Profile sent to you was similarly incorrect in that instead of it being for the Head of Business Partnering and Change it was for the Head of Business Partnering and Reward. I apologise for any inconvenience these errors may have caused.

The corrected answers and information to answer your FOIA request, with clarified numbering, are:
I understand that Jacquie McGeachie is no longer the interim Assistant Director of HR and is working on some sort of special project for Nick Walkley.

1. a) Please tell me the nature of the special project and b) provide the job description for it.

1 a) Ms McGeachie is assisting the Chief Executive with HR and associated issues arising in the current restructure of the council’s senior mangers (sic). If there was a recruitment drive we might get a better officer for less money?

1 b) There is no Job Description available, therefore the Council does not hold this information.

The post is a HR consultant role, which was has been created, under DPR no. 1645. This may be obtained at the following link:http://barnet.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=123

2 a) Please tell me when and b) where it was advertised and c) how many candidates applied and how many were short-listed.

2 a), b), c) and d) The post was not advertised therefore the Council does not hold this information.

3 a) Is Ms McGeachie now on the payroll and b) if not through which company is she being paid?
3 a) Ms McGeachie is not a London Borough of Barnet employee and so is not on the Council’s payroll

3 b) Ms McGeachie is paid through Hays on a temporary basis. Where temporary means forever, 3+ years so far, since January 2009, and not a single penny of PAYE paid?
4 Please tell me a) what salary scale applies or b) the daily rate paid to the agency.
4 a) The salary scale is as set out in the DPR, in section 5 under HR Change Consultant

4 b) The day rate paid to Hays is £575

I note that Sarah Murphy-Brookman is now the Assistant Director of HR (the report to the Remuneration Committee does not say if this is an interim post or not).

5 Is this a permanent posting or an interim one?

5 This is an interim post, please see section 8.2 of the DPR which refers to an interim structure which will be reversed at outsourcing. At which point doubtless she will slip seamlessly into another role. She doesn't put interim in front of her title like others do. She also doesn't tax dodge as far as Mr Mustard is aware.

6 a) Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months, and b) if so in what way?
6 a) Yes.
6 b) It has been reduced from spinal column point (scp) range 247-250 to scp 243.

7 Please tell me a) when and b) where the post was advertised and c) how many candidates applied and d) how many were short-listed.

7 a), b), c) and d) The post was not advertised therefore the Council does not hold this information Aren't all posts meant to be advertised?

Ms Murphy-Brookman previously filled the role of Head of Business Partnering and Change.
 

8 Please provide a copy of the job description for that post including the pay scale.

8. The Role Profile for the Head of Business Partnering and Change can be found at this link. Please note that this post was previously called Head of Business Partnering and Employee Engagement, and when the role was changed to Head of Business Partnering and Change the title on the role profile was not similarly amended. Now you know it is wrong why not correct it? You have had a month and not done it. No-one cares about detail.

9 a)Has the pay scale of the post been changed in the last 12 months and b) if so in what way?
9 a) the pay scale for this post has not been changed as such, but as can been seen in the DPR (link provided above in 1 b)) this post has been temporarily suspended.

9 b) please see 9 a) above

10 Please tell me who is now filling the post.

10 As can be seen in the DPR the post has been temporarily suspended, so there is no person in post.

11 Please tell me if a) that person is now on the payroll under PAYE or b) are provided by an agency and c) which one.

11 a)b) and c) As can be seen in the DPR the post has been temporarily suspended, so there is no person in post, therefore the Council holds no information on this.

12 If paid through an agency please tell me the daily rate.

12 There is no person in post, therefore the Council holds no information on this.

13 If an employee paid under PAYE is the posting an interim or permanent one?

13 There is no person in post, therefore the Council holds no information on this.

14 Please tell me a) when and b) where the post was advertised and c) how many candidates applied and d) how many were short-listed.

14 a) b) c) and d) the post has not been advertised, therefore the council holds no information on this.

Is that all clear for you? There are 3 senior temporary posts which are in the DPR apart from the McGeachie one and for which Mr Mustard has sent for details which he will bring you in a few months time.

 

Just to show you what a soap opera these jobs are, with even the council getting confused by their own changes, in which they seem only to change the tile of the post and nothing substantive, you need to see this blog post so that you can see that HR have been tiddling about since at least 2009.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Jacquie McGeachie - post #5

www.despair.com ( no despair in Barnet of course )

So Mrs McGeachie is an "interim" Assistant Director. In Mr Mustard's dictionary that means "for now". "For now" is a long time in Barnet. Mrs McGeachie came to Barnet in January 2009 and hasn't yet left.

Interims shouldn't hang around like a bad smell. Don't just take Mr Mustard's word for it, see what the Interim Management Association say about the hire period, here. Mr Mustard has copied the important section for you below:

What is a typical hire period for an Interim Manager?

The Interim Manager is generally hired for a short term, high intensity assignment with a clearly defined start and finish date. ( except in Barnet )

Would you all agree with Mr Mustard that 3 years is not "short term"; he thought you would.

So naturally Barnet Council have been making enormous efforts to find a permanent Assistant Director for Human Resources. There are over 300,000+ people in Barnet, some of them must be qualified, and they live locally and so would know the borough which is a great advantage. The salary is good, in the range of £84,000 to £104,000 as that is what the other Assistant Directors get paid. The council have been paying out over £130,000 a year to this interim.

Now Mr Mustard has only been looking at council papers for 10 months and so he hasn't kept an eye out for staff advertisements in the local paper, on the internet, in national papers like the Guardian or in the specialist Human Resources press so he didn't know if any ads had been placed.

Thinking it rather odd that the "interim" post had not been filled by a proper permanent employee paid a salary under PAYE he duly sent in a question under Freedom of Information and here it is.

#1098 - Assistant Director of Human Resource

Please provide details of all efforts made to fill the post of Assistant Director of Human Resources since January 2009:

- copies of all advertisements placed, the name & date of the publication and the cost
 

- the name of any recruitment agency employed to find a permanent AD, the date they were appointed and when they ceased to act and the cost

- the dates on which the post was advertised on any Barnet Council website

- and any other efforts made to fill the post.

Mr Mustard then sat back and waited to be deluged with the details of lots of failed attempts to recruit a permanent employee. He was sitting for a long time after he asked the question on 15 August. On 28 October Mr Mustard decided that enough was enough and asked for a Review. On 1 November the council woke up and answered the question. They also sent a routine apology. Mr Mustard then received the Review from another officer and a much better worded apology with some feeling in it unlike the first one. Mr Mustard likes a good apology; you cannot overdo them ( he has given some out in his time having managed to start a County Court Claim against the wrong person ).

So what was the answer?

I have been advised that the Council has not made any efforts to fill the post of Assistant Head of Human Resources on a permanent basis. This post will continue to be filled on an interim basis because the service is to be outsourced in the 2012/13 financial year as part of the New Support and Customer Service Organisation (NSCSO) procurement project.

Reading this answer again now Mr Mustard thinks that the words "I have been advised that"  should be removed. The answer is the official one on behalf of the council so the writer cannot abdicate responsibility because he/she did not get the information out by themselves.

Mr Mustard thinks the second sentence of the reply is very interesting as it implies that the interim Assistant Director will be going somewhere ( possibly home ) but doesn't actually say so.

The most interesting part though is that no efforts whatsoever have been made to replace an interim person with a proper permanent employee with links to, and hence one would think more commitment to, Barnet. They are also more likely to spend their salary in Barnet if they live here.

Mr Mustard will get round to the tax issues soon but being an interim for 3 years certainly won't find favour with HM Revenue & Customs when they rumble what has been going on. Three years of back dated PAYE and national insurance is going to come to a pretty penny on this one. Looking back at the Consultancy Agreement ( on the blog yesterday ) Mr Mustard notes that in paragraph 10.3 Mrs McGeachie has to pay the council, on an indemnity basis ( no get-out ) any income tax or national insurance or similar contributions  that the council has to pay out. This is not the best drafted Agreement Mr Mustard has ever seen because although "similar contributions" are also subject to an indemnity the question of penalties and of interest for late payment have not been considered.

A poor show all round.

So now you know why interims hang around for so long? There is no imperative to replace them. Is this how the council should be run?

Adjustment 09:03

The other thing that the sentence about outsourcing implies is that it is policy not to recruit any permanent staff to posts that are going to be outsourced i.e. in all the bundle of services that make up DRS, in customer support and in parking. Has that been the case? No, definitely not.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Jacquie McGeachie - post #4

www.despair.com ( no despair in Barnet of course )

Mr Mustard made a small error yesterday and muddled up a 2 and a 3 in his head and thought that we had only had the pleasure of the company of the interim ( for now ) Assistant Director for Human Resources for 2 years when the correct answer is 3. Mr Mustard now realises that we are in the year 2012 but in his own defence he would like to point out that an interim manager normally arrives, does a cracking job in a short time and then leaves with a permanent employee taking over a well run ship so the question of 2 years or 3 should not arise. However, we are in Barnet where management is done differently and interims hang around seemingly for ever like a bad smell.

Let us take a look at the Consultancy Agreement

Consultancy Agreement - Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Limited

The sharp eyed reader will have noticed that the Agreement is dated 22 February 2010 but "employment" started in January 2009 and the Agreement never actually got signed until 5 May 2010. Is there an earlier Agreement? No, is the gist of the Freedom of Information response which read as follows:

I can confirm that the Council does not hold a previous copy of the contract with Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd

Current contractual arrangements are now tri-partite, probably, the situation is still a bit murky. The arrangement with Hays seems to be that the contractor, in this case Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd invoices Hays for the work done by the "consultant" Jacquie McGeachie and then Hays invoices the council. 

Mr Mustard has asked which days Mrs McGeachie billed for in November 2011 and the answer was basically that the council didn't know as the information is with Hays. Mr Mustard was most unamused by this response as the council, if it truly doesn't know, is exhibiting an astonishing lack of financial control. Mr Mustard has asked for the FOI answer to be done again with a little more thought this time.

As is often the case the paperwork surrounding this procurement is deficient.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Jacquie McGeachie - post #2

payments were missing off the over £500 lists for 2010/11

So Jacquie McGeachie started in Barnet as the interim ( for now ) Assistant Director of Human resources in about January 2009.

Here is a short blog which Mr Mustard has borrowed, with permission, from Mr Reasonable

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It has puzzled me for some time that Barnet Council's Head of HR is nether mentioned in the list of senior officers salaries nor mentioned in the supplier payments. Following the submission of a Freedom of Information request I can reveal that Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Limited was paid £140,803.28 in 2010/11. (Although the annual accounts say £133,975 - whichever, it is a lot of money)

I think it would be terribly helpful if all the senior officers who are paid as consultants were listed in the official list of senior officers salary that are included in the council's annual accounts. This is something I shall be taking up with the Auditors, Grant Thornton when I meet them in a couple of weeks.

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Mr Reasonable's meeting with GT did result in interims/consultants who occupy staff posts being listed in the statutory accounts. Well done Mr R.

What is immediately apparent, if you refer back to Mr Mustard's blog of yesterday, is the absolutely massive jump in the amount paid for the services of Jacquie McGeachie by at least £30,000 This time rather than go through an agency Mrs McGeachie formed her own Limited company on 2 January 2009, Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd ( number  06781904 ). 

Did she suddenly become a much better HR person because the job was 50 miles further south?

Is London Weighting really that high?

Did Barnet Council really need to pay that much?

Was there no-one in London who could have done the job?

Why do most of the senior management live outside of the borough?

How much has been paid in 2011/12? This much in the first 4 months:-

Timesheet ID	Week ending	Charge £
95457	08/04/2011	2,875
95456	15/04/2011	2,875
95460	22/04/2011	2,300
95455	29/04/2011	1,725
95461	06/05/2011	2,300
95462	13/05/2011	2,875
95463	20/05/2011	2,875
95464	27/05/2011	2,875
97051	03/06/2011	2,300
97052	10/06/2011	2,875
97053	17/06/2011	2,875
97054	24/06/2011	2,875
98410	01/07/2011	2,875
98411	08/07/2011	1,725
98412	15/07/2011	1,725
98413	22/07/2011	2,875
98414	29/07/2011	2,875
Total for 4 months		43,700
Annual equivalent		131,100

It is evident that this is a rate of £575 a day. A good number of 3 and 4 day weeks as well. The whole of HR must be under control. Is she worth it? Come back tomorrow to find out.

Hays have processed the payments since 1 April 2011. This is possibly a desperate late attempt to sidestep Barnet tender or EU procurement regulations as there is a framework agreement in place for temporary help from Hays. You could think of Jacquie McGeachie as a glorified temp, if you wanted to.

Why would someone earning this much money want to sidestep PAYE ( Pay as you Earn tax which applies to employees ) when they are holding a staff position and would still have plenty left in their pocket at the end of the month? Probably because their transport costs are high and if they can convince HM Revenue & Customs that they are a contractor and then set more of these off as allowable expenses against tax ( employees cannot claim any home to work costs against tax ). 

Did Mr Mustard ever tell you that he used to work for the Inland Revenue in PAYE. It was a long time ago but the principle has not really changed. If you are an employee you pay PAYE except in Barnet of course, which is a blog for another day.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Jacquie McGeachie - interim Assistant Director of Human Resources

Peterborough Lift Lock ( Ontario )

Given the number of staff who are going to have an enforced change of employer Mr Mustard thought his readers might like to know who is running the HR department and the answer is Jacquie McGeachie. She is an interim i.e. only here for now. In future posts we will look at her remuneration at Barnet, PAYE, the HR performance and other interesting topics. Let us look first at where she came from. 

Before Barnet, Mrs McGeachie worked for Peterborough City Council starting in December 05 to some time in or around November 08. She was the interim Head of HR from 27 June 07 until she left. Her "employment", (and how a Head of HR can be anything other than an employee under PAYE is a mystery. It will be a rude awakening for many councils once HM Revenue and Customs finally get their teeth into this area which appears to be a ripe one for collecting extra tax from) was not a direct one with PCC but through Anne Corder Recruitment, an agency local to P'boro. 

Payments were as follows : 

2006/07 £80,144 for about 40 weeks so around £2,000 a week

2007/08 £79,210 for about 35 weeks so about £2,250 a week

It is impossible to be exact as it would take too long to get the paperwork out and it has taken Mr Mustard 6 months and a referral to the ICO to get Anne Corder to release even this info.

What we can say though is that the annual rate of payment was in the area of £117,000 p.a. This of course was the amount paid to the agency. Mrs McGeachie herself will have been paid less than that. Staff agencies are notoriously expensive to deal with and they would have probably been taking between 5% and 25% of the fees leaving Mrs McGeachie earning something in the region of £90k to £110k p.a. Why you would give up what is a huge salary and a 2 mile commute in P'boro, the location of the McGeachie residence, to join One Barnet?

Someone please tell Mr Mustard that she doesn't drive from P'boro to N11 every day spewing CO2 as she goes. If she does, she will of course have a space in the executive section of the car park and won't have to drive round and round looking for a space like normal staff.

So that is the scene set. More on McGeachie tomorrow hopefully, and the day after.

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Not that P'boro City Council is any less stupid than One Barnet though. The footer of the first FOI response was as follows:-

The information supplied to you in response to your request is the copyright of Peterborough City Council and is protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 

Mr Mustard reproduces the relevant part of the Act for you here:

1 Copyright and copyright works.

(1) Copyright is a property right which subsists in accordance with this Part in the following descriptions of work—

(a) original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works,

(b) sound recordings, films [F1 or broadcasts], and

(c) the typographical arrangement of published editions.

(2) In this Part “copyright work” means a work of any of those descriptions in which copyright subsists.

(3) Copyright does not subsist in a work unless the requirements of this Part with respect to qualification for copyright protection are met (see section 153 and the provisions referred to there).

Never one to pass up an opportunity to save council's from their own stupidity Mr Mustard wrote the following to PCC:-

I refer to your claim to have copyright in your reply. I repeat below the first section of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. Are you claiming that your email is an original literary work? or some other copyright work? Please enlighten me.

PCC have seen the light, although they needed another dig in the ribs first, and have amended their FOI footer.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Consultant or employee - which costs more?

and another over £500 list error, which are so common that they mean that one can't really place any reliance on the published lists.

So Mr Mustard looked at the over £500 lists for the year ended 31 March 2011 and picked out payments to Anna Klonowski Associates Ltd as being worthy of a bit of research and here is what was in the list along with some extra detail from the Freedom of Information response ( thank you to some of the ladies and gentlemen in the FOI section of governance who are starting to realise what their role is and that Mr Mustard is not the enemy of the less senior staff - one day the senior management and ruling councillors might realise that bloggers help them to stay on the straight and narrow - as if they diverge from the true path, we will find them out one day ).

Date	Ref	Value £	Days	Other
			at £675
12/05/2010	5000256666	13,838	22
17/05/2010	5000257246	13,838	none*	Duplicate entry
07/06/2010	5000259604	14,850	20.5
07/07/2010	5000263626	11,813	17.5
14/07/2010	5000264374	1,500		Coaching across Finance dept
29/07/2010	5000266475	12,825	19
07/09/2010	5000271688	1,884
18/10/2010	5000276825	3,375	5	Coaching for health to the business

Mr Mustard did not ask for and was not told the daily rate, he worked it out for himself. The first entry of £13,838 was for work in April which has 30 days of which 22 were working days giving £675 per day and as all the other months divided by £675 it looks like the logical answer.

So there are 260 working days in a full year. Let us remove 10 for bank holidays and 25 for holidays and so a consultant would in a full year invoice 225 * £675 = £151,875

There is a problem about to land at Barnet Council. All temporary staff will after 12 weeks of work get many of the same rights as permanent staff, rights like holiday and sick pay which mean that in effect they will cost 10% more. Mr Mustard wonders if the Interim Assistant Director of Human Resources, Jacquie McGeachie, is busy going round chopping re-negotiating downwards the ridiculous daily rates that are paid. You will have to start with your own daily rate Ms McGeachie as you pay yourself through Jacquie McGeachie HR Consulting Ltd rather than submit to PAYE like a normal employee. Your company was paid £140,803 in the year ended 31 March 2011. Shall we say £125,000 for the year ahead which is still at least £25,000 too much. It will be interesting how you deal with your boss Mr Andrew Travers on £1,000 a day. It would be interesting to see you tell him that really he needs to reduce that down to a trifling £900 a day; how will he get by?

Now here is a bit of luck. A picture of Andrew Travers on the right and Jacquie McGeachie on the left (ignore the lady officer in the middle for today)

who chose the earwax flavoured Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Bean?

Back to the comparison. In the high salary list published by Barnet Council there is now a permanent Assistant Director of Financial Services ( Barnet Council are always tweaking titles slightly ) who gets paid only £84,543 a year (oh it's tough almost at the top) but you can't compare that directly to a consultant's invoices.

For an employee paying PAYE as they all should, employer's National Insurance needs to be added. That is £10,680 for the year. 

Also, the small matter of payments into the council's under-funded pension scheme. So, for the moment, 24% of payroll has to be paid in. That is another £20,290

So we have £84,543 + £10,680 + £20,290 = £116,000 for round numbers to employ someone

as against £151,000 for a consultant, which is 30% more. 

How many consultants are there in Barnet? too many to mention. Agilisys were paid £214,072 ( and 20p!) In October 2011 alone.

It's time for a musical interlude.

So there we have it. Loads of money spent on consultants and 30% of it is avoidable expenditure.

Just looking back at the list in the table at the top you will see there are two entries for £13,838. This was explained to Mr Mustard as "April 2010 miscoding transferred (see above 5000256666), not another invoice paid, this was a journal transaction". Ignore the spin. The extra entry was a blunder. The published information was just plain wrong.

Mr Mustard feels a Freedom of Information enquiry coming on about that subject. Bye for now.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard