A self promoting tweet is pointless & doesn't change the truth

In the eighties Mr Mustard used to debt collect door to door in Dollis Valley (and across many of the poorer parts of EN5) so he knows it quite well. It should never have been built but the milk is spilt.

Now, finally, the council are doing something about it and are trying to hoodwink us into believing that they are cracking on, hence this tweet which probably tripped off the tongue of the Tooting Twister as he was taking notes at Monday's meeting of the Degeneration Committee (it may be called something slightly different) and didn't laugh when talk of social cleansing of the borough came up and Mr Mustard leant across and suggested we send our poor to Tooting.

Mr Mustard knew that redevelopment had been decided upon a long time ago and he googled the place and found this note in council committee papers

It takes a pair of rose tinted spectacles to decide that we are going more "quickly than originally planned" unless of course the council decided back in 2003 that they would take 11 years.

By all means tweet concrete achievements but, please, not this misleading nonsense.

Thank you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Vexatious to vexing - the end (hopefully)

not Colonel Mustard with the revolver in the library

Mr Mustard has been somewhat busy in the parking ticket department (another win at PATAS yesterday for a visitor who was pounced on whilst collecting a visitor voucher) and so not had time to write up the third and final instalment of his journey to Freedom of Information.

Regular readers, and those who have read the Information Commissioners decision, will have generally got the impression that employees in the parking department and HR at Barnet Council would break down in tears at the sight of an FOI request from Mr Mustard or be signed off on sick leave due to stress. How they manage to be such complete and utter heartless b'stards when dealing with some poor soul who stayed 2 minutes too long in a parking space and due to events ended up with the bailiffs clamping their car will just have to be one of those unanswerable questions. Most staff ("officers" - bloody stupid name for them) are fine with Mr Mustard and three of them have asked him to help appeal their Barnet Council PCN - how ironic is that?

Now once Mr Mustard had the adverse decision that his questions (not him, thankfully) were vexatious he had to do something about it as no sane person would want the matter to rest like that. Now as it happens there was some lucky timing. Mr Mustard had attended the council's offices several times in June to look at their annual Accounts and see supporting information. With Black Hole Travers having climbed up to the top rung of the ladder, becoming the Chief Executive and we don't hear anything like as much about him as we used to about Nick Walkley (remember him? saddled yourself with some very difficult problems in Haringey, Nick - the bloggers of Barnet must look like light relief compared to every Fleet Street paper looking for blood) we needed a new S151 Officer (legally responsible for finance) and we got one with the rather fancy title of Chief Operating Officer and the name of Chris Naylor in January 13. Chris joined us from Tower Hamlets who have their own problems with transparency. Is there a boringly well run council anywhere in London? that is all Mr Mustard seeks from Barnet.

Now last year 3 bloggers attended together along with a well known parking expert who is the scourge of councils all over London. This year Mr Mustard attended alone as he knew the score and to help the council he gave them a list months in advance of what he wanted to see. Was it ready on his arrival? No, of course it wasn't. The council should not be surprised that they take a bashing when they are so unhelpful and stupid. One thing he asked for was the bailiff contracts for parking for the year. Mr Mustard had the suspicion that there weren't any and rather than tell him that they gave him an out of date contract 300 pages long. What a waste of paper. It didn't detain Mr Mustard for a minute. 

Now the council have to deal with his objection to the Accounts, one of 5 he has made, on which he anticipates that a verbal report will be made by Grant Thornton to the Audit Committee tomorrow evening. There is no scheduled agenda item to sign off the Accounts, which would be normal in October so it looks like at least one of the objections has been found to have merit. Chris, to his credit, says that the Audit Commission Act is there to be used.

Now one topic of enquiry was the invoices raised by Agilisys/iMpower for the year, all £3.7million of them. They were so heavily redacted that they told him nothing more than was on the over £500 spending list.

Anyway the one thing they did lead to was Chris Naylor offering Mr Mustard a meeting to have a chat about them. This was a novel idea. No-one else had dared put their head over the parapet previously and this initiative should be applauded. It doesn't mean that Mr Mustard is going to turn into a blogging version of the Tooting Twister as we don't want to do him out of a job, now do we? (oh what's that Mrs Angry, "yes of course we do", correct again of course) but he will, and already has, add in some balance to his posts when it adds to the story. So Mr Mustard agreed to a meeting but asked to change the agenda to his FOI question status. The meeting was going to be in Cafe Buzz but had to be moved to the North London Business Park as it was going to be followed by another meeting for Chris (one thing Mr Mustard mentioned was that there are probably staff who do nothing but sit in meetings and they are surplus to requirements if so).

So this meeting took place in the first week of September (Chris bought the teas) in the staff restaurant (see how open and transparent we are) and Mr Mustard offered the following compromise:

Ask up to 60 FOI questions p.a. and not write about junior staff. Most people would think that staff earning up to £56,000 a year weren't junior but that is the accepted definition. Mr Mustard hadn't asked a question since 12 July 2013 and had realised that he had so much information coming from other sources, and other pan-London questions to deal with, that 60 would be more than adequate for a year. He can still ask questions at committee meetings that won't be refused although answers can be obfuscatory and he has the annual audit visit and technically his tweets are FOI if they ask for facts like "who owns the blue bins"; answer "the council".

The counter-offer was a bit longer and here is a summary.

Chris wants 

- a "stronger working relationship" (very sensible)

- he wants the council to publish information regularly that is of use to interested members of the public and the default setting will be to publish (he has Mr Mustard's list to think about)

- he wants the council to be as receptive as possible to the insight and experiences of residents and service users (great but you should have been at this week's Constitution Committee, Chris, to see what councillors think of this. The very sensible idea to allow comments from residents to precede the business item rather than all be heard at the start of the meeting, was voted down on party lines. You may want to hear from residents but clearly some councillors don't. Cllr Thomas, for example, has never allowed any member of the public to have their 5 minutes to speak at Cabinet Resources Committee - unfixable problem? )

- a reasonable number of FOIs may be in the order of 60 p.a. (Mr Mustard having received this level will now show he doesn't need them and save his FOI for the really big issues or questions which he is asking of every London borough)

- he would welcome a monthly digest of service issues or complaints that Mr Mustard has learned about that month, both his and those of other residents (Mr Mustard isn't keen on having a monthly to do list for the council, who can read his blog and see the issues for themselves as many staff and councillors already do, and he has never been reticent about writing to senior officers, all councillors or relevant Cabinet members and the Leader but given that this proposal includes a response back he will inform the COO of the big issues. He has already asked him to find a way to take the £7m generated by parking tickets out of the budget but that is of course a political decision. Officer time may be helpful in finding savings elsewhere. The council will never be well regarded whilst it is issuing 165,000 PCN p.a. so it may be a sensible political decision to move gently away from parking income and make Barnet a nicer place to live).

So having agreed to the above arrangement the blog has gone on as per usual, more or less, and Mr Mustard has avoided having to spend days of his time reviewing 800 blog postings and removing anything that would have counted against him when reviewed by lawyers sitting in the Upper Tribunal and producing a huge bundle of documents and his arguments to the Tribunal. The council didn't think they were greatly at risk of having the ICO's decision overturned but then I didn't mention the smoking gun (not a real gun of course, but something that would have blown a huge hole in the main plank of the council's argument) that I had and which has now been put back in the drawer.

What can others who ask many FOI questions learn from this episode? The FOI legislation does not set out any limits on the number of questions one person can ask of an organisation which is where Mr Mustard went wrong by overdoing it. You would think that an organisation of 3,000 people could cope with a fairly high level of questions. 200 questions per annum, not all on parking but on varied topics, and it doesn't look very vexatious when compared to 165,000 parking tickets issued in a year. How can they cope with those? surely not because that leads to a huge income rather than a compliance cost? 

So what is an acceptable number of questions for others is not going to be either 200 p.a. or 60 p.a. because it will depend on who is asking, what they do with the information, the size of the organisation and so on, all the factors set out in the recent guidance. It would have been interesting to challenge the decision but really Mr Mustard couldn't be fagged to do so, he would have been unable to do other things that he currently wants to do.

Not asking many FOI won't stop the blog.

Our Mr Naylor got himself and the council some column inches yesterday in the Guardian, here. You'll see from the comments that three interested residents don't agree with him but at least we can talk about it like sensible adults. It may be Chris's default setting but it isn't Barnet Council's and he is going to have a heck of a battle on his hands getting everyone to see his point of view.

Now Mr Mustard being Mr Mustard and judging on actions not deeds he has set Chris a test. Last year the council developed Parking Recovery Plans when income from parking was below expectations. There was more chance of seeing a fish riding a bicycle than getting a copy of the documentation which was treated with the highest security clearance. Mr Mustard has asked Chris for a copy of those plans. 

Let us see, will he pass or fail? Watch this space.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Update  19 November 13

I met with Chris Naylor and two of his colleagues this morning. CN handed over the Parking Recovery plans for the last two years. Mr Mustard can't see why the council went to such lengths to hide them as they are deadly dull and didn't show him the sort of information he expected to see. There is some unfortunate thinking within them, like introducing more CPZ simply to generate more revenue (ah, so they are profitable)  but everyone knew that anyway. Anyway, I am pleased he passed the test. the next one will just have to be a little harder.

One Barnet scrapped

One Barnet to become less visible

Mr Mustard sat through 3 days of argument at the Royal Courts of Justice the week before last. The judgment is expected soon and the whole process has shaken Barnet Council to its core even though not a single councillor from the majority party could find the time to spend even a minute in the RCJ. They go on about being Open and Transparent when really all they mean is that they want to appear to be Open and Transparent without the public, especially those eccentric socialists from BAPS, the pesky bloggers, exiled Americans and a café owner getting in the way and asking the difficult questions that need to be asked.

So the new plan, which has been leaked to Mr Mustard by his mole in Governance, is to "scrap" One Barnet. Stop cheering because that isn't the good news that you think it is. The evil One Barnet programme, once described by Mr Mustard as "everything and nothing", is not going to change in any way shape or form, Cornelius is going to keep driving that juggernaut until it crashes spectacularly but what will change is that the words One Barnet will disappear from sight. This will be achieved by the spellchecker on council computers being programmed to replace the words One Barnet with nothing at all and any member of staff who uses the words in any communication from now on will be sent away for a day of re-training by Alfur Training who won the recent mini-tender competition (training costs a fortune and their quote, the cheapest by some way, was still £500 a day - Mr Mustard exhorts all employees not to use the words One Barnet ever again as he doesn't want his Council Tax wasted in this way). 

Here is the proof, the leaflet that came with the 2013/14 Council Tax demand talks about changing the way services run but does not mention One Barnet

By doing this, the thinking goes, the multifarious changes planned in Wave 2 of "blank" cannot be so easily attacked by BAPS. What will they put on their banners, just the word "Stop" and then a blank space? It will be harder to link together the wave 2 projects, which include:

• community safety
• early intervention and prevention
• health and social care integration
• sport and physical activity
• waste and street scene.

Mr Mustard is looking forward to seeing the Sport and Physical Activity programme. "Better fitness for less effort" which probably won't be the next Olympic slogan.

This idea, probably one of his best, is that of Chris Palmer who is now the Head of Communications. He is known as the Tooting Twister because "spin doctor" implied a certain ability and thus was inaccurate, because he lives in Tooting and because he is the mouthpiece for the council and mangles words for a living, a very nice six figure living at that. He has been hanging around Barnet like a Town Hall Tax Dodger for some time now and must be getting a bit fed up with the journey as he has been seen (the bloggers' eyes are everywhere) looking at nice Victorian houses in Finchley (well they do go well with the council's policies) and so he will also need a new name. He will have to be the Finchley Fudger from now on.

Mr Mustard has been thinking about how the bloggers can combat the anonymisation of the programme formerly known as One Barnet and he thinks there is a need to fight a non-slogan with a memorable and catchy slogan so that his suggestion for the next march up the High Road is to use a new chant, Keep Name One Barnet, calling out the letters k, n, o & b in time to the placing of the feet, (think 2-4-6-8).

Sing it out proudly comrades.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Footnote : 2 April 2013

As the clock strikes mid-night Mr Mustard is obliged to tell you that this entry was his April Fool although like all good jokes it could be true. I will ask Richard Cornelius not to do this if I have given him the idea without payment of a suitable fee. Given that this is the best idea on the subject Mr Mustard doesn't think that £24,999 would go amiss and of course doesn't need any boring contract paperwork.

It is of course true that not a single councillor could find the time for even a brief visit to see the Judicial review in progress which is an utter disgrace.

Mr Mustard does not have a mole in Governance (is this a double bluff?) although he doesn't expect this to stop HR dragging all the staff into a room for an interrogation one-by-one as to whether they are Mr mustard's mole or not.

Alfur is Icelandic for "fool".

Maybe Chris Palmer is going on the payroll as he certainly isn't going anywhere else. Mr Mustard will have to put an FOI question in although doubtless it will be as vexatious as only his questions are. Actually Mr Mustard thinks that one other person has now had one of their questions deemed as vexatious but can't remember offhand who it was. It will come back to him. So nice not to be alone.

Mr Mustard recommends that members (double entendre not intended) of BAPS (nor here) do not shout Stop Knob or even stopcock as they march up the High Road in the future as they might get arrested for breach of the peace.

Until next year then and try not to make fools of yourselves.

Not credit card worthy

There seem to be an infinite number of things wrong at Barnet Council with even the simplest administrative tasks seemingly beyond the ability of management.

Take "Residents Permits" for example (let's not mention the missing apostrophe as there is a grave shortage of them at the council. It might be better for all concerned if the wording was turned around to be Permits for Residents)

If you cannot renew your permit on-line for some reason then you need a form to post in. This is available at this page on the Barnet website.

If you click on "Residents Parking Permit Application Form" at the right of the screen you obtain a form that is version 3.1 from December 2011, viz

Residents Parking Permit Application Form December 2011

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If you then click on the words "Residents Application Form" you get version 3.2 from June 2012

Residents Permit v3.2 June 2012

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What did you notice. That if you use the December form the price is £100 and not £105. Mr Mustard will leave you to decide which form to download print out and send in. (I expect the Tooting twister who is in overall charge of the website will leap into action and correct this error pretty quickly so the form may not be available from the council website for long - you can download it from here though - nudge nudge wink wink) (Mr Mustard has just remembered that Barnet Homes, a Barnet Council ALMO, have a subsidiary called "Your Choice" - well this is your chance to have a choice which you don't normally)

Did you want to pay by credit card? You can't. Parking has gone cashless (almost) you know. Now it seems to have gone credit card less as well. Look, here is an older version of the form in the middle of a long report.

Parking Permit Religious-Faith Duties

---

So someone has decided that if you pay by post you must be such a luddite that you don't have a credit card. Is this reasonable or equitable? No, of course it isn't. Sometimes when you buy a replacement vehicle that is the only way that you can pay for the new permit as happened to Mr Mustard recently who then found his cheque book, knocked the dust off and wrote one out.

Is it right that you should then be penalised £5 because the council's systems can't cope? No, of course not.

Is a two tier pricing structure bonkers? Yes it is. A cheque costs nothing to clear and the credit card merchant will charge about 2% so if anything the person paying by cheque should pay less.

Have councillors collectively decided upon this new policy? Not that Mr Mustard has noticed.

Has there been an "Officer decision" recorded in a Delegated Powers Report of this new policy? Again, not as Mr Mustard has noticed. (Feel free to tell Mr Mustard is wrong and he will correct any errors).

Does this new policy fit well with the One Barnet key principles?

A relentless drive for efficiency? Doesn't look like it does it going back to a method that has been around since the 9th century and which was until recently being phased out, except in Barnet where it is being phased back in.

Delivering more choice for better value? Oh dear me no. Less choice is being offered.

A citizen-centric council? No, you must do it the way that some faceless individual has decided upon.

Can you add this into your parking review please Councillor Dean Cohen (I have dropped you an email)

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Building Control Awards not

Brown envelopes - Barnet Council? - oh yes"!

Awards day. From the Barnet council website

Boost for Barnet’s Building Control team

Published Thursday 14 June 2012

The partnership working of Barnet’s Building Control team has been recognised at a prestigious awards ceremony {held on 24 May 12 at the Old Library, the Guild Hall (sic)}

The Local Authority Building Control London Region Building Excellence Awards ceremony acknowledges the best examples of building design and construction. Awards are given for the quality of the construction, the innovation involved in the developments and the professionalism and skill involved in delivering entire projects across London.

Barnet Building Control nominated Alan Cox Associates Limited, in conjunction with Andrew and Dickens and Malone Associates, for their work in creating a smart new housing development in Uphill Road. The nomination won the ‘Best Small Housing Development’ category.

The award was part of a high profile and prestigious field of entrants which also included the Olympic Stadium and Velodrome in east London as well as the new London Aquatics Centre. The Olympic Stadium was the winning project in the Best Community Building category. The velodrome won the Best Sustainable category. The Aquatics Centre won the Best Technical section. Therefore none of these three mentioned projects were in competition with Alan Cox and any mention of them is just to sex up the dossier and make the award seem more worthy. A pretty desperate press release if ever there was one.

Alan Cox Associates is based in High Barnet and works with Barnet Building Control in a partnership arrangement and can make Building Regulation applications via Barnet for works anywhere in England and Wales.

Thursday 14 June must have been a very quiet day for news in Barnet. Well done Alan Cox for getting the award - you had Mr Mustard as a client a couple of years ago but someone will have to tell you who I am! ("the man with the mansard roof" might help you work it out - 4 applications for planning permission - no evidence of partnership working with the council during those 2 years -  just shock and awe that someone didn't want an ugly dormer)

When Mr Mustard first read this press release he was going to blog about people giving awards to themselves because the LABC awards are given out by an association of Local Authority building controllers so if they gave the award to Barnet Council Building Control it would be a self-congratulatory award worth nothing at all but it is even less than that.

In fact, having read the press release more carefully it looks like the Tooting Twister has been twisting for all he is worth (I agree Mrs Angry, not much, about a tenth of what his town hall tax dodging company is paid) and that all that Barnet Council have done is to nominate someone else for an award. This is deemed worthy of space on the website.

Mr Mustard is also a regular customer of building control and apart from one new-boy who was a bit rule bound all of the building controllers are sensible souls who work very hard and do a good job and take a pragmatic approach. One of them visited Mr Mustard to do the final inspection on the extensive rebuild of Mustard Mansions and spent the visit admiring the workmanship and wishing he had the same budget for his own property - he was drooling over the solid oak floors and it was a pleasure to have him in the house. He was sadly too busy to stop for a cup of tea and a longer chat about house renovation.

If a client getting an award is all it takes to boost Barnet Building Control then their lives are very boring indeed. Mr Mustard expects that they are embarrassed by the publicity for simply having done their jobs.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard