Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs.
Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
The Council’s One Barnet programme is to redesign the council in order to meet increasing local and national challenges and opportunities, implementing any agreed changes.
Pay scale £39,790 to £42,499
Purpose of Job
To lead on all aspects of work relating to Member and democratic engagement to promote openness and transparency, including research and data gathering; presentation of findings; implementation and co-ordination of actions and monitoring and reporting on progress. The postholder will be required to lead on particular aspects of Member development, Members’ allowances and democratic engagement.
To manage and provide a professional lead on Member development, Members’ allowances and democratic engagement across the service and corporately as required.
To lead on and advise Members and senior officers of the Council on strategies relating to transparency, Member development and democratic engagement.
To contribute to the success of the Governance Service.
Mr Mustard has been distracted by so much other tut coming out of Barnet Council that he has neglected the non-jobs so that is being put right today.
Barnet Council do not appear to be committed to Openness and Transparency as otherwise they would not
set rules and limit the questions one can ask at Residents' forums
reduce the opportunity for debate at Council Meetings
fail to produce minutes of meetings in a timely fashion
allow Councillors to ask residents not to email them
allow Councillors to delete emails unread
have meetings at which no Cabinet member appears
have refused filming against the wishes of Central Government
have refused entry to a Council meeting
I expect that other bloggers will add a few more entries in the comments box and this non-job would not be necessary. It looks like £40,000 in the bin to Mr Mustard.
This surely cannot be a full time job ?
Can't Nick Walkley advise members on this as part of his leadership role as set out in his Role summary ?
Ensure the Council operates in an open, accountable and democratic manner to minimise any challenge to its operations based on such grounds.
Sadly Mr Mustard cannot make this evening's meeting of the BPOSC - Budget and Performance Overview and Scrutiny Committee as he has a prior commitment.
You can all go along. You will find the agenda available to download here. guff
You might find the final page of agenda item 9 interesting. It is here along with page 1.
click and then click again for a full page version
and then use the back key to return to the blog
Sorry that page 15 is sidewards but let me tell you what it says. The budget for OneBarnet for the year 2011/12 i.e. the year to 31 March 2012 is £5,928,988 - let us call it £6m for round numbers.
Mr Mustard has just popped into the downstairs toilet ( yes really ) and found the pamphlet "The Council Tax and Business Rate in Barnet 2011/12". On page 3, Message from the Council, it says
"Our One Barnet programme will make over £13m of savings over the next 3 years and this, along with other improvements to efficiency, will account for the bulk of our savings."
Oh dear, OneBarnet will cost £6m in a year ( = £18m in 3 years ) and as far as Mr Mustard is aware has not yet saved a single penny. Unless, of course, you know better ?
Hopefully the Councillors who read the blog will give the figures presented to them a good workout. Also councillors take a look at the risk scores of 16 which are very high with both the likelihood and the impact coming in at 4. They couldn't be much worse.
Mr Mustard expects that you would like to see what presentations are being made by Barnet Council Officers to the world at large.
There is one here on the website of the Association of London Environmental Health Managers. Do you suppose other Councils learn from Barnet what to do or what not to do ?
Rick Mason ( Assistant Director, Housing & Environmental Health - nice to see what work someone on £104,673 p.a. can produce ) produced this on 7 May 2011 and it was published online on 1 June.
You can read the slides yourself. Mr Mustard will just pick out a few points.
"All the risks of not doing this" are just a theoretical list of possible failures that no well-managed sensible Council would allow to occur. They do not justify OneBarnet.
OneBarnet projected savings. Year 9 - £102m ( in total ).
The Council spends £900m a year. In 9 years it will spend £8,100 million.
A saving of £102m as a percentage of £8,100m is just 1.26%
that is hardly the most radical programme of savings you have ever heard of is it ?
and all this fuss about OneBarnet being the best thing since sliced bread.
The Barnet Bloggers, given access to the complete books of the Council, could save that without the expense of a single consultant as the following paragraph demonstrates.
There was a case of overcharging that Mr Reasonable found recently. Paying £17 per hour for something worth £9 odd. Be generous and just call it a 70% overcharge. Looking the other way, percentages are funny things, the charge for security ( yes, MetPro again ) has now been reduced by 7/17*100 = 41%
Interestingly, and typically sloppily, Cllr Rams on his blog ( which Mr Mustard will not give you a link to as it is not to his taste ) wrote that:
The council has already begun a major transformation programme – One Barnet – to radically change the way we deliver services and save £100m over the next ten years
So that is a slippage of a year already built into the programme.
The bidder invests £1m in his bid. Where does he get that back from ? Why us of course.
As avid readers will know the London Borough of Barnet managed to get themselves into Private Eye two weeks ago because of their long term chronic failure in procuring unlicensed, in just about every way ( start with SIA and CRB and just keep going ), bully boy security guards from a phoenix of MetPro companies. You will recall that there was not a Contract, only an arrangement, and that over £1.3million was paid out for non-services received over 5 years. Procurement at Barnet Council is so good that they managed to pay about £17 p.h. to MetPro and other 100% legal providers get just £9 odd p.h. The words back and hand have, er, jumped into Mr Mustard's mind for some obscure and unrelated reason. get about 14% less. Mr Mustard made the mistake of comparing static guards to the ones who travel (amusingly often called emergency or rapid response when in fact most of the time they just drive around locking up the park gates and they can't legally break the speed limit) and Mr Mustard likes accuracy hence this amendment.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about the procurement of services would know roughly how much to pay for something. All these conferences that Officers go on, don't they ask officers from other Boroughs about how much they are paying for certain items? it is a proper question as you are all in buying groups of one sort or another or could be if you did any real work. Mr Mustard suspects that owning the bar next to a conference centre targeted at local authority conferences would be very lucrative. And just think you could charge the hapless Assistant Director of Commercial Services, Captain Craig Tommy Cooper, who is on the not ungenerous salary of £132,480 p.a. & is in overall charge of procurement ( using the phrase "in charge" in its loosest possible sense ) more for a pint of beer as he won't know the proper price?
Do readers feel inspired by the example of Sir Paul Stephenson who hadn't done that much wrong and still resigned as he was in charge and felt morally obliged. Time to get the ceremonial Sandhurst sword out of the cupboard ?
MetPro should have completely failed the "sniff test" with every Officer who ever touched an invoice. In case you have not heard of it before this is the "sniff test".
Mr Mustard does not have the time available to him that Officers do. He has a real and very full life and being Mr Mustard is a part time occupation, and source of amusement, although Barnet Council really aren't funny. That training course video that relates them to a bunch of clowns seems like reality to Mr Mustard. What you haven't seen it? Well here it is.
Give yourself 5 minutes to stop laughing and put your socks back on and then read on as Mr Mustard has another sniff test failure to tell you about. It is a shocker. It leapt off the page at Mr Mustard and it should not have escaped from NLBP.
Yesterday, 99% The Barnet Eye, one of the famous five Barnet Bloggers, officially endorsed by Eric Pickles MP, circulated a report entitled State of the Borough 2011 produced by the Barnet Insight Unit. A renaming ceremony is in order, it is now the Lack of Insight Unit. Mr Mustard has already featured the Head of Insight as a non-job and now he can be dispensed with on the grounds of non-performance and not being in touch with reality.
Look at the 2 documents below. Two pages are from the New Support & Customer Services Business Case which was presented at the Cabinet Resources Committee on 29 June and the other is from the State of the Borough 2011 report as headed ( what is the point of this document ? said Mr Mustard's co-Director - Mr Mustard could not tell her and as a Tax Payer she was unimpressed ).
if you click and then click again you get a full page version
Now let us take a close look at the figures.
Contact method
NS&CSBC
State of LBB
LBB/NS %
Telephone calls
2,574,070
1,500,000
58%
Emails
282,985
21,000
7%
Letters
353,462
1,100
0%
You can see that they are vastly different and the ones in the State of the Borough report are only a small % of the real numbers. Mr Mustard does observe that for the purposes of outsourcing the use of unrounded numbers does not help understanding, 282,985 should have been put down as 283,000 but at least he thinks that the numbers might just be about right. They do not fail the sniff test.
Anybody with half a brain would know that in the age of computing more than 21,000 emails are sent to Barnet Council each year ( 80 a day ) and more than 1,100 letters ( 4 a day ! ). Are you smarter than a 10 year old ? I don't think you are Barnet. I think Mr Markey will be round in a moment for the ceremonial sword Mr Cooper.
Better clear your diary non-stick, there is going to be a sudden attack of conscience and a queue is going to form outside your door of senior Officers who have just realised that they are not worth what they are paid and are going to do the honourable thing and resign.
Oh and Councillors, can you believe any numbers that are put in front of you like the OneBarnet % savings ? Please question everything in the future that fails the sniff test.
And afterwards, bins all over the pavement, try getting a pram or a wheelchair along the street.
Its this sort of thing which people remember and don't like. They think if the Council can't even put a bin back how can they outsource 70% of the jobs.
Back in March, Mr Mustard blogged about the new Council tax system - he observed that, following a chat with one of his neighbours, he had the suspicion that a number of Council Tax bills had not been issued at all.
I expect you will recall that a number of bills were issued twice
and now Mr Mustard has confirmation that a number of bills were not issued at all, and some have possibly still not been issued but the answer cannot currently be established. Software problems don't you know.
The first rule of credit control, Mr Mustard's specialist subject, is that if you don't send an invoice out it won't get paid. Now this may seem like absolute commonsense to you dear reader but then your brain isn't full of that fluffy OneBarnet nonsense that leaves no room for day to day rational thinking.
So 138,424 bills should have been issued.
Only 128,380 bills were issued by 31 March 2011 ( that is just under 93% of them )
So that's 10,044 bills not sent out on time. At an average band charge ( D ) of £1,423 that could be £14million of cash flow in jeopardy.
The Council won't know for 2 more weeks how many bills have still not been sent out.
Sadly, many of the ones that have not been issued relate to benefit claimants. Those are the very bills which should be sorted out on time because the affected people, by virtue of their status of being benefit claimants, won't have spare cash with which to catch up with any arrears that build up that they don't know about.
