Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs.
Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
You will struggle to believe that a council, a body with a legal duty to be fair
R-v-Secretary of State for Home Department ex p. Doody (1994) (House of Lords) per Lord Mustill : "Where an Act of Parliament confers an administrative power there is a presumption that it will be exercised in a manner which is fair in all the circumstances" (The noble Lords clearly forgot to add 'except in Haringey' )
could stoop this low, or maybe you think that all parking departments are venal and rapacious. Certainly there are plenty of examples of a complete lack of ethics when it comes to PCN.
Here is the alleged contravention from the postal PCN
and here is one of the two photographs from the council website (the second photo is of the time plate)
Look at the bottom of the photograph. The photograph is timed at 18:32 so unless the driver decided to reverse back into the space and somehow avoid being photographed and also avoid being given a PCN or having one stuck to the windscreen (which of course they didn't) then at 18:34 the car was half a mile up the road.
Mr Mustard wonders if this should be treated as an attempted fraud and reported to the police. Despite this being obviously mischeivous the car owner still has to make representations as otherwise they will become guilty by default, which is one of the flaws of the way that the legislation is written.
If you have a PCN which has been dished out by CEO (traffic warden) 542, Mr Mustard would suggest you study it very carefully for any signs of trickery.
Perhaps the time of the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Nick Walkley could be better spent in instilling honesty into parking staff and contractors (this will of course be the work of just one rogue traffic warden, yawn) instead of faffing about spending thousands on wretched logos.
Almost the new Haringey logo:thanks Alan
Any lawyers who happen to be reading are invited to comment upon possible actions that could be taken against Haringey Council. Mr Mustard will deal with the PCN itself.
extracts of Barnet Council's ludicrous attempt to nobble Mr Mustard in 2011
Haringey Council wanted Mr Mustard to prove he was one and the same as Derek Dishman, or the other way around, before answering his questions about what, if anything, the parking department had written about either of them. It would have been a data breach for Haringey Council to phone Barnet Council and ask who I was but that sort of thing does not (oops) go amongst councils. Searching on google for "Derek Dishman Mr Mustard" also brings up ample proof in a second.
Anyway, as he is so helpful, he did prove it.
Dear Ms
Pietikäinen
I refer to
your below email.
I prove that
Mr Mustard is my nom-de-plume by the following methods:
·I
have placed your below email on the Mr Mustard blog
·Your
chief Executive, Nick Walkley, can confirm my identity
·I
attach a complaint made to the ICO, which was not upheld, by Barnet Council
which understands that Mr Mustard is Derek Dishman and that the blog should
have been registered under Data Protection Act.
·Derek
Dishman as his character Mr Mustard has been seen on BBC1 in the programme
Parking Mad. The following iPlayer link will work for 2 weeks http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041d6z6
I look
forward to my request now being complied with.
Please add
to my SAR request all internal council communications with any member of the
Feedback & Information Team since 1 January 2015 in my real name or
nom-de-plume.
Best regards
Derek
Since doing this Mr Mustard, or his alter ego, have received an email thanking them for the £10 cheque and saying that an answer should be provided by 3 October.
It will be interesting reading. Yours frugally Mr Mustard
Actually it all went wrong when the Job Description was changed. This was in the time of Nick Walkley as Chief Executive, now at Haringey Council and if memory serves Mr Mustard correctly we also had, at that time, the pleasure of top level HR advice from Jacquie McGeachie who also, completely coincidentally, left us and went to consult at Haringey Council. Which of the two of them wrote the job specification Mr Mustard couldn't say, maybe someone else entirely, but Nick would have had to approve it. In the light of recent events it was a poor decision.
The below figures from DueDil (a most useful free site for company information) are to 31 December 13. The McGeachie company is now worth a mere £241 despite being previously being paid a zillion* pounds a day by Barnet Council; maybe her skills are not so valuable or sought after in 2014?
Mr Mustard's Haringey based follows will doubtless now be combing through the over £500 lists (expect payment to be disguised by use of another agency) or asking an FOI question, and checking the job description of the monitoring officer.
Here is part of the job description of the job which included the post of monitoring officer in 2011 (Mr Mustard's questions may have become vexatious in late 2012 but having information like this shows the real value that was in them)
Fast forward to the current requirement (probably being changed as this blog is typed)
Not much specified there in the way of legal ability.
If you want to see the full job descriptions, they are here, from 2011 and here from 2013.
The immediate problem is over but what did it cost us? The answer will be in the council's March 15 Accounts which will appear in draft form in June 15.
Yours frugally
Mr Mustard
* Mr Mustard is prone to the occasional exaggeration. It was something in the area of £750 to £1,000 a day, nothing over generous.
Conservative politicians have a weekend of thinking ahead of them (one hopes) and hopefully someone is coming forward to lead a new team who will scrap One Barnet and look at providing decent services to all without needing an army of consultants and town hall tax dodgers to do so.
Bring on "Boring Council" as that is what Mr Mustard would like to see. A council so finely tuned, so highly efficient, without waste and without people doing jobs that we don't need (goodbye to the Tooting Twister? he must be in a right spin at the moment) at ridiculous rates of pay / daily rate, that he can retire.
We wrote to you recently about the
impending vote on the motion of no confidence in Leader Richard
Cornelius.
We observed that there was a rising tide of concern in your
ranks about the One Barnet programme of outsourcing, and we asked you to act to
halt the negotiations for the privatisation of £1 billion worth of our council
services.
Now your former colleague Brian Coleman, who has been a senior
member of the Cabinet and exerted considerable influence within the party, has
chosen to speak out against One Barnet in the strongest terms, calling for its
immediate rejection.
In his statement in the Barnet Press, Councillor
Coleman refers to the proposed outsourcing as ‘an
officer-driven juggernaut’ backed up by a ‘revolving
door of endless consultants’ with a ‘promise of
savings’. By implication, Cllr Coleman does not believe that One Barnet
will deliver those savings.
The council needs to dump
this flawed scheme and introduce a proper strategy which assesses where services
belong, whether that is the private sector, shared services with other boroughs,
the voluntary sector or indeed occasionally in-house - a mixed economy is what
is needed.
We would give far more weight than Cllr Coleman to
considering the in-house option fully as services are reviewed, but we are glad
that he is prepared to voice publicly the idea that large-scale privatisation of
services is not the answer to all our prayers.
He is not alone in this;
many senior Conservative politicians in local government are saying the same. He
also says of his erstwhile colleagues:
I don't know
any councillors who agree we should privatise the planning
department.
We invite those of you for whom this is true to speak
out! We ask again: who controls the Council, senior officers or the elected
Councillors?
We are pleased to see that at last a Conservative councillor
is voicing in public the concerns that many of you have about One Barnet,
especially since he has had to put aside loyalty to Richard Cornelius in order
to do it. (Although, as he points out, Cllr Cornelius had become convinced that
One Barnet will save money, he too was angered by the covert moves senior
officers took towards adopting a Joint Venture for the DRS
outsourcing.)
Cllr Coleman has also put on record the consternation that
many of you felt when Nick Walkley pressed the button on his ejector seat out of
the Barnet cockpit.
Of course, we have many differences with Cllr
Coleman. For example, his suggestion that Conservative councillors have gone
along with the One Barnet proposals because the unions had their own separate
objections to them seems far-fetched. We find it hard to believe that the
Conservative philosophy has as shallow a basis as knee-jerk hostility to
anything the unions say.
Notwithstanding that, and our very many
differences with Cllr Coleman over the years, there is an indisputable truth in
much of what he is now saying about One Barnet. It is only a pity that someone
did not speak out publicly before!
A glance at what is happening with the
parking contract recently outsourced to NSL shows the dangers ahead if the
Council plunges ahead with One Barnet.
The parking contract has been in
place for six months and NSL are still experiencing serious difficulties as a
result of 'teething troubles'; this contract was for £15 million over five
years. If you scale up from a £3 million a year mess to £100 million a year how
much havoc will be wrought in the lives of residents?
Opening his
article, Cllr Coleman says:
Something has happened in
the last few months in Barnet. Residents have been taking an interest in the way
Barnet Council is proposing to operate in future, the so-called One Barnet
scheme.
He is right, residents are very interested in that, but it
shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Of course, like you, residents
are concerned about the fate – for that is what it is – of their council
services, and of the money they have paid out in taxes to secure them.
We
hardly need to remind you that residents will also take an interest in who was
in charge when their services were handed over wholesale to two large companies,
and tied up in 10-year contracts. We all know who they will blame when the
service delivery falls short of the high standards they have experienced up till
now, or when there are contractual wrangles about service levels with the
contractors BT, Capita et al.
Cllr Coleman suggests that Barnet
Conservative councillors are behaving like lemmings heading for a cliff. That is
not a very positive image but we have to believe that his comments do have some
valuable insights and that there must be some truth in them that demand your
urgent consideration.
We ask you now then to follow the instinct of your
own common sense, stop behaving like lemmings, and abandon the reckless One
Barnet programme before it is too late.
Yours sincerely
Derek
Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne
Mr Mustard is very grateful to the comprehensive site about London, Londonist, for their permission to reproduce the above drawing of how London could be divided up and the introductory paragraph, viz:
London’s boroughs, it seems to us, are all wrong.
It isn’t their
abilities to empty bins, tarmac roads or stage amusing performing arts
festivals that bother us (at least, not on this occasion).
Mr Mustard is also grateful to the friend who brought this to his attention and thought that the region containing Barnet should be called Barr-enf-ey but Mr Mustard, being Mr Mustard, had his own idea and though it should be called BEn-Har (please don't write in and complain about the bad jokes). Mr Mustard also thought, and this was last week when the news of non-stick not sticking it out at Barnet and then going to Haringey would put him in number 1 spot for the job of the CEO of a triple sized borough.
That was of course before the people of Haringey, pretty fleet of foot down there, started a petition protesting about the appointment of non-stick which has to be confirmed by full council on 16 October. This is the link to the petition.
Mr Mustard has never heard of such a petition ever being started and he is not going to sign it because he does not live in Haringey (although he did in about 1978) and he rather thinks that Barnet would be improved by a better Chief Executive. Mr Mustard wonders if non-stick has actually handed in his written resignation and as arrangements have already been made to cover his work the idea of his going is pretty certain. Even if he hasn't actually signed a resignation letter no person of honour could stay now as they have signalled their intention to leave and so must leave if they are to have any credibility at all.
In case anyone is interested there are quite a few vacancies on Iona coming up.
Finally, would bloggers of Haringey please look through all the Barnet links on this site and get in touch if you want to know anything.
It was announced yesterday that Mr Nick Walkley, the Chief Executive of Barnet Council, is leaving in order to take up a position in Haringey.
This unexpected development immediately raises the most serious questions regarding the progress of the controversial £1billion One Barnet programme which is due to outsource the majority of our council services to the private sector: a hugely over ambitious project which bears the risk of being a spectacular failure, and having a devastating impact on the lives of residents in our borough.
We have a right to know why Mr Walkley, the architect of this programme, is leaving at this crucial point in the proceedings, just as the procurement process reaches its conclusion, and the successful bidders are chosen.
We note that this departure arises in the wake of the revelation that the council leader, Councillor Richard Cornelius, admits that he knew nothing about a decision by the senior officers of the council to change the outsourcing model of the DRS service bid from a strategic partnership to an even higher risk Joint Venture. This is a decision which has been taken by officers acting with consultants and bidders, without oversight from the elected members of this authority, and is therefore an action taken in open defiance of the democratic process which us supposed to safeguard the best interests of residents of this borough.
We question the unrestricted expenditure of millions of pounds on unaccountable consultants acting as "implementation partners" for what is, at best, the biggest risk undertaken by any local authority with the money and trust invested in them by residents and tax payers: a scandalous waste of our money at what is supposed to be a time of austerity, and when we have seen savage reductions in council spending, leading to widespread hardship and the loss of community resources such as the much loved local library in Friern Barnet, and the Church Farmhouse museum.
As residents, tax payers, and local bloggers, we call for an emergency session of the full council in order to discuss the implications of Mr Walkley's resignation and for the immediate suspension of the One Barnet programme pending the outcome of an external and fully independent audit of the risks involved in this £1 billion gamble with our money, our services, Our Barnet.
Yours faithfully
Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne
The above is a seriously made and sincere request but as it is Friday, which traditionally is the day on which bloggers jest, here is the resignation letter that Nick Walkley won't be writing.
Dear Mr X,
As a graduate of an institution of higher education, I have a few very basic expectations. Chief among these is that my direct superiors have an intellect that ranges above the common ground squirrel. After your consistent and annoying harassment of my co-workers and me during the commission of our duties, I can only surmise that you are one of the few true genetic wastes of our time.
Asking me, a network administrator, to explain every little nuance of everything I do each time you happen to stroll into my office is not only a waste of time, but also a waste of precious oxygen. I was hired because I know how to network computer systems, and you were apparently hired to provide amusement to myself and other employees, who watch you vainly attempt to understand the concept of "cut and paste" for the hundredth time.
You will never understand computers. Something as incredibly simple as binary still gives you too many options. You will also never understand why people hate you, but I am going to try and explain it to you.........
You walk around the building all day, shiftlessly looking for fault in others. You have a sharp dressed useless look about you that may have worked for your interview, but now that you actually have responsibility, you pawn it off on overworked staff, hoping their talent will cover for your glaring ineptitude. In a world of managerial evolution, you are the blue-green algae that everyone else eats and laughs at. Managers like you are a sad proof of the Dilbert principle. Since this situation is unlikely to change without you getting a full frontal lobotomy reversal, I am forced to tender my resignation.
However, I have a few parting thoughts.
1. When someone calls you in reference to employment, it is illegal for you to give me a bad reference. The most you can say to hurt me is "I prefer not to comment." I will have friends randomly call you over the next couple of years to keep you honest, because I know you would be unable to do it on your own.
2. I have all the passwords to every account on the system, and I know every password you have used for the last five years. If you decide to get cute, I am going to publish your "favorites list", which I conveniently saved when you made me "back up" your useless files. I do believe that terms like "Lolita" are not usually viewed favorably by the company.
3. When you borrowed the digital camera to "take pictures of your Mother's birthday," you neglected to mention that you were going to take pictures of yourself in the mirror n.de. Then you forgot to erase them like the techno-moron you really are. Suffice it to say I have never seen such odd acts with a sauce bottle, but I assure you that those have been copied and kept in safe places pending the authoring of a glowing letter of reference. (Try to use a spell check please; I hate having to correct your mistakes.)
Thank you for your time, and I expect the reference on my desk by 8:00 am tomorrow. One word of this to anybody, and all of your little twisted repugnant obsessions will be open to the public. Never f*** with your systems administrator. Why? Because they know what you do with all that free time!
Wishing you a grand and glorious day'.
Perhaps Barnet Council might like to think again about outsourcing the IT department?
Mr Mustard's alter ego is not only a debt collector, he is also a property developer (that sounds a bit over-stated as he only develops one house at a time and tries to return them to a more original state by adding things like wooden sash windows - actually he might call himself a Property Improver from now on - don't use the shorthand version of PImp!). He is just moving towards exchange on his current project so he now wants to buy another run down house in Chipping Barnet to improve - probate sales especially welcome. He agrees a price and then moves quickly, no waiting around for surveys as he relies on his own judgment.
The current project was owned by a widow who had the misfortune to be introduced to a roofer who her son's girlfriend found down the pub (this is the story he has been told by a neighbour in the know) as they were cheaper. The roofer stripped the roof, threw the old concrete tiles and battens into the loft space, got the old widow to pay him for the job (she probably wasn't up for climbing ladders to check) and then buggered off leaving the roof uncovered. A completely b'stard way of going on. The old widow had to find new roofers in a hurry and pay a second time for the same job.
@MPSBarnet (good to follow) are tweeting today on this horrible type of crime
and in other news, Nick Walkley is leaving Barnet Council
There we have it. The Barnet Chief Exec pocketed £250,818 (including the pension pot payment which is simply deferred pay) and the Haringey Chief Executive got £233,862 (returning officer fees deducted for a fair comparison). Now the difference is £16,956 or some people's salary and you might think that if you are paid a six figure sum it doesn't matter but a drop in salary always rankles.
Why go?
Has non-stick Nick finished what he came here to do? Well Mr Mustard would say not, as he is leaving before the One Barnet contracts have been awarded and an extra 6 months to make sure they are working properly would be the actions of a person who finishes the job.
Has non-stick left behind a good team of well trained up senior managers and is there a candidate who can step into his shoes? No. We are in the midst of a senior management restructure. The Chief Finance Officer has taken his £1,000 a day habit to East Sussex where it swelled to more than £1,100 a day (and where the rumour is he won't be staying). Would a Town Hall Tax Dodger get a warm welcome as the new Chief Executive? Somehow Mr Mustard doubts it.
Who else have we got at the top of the organisation who could take over? Who is that eminently forgettable Assistant Chief Executive who is trying to get squatters out of a building by, yes, giving them a building. We might as well let the squatters stay where they are, especially as they are doing such a good job. What was her name, oh that's it, Julie camera-shy Taylor. We can't have a Chief Executive who is afraid of their own shadow. Any other Directors up to the job? - None of them seem at all inspiring.
Mr Mustard is now thinking about non-stick Nick's legacy. What has he done for Barnet? Mr Mustard couldn't think of anything so he went for help. He downloaded Nick's performance report for the last quarter.
So what fantastic achievements were there in the months of April, May & June 2012?
The report calls for the top 3 achievements. Somehow Nick listed 4. He really should read the question before answering.
Moved teams into a call centre. Mr Mustard tested the call centre and it was a failure; uncaring and inhumane, insisting that the disabled have to apply for their blue badges on-line. Not an achievement to be proud of.
Delivery of the new website to timetable. Mr Mustard has the original timetable. The website was only a year or two late and it is horrible and cost over £700,000.
Launch of the Big Society Innovation Fund. "I gave away free money". For that we should haul non-stick up onto our shoulders and parade him through the streets of Barnet, shouldn't we? OK, maybe not.
Successful transfer of the Hampstead Garden Suburb library to the residents. So non-stick claims credit for giving a library away; not sure many people would agree that was an achievement, can you hear the cheering from Friern Barnet?
It looks like non-stick hasn't achieved much for a man costing us a quarter of a million pounds a year. Get yourself over to Haringey as soon as you like non-stick. You won't be missed here especially by those who now have the job of undoing One Barnet.
The worry is who we will now get in his place. Someone with good people management skills who gets out there and really listens and just quietly gets on with implementing sensible policies that work and doesn't have a slogan and doesn't think they should cost us a quarter of a million a year. A salary of £100,000 is ample. The new incumbent might have to do a hatchet job on those earning more than that but possibly if the senior management were all cut and not replaced the staff might just be able to get on with their jobs and actually get things done.
The future is in the hands of the seven councillors who make up the Chief Officers Appointments Panel whose members are not obviously listed on the council website (stand by in FOI!)
We haven't had any performance, or lack of, reports for a while so here we are, two at once, for the 6 months from October 2011 to March 12. The latest quarter has been changed and should be on the website soon. Considering that over £700,000 was spent on the new website and that over 100 people have been trained in the CMS software, it is disappointingly slow in being updated.
Do you think this is an achievement? "We gave away £200,000?". If that is one of non-stick Nick's top three achievements the bar is not set very high.
Yet more transformation managers being appointed:
The Contact Centre Transformation Manager - Iain Hamilton - all the way from Cheshire.
Head of Customer Services Transformation manager - Andrew Cox - a rare appointment of an interim who has come from inside the council.
Libraries - interim project manager - Heather Wills - who had her own bog post last week.
The Chief Executive's service is unable to manage the simplest task. They can only manage to pick up the phone within 20 seconds 62.3% of the time. What putrid service.
Channel shift is being pushed faster than people want to go. Of course more payments are being done on-line as opportunities to pay by any other method get removed.
Benchmarking is still utter rubbish. The marks chosen are not challenging ones at the top of the range which is what they are meant to be. It is of no help to know that Bolsover DC are marginally more cr*p than Barnet Council at answering the phone.
Adult Social Services were unable to find temporary recruits for 2 posts. Perhaps word has spread about what a joy it is to work for Barnet Council.
The final sentence of page 5 is very worrying. E-mail is the most useful form of communication for many people and Barnet Council are going to try and straightjacket us into webforms where the subject about which you want to write has to be presented in a certain format and you don't automatically get a copy, you are reliant on the council to send you one afterwards if they choose to. This has already happened with parking ticket appeals where your choices are a letter (snailmail) or a webform. Not email which is an utter disgrace. Anyone would think that the council don't want to make it easy to appeal.
Well done to Friern Barnet library campaigners. You are one of the top 3 issues (issues = problems). Keep on going. The council will crack in the end.
Brian Coleman has been complaining in his blog (you will have to find the rotten thing yourself, it is too turgid for words) about spelling mistakes in the local papers. Well Brian, take a look at the top of page 2
"4 where on target" that should have been "4 were on target" and then further down
"predominantly by with our face to face service".
Also, the triangles which indicate the DoT, Direction of Travel, have turned into empty rectangles. There is a lack of attention to detail at the council and no-one cares.
