Commissioning already starting to crash and burn

Cast your mind back to 2009 when the idea was born to do away with silos and have a structure which cut across council departments, a very difficult management task in Mr Mustard's humble opinion. Look, here are some pretty pictures so it must be a great idea?

The next picture brings back to Mr Mustard's mind what a lovely elderly patient said about a blonde nurse at the hospital where he was a finance manager early on in his career

"Delightful to look at but not an earthly of use"

Mr Mustard does take a different view. It is that silos are useful as they are easily understood and there is responsibility and accountability. Whose fault will something be in a commissioning council? no-one knows, not "me" obviously, you can blame commissioning and they can blame someone in a department or a contractor.

The next report shows you that even the council are finding the non-silo approach hard work.

Parking Improvement Project - Barnet Council - November 13 by MisterMustard

So those first two paragraphs really do set the tone. There are "various departments", two 3rd party contractors NSL and Capita (hey, you missed out Civica, they issue permits for the Saracens zone and are doing the Judicial Review overcharge refund exercise) (CSG is the new name for NSCSO in case you didn't know).

The there is a reference to "these complexities" and then we have "various" computer systems and one more, for enforcement and other functions, is currently being purchased and NSL are apparently leading on that.

What all this shows is that everything parking related would work much better if parking, and all the related activities, signs, line, permits, traffic management orders, were all under one competent manager, in one building, in Barnet, and not parcelled up into tasty morsels for an outside contractor to feast on (there is a statutory bar to certain functions being outsourced so why outsource half of the job and create the current dog's breakfast).

Even the report agrees "most importantly that responsibility for delivery sits within one single project board".

Interesting to see that customer satisfaction was the worst rated council service. This was found to be the case at the end of 2012. NSL took over on 1 May 12. Could the two events be related? An extra 30,000 parking tickets a year have shown up in the lack of satisfaction rating because many are undeserved.

Other points of the project report that Mr Mustard notes are that despite being probably the most interested and experienced citizen when it comes to parking tickets and that he had a meeting 4 days after the report was drafted with two of the people named in the report, that it wasn't sent to him at the time and he found it in an FOI response to another person. This is why he can publish it in full as it is already in the public domain.

Note this phrase

"there are also financial pressures on the Medium Term Financial Plan"

Has the council learnt nothing from the Judicial Review. Parking is not about revenue raising. You budget £7m from parking into the MTFP and if it looks shaky you try to get it back on track. You can put in a predictive figure but you shouldn't see it as a target. Please stop.

and this phrase

"whilst reducing the current risk to the MTFP and subsequently ensure parking income and expenditure is at least cost neutral going forward".

This whilst acceptable if the council are aiming for a no profit no loss result (which Mr Mustard doubts is the case) should not be a concern. There is no requirement to not make a loss on keeping traffic moving. It is a service that the council should provide, it should not be seen as a profit centre,

and here we go again

"the financial pressures cannot be ignored"

Yes they can. It isn't all about the money, is it?

It is in Barnet.

Until this mindset goes away there will always be negative feedback about parking.

The project sponsor is the Commercial & Customer Services Director. In the context of parking she cannot comfortably wear both hats which are mutually exclusive. If parking hits budget customers will be unhappy and if customers are happy the budget will be missed.  Difficult.

Whilst mentioning management have you seen how many people it takes to get anything done at the council? Commerce does not work this way.

On page two Objective 4 is screaming off the page like a Harry Potter Howler. Parking is not there to protect the general fund. This is wrong, both legally and morally.

Objective 8 would be funny if it wasn't such rollocks. Mr Mustard made an objection to the Accounts of Barnet Council to 31 March 13 that NSL owed the council (i.e. us) £137,343 for failure to meet Key Performance Indicators. These are apparently still being discussed. Don't talk about them, the rebate is due, it is a reward for failure and should simply be deducted off the next invoice.

Could somebody please go to the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 25th February 14 as Mr Mustard is double booked. Hopefully the Barnet Bugle will be there filming as ever (I'll buy you a pint of shandy some time Dan).

On page 11 there is more of that miserable channel shifting which Mr Mustard is dead against. Channel shift is an attempt to make residents use the communication medium that the council find to be the cheapest so they want to get you off the phone. Where to isn't stated, probably to a ghastly webform or self serve your answer on the Internet. If residents want to phone the council they should be allowed to and not forced towards the Internet especially as there are still lots of elderly people who drive but don't use a computer.

What happens when boroughs try to channel shift Mr Mustard from doing a parking ticket challenge by email (as Haringey and Camden have both found out to their cost), onto doing it by webform, is that he writes a letter. It costs Mr Mustard 50p or 60p but he doesn't care about that as he wants the information in a form that he can file where he likes on his computer and that stamp is good value to Mr Mustard. The council end up moving him from a fairly cheap method to the most expensive one. Barnet don't put it on the back of the PCN, which would be useful, but they do accept challenges to barnet@nslservices.co.uk and auto-acknowledge them.

If commissioning is causing this much trouble in parking what is it doing in all the other myriad services that have been contracted out to Capita?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Why bother having KPI if you don't enforce them?

KPI review meeting in full swing

Sharp eyed readers will have noticed Barnet getting a mention in the Standard again yesterday in an article about targets for the issue of parking tickets. Barnet doesn't have an explicit target for an absolute number of PCN but the contract does include KPI (Key Performance Indicators) which are likely to drive up the number of PCNs issued, such as (these are extracts from the contract)

KPI.2 : effectiveness will be assessed by ... PCNs issued.

KPI.11 : The service provider will maintain....the industry average for the recovery of a PCN at £45 and work to increase the value of this recovery rate for the duration of this contract.

Mr Mustard raised objections to the Accounts of Barnet Council for both of these somewhat doubtful KPI to the external auditor Paul Hughes of Grant Thornton. His reply, which for Mr Mustard's four objections about parking, ran to 8 pages which actually said very little apart from some little gems hidden away, was that everything was cushty (Mr Mustard may be paraphrasing the champion pen twiddler's reply here, you'll doubtless be familiar with Mrs Angry's descriptions on the Broken Barnet blog of the high esteem in which the external auditor is held by Barnet's Bloggers) and that he wouldn't be doing anything, apart from giving us a hefty extra invoice (actually this last bit Mr Mustard gleaned from the agenda for the Audit Committee meeting of 28 January when Mr Mustard had a snooker team to captain, which won 7-5 since you are asking, and to be fair to Mr Hughes he is at some future date when everyone has forgotten what happened going to have a closer look in the council's records at what Mr Mustard had to say, although he'd probably be well advised to sub-contract it to Mr Mustard and his fellow bloggers to ensure a thorough job does actually get done).

Mr Mustard supposes we should be grateful. When it came to paying MetPro over a million pounds, there wasn't a contract. Was that something that the external auditor picked up during his audit? oh bless me no. Mrs Angry was the lead auditor that day with her army of armchair auditors all offering their assistance, advice and publicity. Well, at least with NSL Ltd there is a Contract. 

So why is Mr Mustard unhappy? Simples, because the Contract terms aren't being enforced.

The KPI are meant to be recorded every month. As part of his armchair audit, under the Audit Commission Act 1998, Mr Mustard asked to see actual KPI in July 13 for the previous year to March 13. The actual measurements were not available even though within the Contract they are clearly specified (despite NSL thinking they had yet to be agreed - the numpties) and accordingly each month has to be considered as not met. Therefore the "Bits" - bonus payments or deductions - had to be heading downwards to the floor and Mr Mustard calculated, & he is quite good at maths, that a refund of £137,343 was due to the council (on behalf of Mr Mustard and every other resident). Somehow he feels that if a bonus of that amount was due to NSL they wouldn't have wasted any time in submitting their invoice. This refund has not been made.

Let us now look quickly at the average recovery value of a PCN.

Year to 31 March 12, when Barnet Council ran the whole show:

Income / number of PCN issued
£7,227,652 / 134,801 = £53.61 average PCN income.
 

Year to 31 March 13, NSL were appointed on 1 May 12 (so 11 months of this year is theirs and their figures will have been boosted by the council handling the first month)

£5,834,877 / 165,569 = £35.24 average PCN income.

From this we can see that the income achievement of NSL (and Mr Mustard doesn't want PCN used as revenue raisers) is only 65.7% as good as the council's. Quite simply, their performance is mediocre (Mr Mustard is being polite here, Private Eye would say they are piss poor)

Now the bloggers have got sadly inured to council procurement being awful. Which cretin, or cretins, agrees a KPI for £45 when the current council performance is £53.61. So some complacement idiot is content with a KPI performance level that is 84% of the current performance. If the person who agreed this hasn't yet left the council please would they now do so now and don't put your hand out for a pay-off. The first rule of negotiation is that you don't give anything away for nothing.

What is also clear though is that at £35.24 NSL are performing at 78% of a woefully reduced expectation.

Clearly KPI.11 has not been met, ever.

If a KPI that measures incoming revenue isn't a revenue raising measure then Mr Mustard doesn't know what is (no matter how satisfied our apparently easily satisfied external auditor is).

The parts of the Paul Hughes letter that Mr Mustard did find interesting are these, thanks Paul: 

In appointing NSL Ltd, the Council had an expectation that recovery rates would improve so these figures do represent underperformance to date in recovery of PCNs.

There is a clear acknowledgement from the Council that management of the NSL contract has not been acceptable.

We are aware that remedial actions are being put in place by the Council, including a recent performance meeting with NSL, resulting in a high level performance plan.

the overpayment to NSL ... remains the subject of performance discussions with the contractor.

What Mr Mustard notes from the above remarks.

Once a contract is signed even if your performance is only 65% of what it ought to be, not much will happen.

The council is unable to properly manage outsourced Contracts, as the Famous Five Barnet Bloggers have been saying for ages.

Every blunder simply results in a "lessons will be learned" improvement plan. We had one after MetPro; it evidently hasn't worked; they are just a sop.

Some 10 months after the year end, and 22 months after the contract started, the contract terms have not been implemented. 

What is the point of having contract terms that the Council don't implement.

The wider picture

The NSL contract is a simple procurement of one service, parking enforcement.

Scale it up 40 times to the level of NSCSO (customer services) or DRS (development and regulatory services) which bundle together a myriad of services with many more KPI and it is clear that the council doesn't have the skill or the will, or both, to properly enforce the contracts that they sign.

The commissioning council is going to be an unmitigated disaster, no matter how much hot air is spouted by councillors in Hendon Town Hall. 

You councillors don't have the grasp of details that the bloggers have. 

You did pick this contractual failure up before Mr Mustard, didn't you? 

Silence.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Stuff the semantics

call a spade a spade (ignore the fork on the right and other irrelevant facts or figures)

So if you aren't too bored already with the official explanation of why everything in the council garden is rosy, read on. Mr Mustard will try and simplify it all for you whilst also trying to bury the argument (can't have a co-writer for all that long and there are other fish to fry). This blog is by Mr Mustard alone.

OK, back to the start. The Barnet Bloggers often raise matters which would otherwise be blissfully ignored. Think of us as the conscience of the council, critical friends (sometimes more the former than the latter) unpaid external (armchair) auditors, an early warning system of what is going wrong or has gone wrong and who stop councillors from carrying out their worst excesses through the fear of being caught and exposed.

Mr Mustard is the newest of the 4 but is already 2 years 7 months and 4 days old himself so now has a fair amount of corporate council history in his brain and being a debt collector has an elephantine memory.

The unnumbered (they usually have a number) Delegated Powers Report ("DPR") in which the £16.1m payment by Barnet Council to Capita came to light refers to a meeting of Cabinet of 6 December 12 which includes the following words:

Capita’s proposal also includes (within the financial offer described above) approximately £8m investment in areas such as information technology (computer hardware and software), and customer services. This investment not only enables Capita to deliver the transformation it is proposing, but also avoids the Council having to find money in the future to fund replacement technology for systems that are at or nearing the end of their useful life.

Capita’s proposal includes a £2.3m investment in the data gathering and storage platforms required to undertake the complex analysis required to develop policy and commissioning strategies.

Capita’s proposal also includes (within the financial offer described above) approximately £15.3m revenue investment in areas such as information technology (computer hardware and software), and customer services. This investment not only enables Capita to deliver the transformation it is proposing, but also avoids the Council having to find money in the future to fund replacement technology for systems that are at or nearing the end of their useful life.

The options appraisal gave the following as one of the reasons why the services could not be retained in-house

The council has limited capability to secure and manage the significant investment, transformation and remodelling required for these service to preserve service levels, achieve strategic objectives and reduce cost.

One advantage of signing with Capita was given as:

The Council secures upfront investment in the technology and transformation required by the services which it is able to pay back over the life of the contract.

About the then estimated £17.5m investment by Capita

Capita has planned investment of £17.5m to transform the services. This investment will be made by the NSCSO for the most part in the early years of the partnership and recovered through the core service payments made by the Council.

and about funding generally

This means that for a significant proportion of the partnership the Partner will be required to run a level of working capital/project finance before becoming cash positive in later years.

So if the DPR didn't contain authorisation of a payment to Capita, per Chris's letter of 11 November 13, well neither did the Cabinet meeting unless the blue (secret) papers included figures for cash flow and statements that were directly contradictory to the public ones and that wouldn't be open and transparent, now would it?

Did the Cabinet understand what they were signing? Perhaps not, which is why Chris's office is being deluged with requests for information. Now I think that Chris remains on the Barnet payroll but I think that his deputy and team of 40 probably now work for Capita, so is Mr Mustard bothered about them having to do some work? no, not at all. Capita failed to heed the warning signs that The One Barnet contracts might be one contract too many.

The cash flow question is a very simple one which any cabinet member should be able to understand, or find the answer to in all the reports that they will have carefully read from cover to cover (just like bloggers eh Brian, reading council papers at midnight with a moist gusset - funny but not true) so if dear Cabinet member you are out of your depth, best get out of the little pond that you are drowning in.

If the bloggers had wanted to hear from the S151 officer, they would have written to him. We wanted to hear from councillors and although we write out of courtesy to them all the ones who should reply know who they are, in this case the Cabinet who decided to rule out the in-house option at the very beginning on the basis they had no money for investment and then magically found £16.1m in cash knocking about with no other plan to spend it but didn't mention this fundamental change at the time.

Now Chris Naylor is the accountant and Richard Cornelius isn't.

Chris tells us that the Council has cash in hand of £200 million, although not official reserves, which would fund the necessary investment at least 12 times over so the council have made a grave mistake in ruling out the in-house option which they could afford to invest in because if they had they could have made similar savings to capita, or if the council managed by incompetents who don't know how to make savings?

What reserves did Corny tell us we had?

Oh dear me, only £15m, what was that then Richard, a slip of the tongue or a complete lack of knowledge of the council that you run? I think you owe me, the bloggers, staff you are making redundant and every council tax paper in Barnet an explanation, don't you? It will have to be a good one.

Here are the actual reserves. Naturally they can often move from one column to another.

Chris - please stop writing to me, this is not your problem. We can discuss briefly on Tuesday. I am more interested in recovering the car that the NSL owned bailiffs took from a lady who is 6 months pregnant, with a small child and a disabled grandmother who she has to take to hospital every week and with whom the council have shown not the least sign of any empathy, understanding or compassion.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The turkey rag a.k.a Barnet First magazine

Mr Mustard's lack of enchantment with Barnet First, a publication by Barnet Council, which strikes him as rather a waste of money and trees, has just multiplied ten-fold.

Let us examine one line from this "column"

The major investment brought to the council by these contracts will do just that.

For more than 2 years we have been told that Barnet Council couldn't afford to develop services in-house because they cost too much and because the necessary capital investment wasn't available. Huzzah, like some shining white knight appearing on the horizon just in the nick of time, appeared Capita waving a big cheque to fund the investment.

Are they a Charity? no, they are a mega-corp with over 500 companies registered at Companies House

Do they help council's out of the goodness of their heart? No, they do it to make money, pure and simple (and not an objectionable principle, that is why Mr Mustard does what he does for a living)

Have they given us £16.1 million which they have plucked out of the pockets of other boroughs to give to Barnet? No, it would be absolutely wrong to do such a thing.

NSCSO Capital Investment - Barnet Council DPR by MisterMustard

So there is your answer at the bottom of this page and the start of the next. On the very first day of the contract Barnet Council gave Capita a thumping great cheque for £16.1m to pay for the investment that Capita were supposedly making. Don't blame Capita, all the mis-representation has, ironically, been by our own representatives.

Mr Mustard has been against the One Barnet contracts all along, not on ideological grounds as he himself provides an out-sourced service, but on the grounds that he didn't think they would be better quality or better value or provide any savings that a competent management couldn't make by themselves. One Barnet could be renamed the "we council wallahs can't be bothered in Barnet" contract, although that doesn't so glibly roll off the tongue.

So having been sold a turkey we might as well listen to the Turkey rag to cheer ourselves up again.

How long before your turkey votes for Christmas, eh Richard (Cornelius)? Only 198 days until your flock of turkeys are stuffed.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

p.s. Don't believe everything you read in the papers is a well known saying of which Barnet First is proof.

Where did the NSL contract savings go to?

Parking contract savings - as safe as houses?

Calculator and cup of tea at the ready? then armchair audit time it is.

Back on 23 September Mr Mustard attended the Cabinet Resources Committee. It was receiving a report from Finance about the financial performance for the first quarter of the council tax year i.e. for April to June 13. For the first time in Mr Mustard's short but eventful life (since 10 March 2011 - ha, he is in his terrible twos phase) there was an overspend, of £2,384,000 (to nearest £thousand) and the biggest culprit was "Streetscene" (hard to tell exactly from the name what that encompasses but it will become clearer later) which was £2,163,000 overspent on a budget of £15,212,000 a spectacularly awful result which is 14% over budget.

Now Mr Mustard hastens to add that these were the projected outturns for the end of the year so there was still 9 months remaining in which to get back on track (or go further off the rails!) but clawing 14% back, or 7 weeks of expenses to put it another way, looks like a mighty ask.

The way in which the figures were presented was insufficiently precise at the Directorate level for Mr Mustard and this is how the streetscene budget problem was presented in the written report:

The Street Scene Directorate is forecasting an overspend of £2.163m which includes:
•   An overspend of £1.081m in  the Special  Parking  Account. This  is  due to cost pressure on the NSL contract of £0.800m plus shortfalls in income of £0.378m.
•  The Parking service is forecasting an overspend of £0.434m, due to shortfalls in off street parking. (this is a different overspend to the one above)
•  An overspend of £0.380m in the Waste service is a result of domestic refuse staff cost pressures, however it is anticipated that the May Gurney contract negotiation should bring this back in line.
•  An overspend of £0.170m in  Street Lighting  is  as a result  of budgeted savings that will now not be achieved during the year.
•  A Highway Maintenance overspend of £0.246m is a result of winter maintenance pressures.

That was all far to vague for Mr Mustard (who had failed to notice Appendix 2 where the answer to his question was to be found) so he asked for a breakdown of the £2.163m and he was helpfully sent a copy of the table although he could have been pointed at it. Here it is:

Description	Budget V1	Q1 forecast	Variation
	£'000	£'000	£'000
Street Scene Management Team	647	631	-16
Business Improvement	333	332	-1
Mortuary	136	134	-2
Street Lighting	6,339	6,509	170
Transport	-6	-131	-125
Highways Inspection/Maintenance	508	754	246
Parking	-747	-313	434
Parks, Street Cleaning & Grounds Maintenance	5,052	5,084	32
Street Cleansing	4,236	4,240	4
Waste	2,911	3,291	380
Recycling	3,278	3,238	-40
Streetscene	22,687	23,769	1,082
Special Parking Account	-7,475	-6,394	1,081
Total	15,212	17,375	2,163

Variations in red are underspends so no need to worry about those.

The street lighting overspend is last year's budget failure carried forward. Surely we can just buy fewer lamp posts? It's not as if anything appears to be wrong with the ones that are being taken out.

There is winter pressure on highways maintenance. Mr Mustard seems to think that much greater sums have been spent in previous years and this lack of spend will shortly show up as potholes.

Parking refers to the anticipated spend in off street car parks. Mr Mustard thinks that this would magically come back to what it was if the system and charges are put back to what they were when he started blogging i.e. install cash parking meters (and card) and make prices those of 2010 or lower until there is 90% occupancy of car parks most of the time.

The waste overspend of £380k is expected to be salvaged from changing to in-house and away from May Gurney (except that they are going to continue to run the Summers Lane recycling depot - shiny new signs everywhere and a most useful facility). When the dust settles, we'll see.

So everything except for on-street parking, permits and PCNs is £1,082,000 behind budget and the Special Parking Account (on-street parking, permits and PCNs) is very nearly the same at £1,081,000 behind budget. The annual increase in the SPA budget was always going to be hard to maintain and Mr Mustard has told the relevant councillors to wean themselves off this income stream which just shouldn't be there. So instead of ripping almost £7.5m out of the pockets of the motorist (the majority of whom are also residents) a mere £6.4m will be filched instead; both surpluses are obscene.

The SPA budget problem was explained as "Cost pressure on NSL contract plus shortfall on income". The shortfall is easily fixed with cash parking meters but the NSL overspend had Mr Mustard foxed as it is a fixed price contract. So he asked for a breakdown, the one that should have supplied to councillors in the report (which to be fair Cllr Alan Schneiderman did pick up on in the pre-scrutiny meeting) and here it is:

Reason	£,000
Vacant Managers Post	-41
Agency Costs (parking manager back fill) and Pension strain	107
Signs and Lines	100
NSL Parking deployed Hours and bit payments.	821
Software license and support	-7
On street parking/parking suspension fees/Parking permits	378
DLO charges for suspensions	143
Reduced SLA with Parking Design team	-421
Total	1,080

So we have had an interim parking manager since the NSL contract started on 1 May 12. Why? is the startlingly obvious question. Why we employ someone who has to travel miles when there must be perfectly good candidates available locally is hard to fathom. Has the council even advertised or is it that the reputation of parking at Barnet is so bad (as has been reported to Mr Mustard by another council parking department less than 20 miles away) that there are no takers? It's not as if parking is a temporary thing, there will be a need for a parking manager into the next decade at least. Anyway that is £66,000 to the bad.

Nice to see real money being spent on signs and lines. Only another £900,000 needed.

We'll come to the £821,000 in a minute in yet another table.

Is it any wonder that the income from on-street parking and permits is down. Prices were increased markedly and that caused behavioural changes and suppressed the income. Making it harder to pay also had an effect; cash is universal and the meter removal policy has hit the council hard. Permit income will slowly recover now that they are £40 again.

Then we have the usual inter department budgeting which seems to be such a waste of time, moving money from the left pocket to the right. An extra £143,000 paid to the DLO (Direct Labour Organisation) for suspensions. How many suspensions are going on and what does one suspension cost? This figure seems high.

Now Mr Mustard was concerned about cost pressures of £800,000 on the NSL Ltd parking enforcement contract, you know the one which was advertised as saving us £600,000 and here is a screen print from the council's website which is looking rather out of date

Then Mr Mustard asked for a breakdown of the figure of £821,000 as he likes everything to be clear. Here it is.

	£’000	£’000
2012.13 budget (NSL Contract)		3,020
Savings 13.14		-349
13.14 budget		2,671
13.14 Spend
Deployed hours	541
BIT Payments (Contract management KPIs)	291
Basic Contract Payment	2,635
NSL Non-Scheduled Items	25
13.14 projection		3,492
Difference		821

Now the standard monthly payment to NSL this year is £212,755.64 giving a base annual payment of £2,553,067 and on top of this about £25,000 a month (yes, a month) is paid through NSL to Verrus for the largely unloved PayByPhone system giving another £300,000 per year (2012/13 payments came to £290,559). This seems an extraordinary amount for processing payments willingly made of £2,945,682 from Pay & Display (as it was quaintly described in the SPA) and another £300,000 or so of car park income. A fee equivalent to 9% just for holding your hand out and taking money seems like remarkably poor value.

So last year £3,020,000 was budgeted for NSL and base fees & charges amounted to £2,843,626 and the rest was swallowed up an extra hours payment of £104,000 and by one-off transition costs such as redundancy payments. In version 2.5 of the Business Plan, which went through a dozen iterations, are the projected annual costs of parking enforcement for the 5 year term, viz:

Projected costs of Options	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15	2015/16	2016/17	Total
	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s	£'000s
NSL – Cost of Contract	3,246	3,220	3,328	3,328	3,328	16,451

which leaves no scope for a saving of £349,000 in this financial year 2013/14 and ignores inflation. Mr Mustard asked under Freedom of Information legislation for the NSL contract and he did receive most of it although the financial information was, of course, redacted. Thus Mr Mustard can't tie the actual payments to the budgeted figures but a budget of £2,671,000 against an annual payment of £2,850,000 is utterly unrealistic.

What the budget also shows is that there is no budget for the KPI (Key performance indicator) performance payments which might amount to another £291,000 in 2013/14 except they can't as the performance was stuck at minus 6 at the start of the year so it should be 6 months before a KPI payment is due assuming performance improves every single month. Mr Mustard will be checking the actual KPI measurements at the year end.

Now the really shocking figure is the one of £541,000 for deployed hours which should have said "extra deployed hours". Now why are the council trying to save £600,000 p.a. and then negate 90% of the proposed savings by  spending on extra enforcement hours.

Now call Mr Mustard suspicious if you like but an extra £541,000 spent on enforcement is likely to lead to a net PCN income of at least £1million. That wouldn't be the motivation, would it?

We know that the contract was failing all the way through 2012/13 and so the solution looks like rather than termination is to throw money at the contract to make it work in 2013/14 and it is one of the few contracts that the council enters which works this way,i.e. the more you spend the more you gain, always assuming that all the extra marginal parking tickets don't just lead to extra appeals to PATAS.

One final point is that NSL are entitled to 50% of the savings they generate on the contract. No "options proposals" were suggested in the first year of the contract. The 50% saving is meant to encourage and reward innovation. 

There hasn't been any.

This is an early One Barnet contract. It hasn't made the anticipated savings. Let's hope that NSCSO and DRS are better (don't hold your breath).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard