Printed visitor parking vouchers (permits)

It is often whilst searching for something else that Mr Mustard finds useful information. That was true in this case, he found this report.

 

 

Within it, there is the following decision.

 

Mr Mustard emailed the parking manager to find out when he could once again buy printed vouchers as although he is a big computer user he finds it quicker and more convenient to give his visitors a printed voucher which is their responsibility to complete and display and not his fault if it all goes wrong.

 

As is usual he received a quick and informative response, as follows:

It was a few days before he made the phone call, partly because he expected it to go wrong & extra hurdles to be put in his way, but Mr Mustard is pleased to say he was wrong.

Mr Mustard already has an NSL Apply account for his resident permit so his identity and entitlement to buy visitor vouchers was not in doubt. It would probably take longer if you are a resident without a vehicle such that you don't have an NSL Apply account and have to provide some proof of residence within a Controlled Parking Zone.

The customer service representative pointed out to Mr Mustard the option to have electronic visitor vouchers and Mr Mustard politely explained that most of them are used by his gardener when Mr Mustard is away on business. Printed vouchers means that his gardener can get straight on with the garden after 30 seconds spent scratching out the relevant boxes as Mr Mustard gives her a few vouchers in advance. Once Mr Mustard told the nice lady the reason why he needed printed vouchers the transaction proceeded smoothly, the operative simply having to record the reason before going ahead.

Other reasons which you might wish to use are that your computer is broken, you don't have a computer, they are mostly for use by your cleaner, carer, decorator, family member etc who visits when you are not there. If you think of any other good reason why you really need printed vouchers do please let Mr Mustard know (email: mrmustard@zoho.com) and he will add them to this post.

The vouchers come in blocks (often still referred to as books) of 4 and 50 blocks per annum is the maximum purchase, 3 books the minimum.

Do let Mr Mustard know if you encounter any problems.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Visitor Vouchers do not expire

Yesterday Mr Mustard and his co-director were puzzled by the ridiculously difficult processes which exist at Barking & Dagenham and Barnet councils when it comes to the simple task of buying visitor vouchers.

In the Barking case the prospective purchaser is 88 years old and has never touched a computer keyboard and although pretty with it she is happy with her life as it is and doesn't need a new challenge. Of course, she needs vouchers if she isn't going to be isolated by having no visitors. Barking have CPZs which are nowhere near the town centre but whose hours extend late into the evening for no obvious reason (@publicnaylor the Chief Executive has been contacted about it but did not respond although he is probably busy having just started in Barking).

This is what the website says

so having clicked on the link for Visitor Vouchers you would expect to be taken to a form to complete with your address and credit card details. Not so. You get a pdf form which opens, which you have to print out (which rather assumes everyone has a printer at home) complete and then post to the council with a cheque. Many people no longer have cheque books. You can go to the one-stop shop in the library to do this but they won't process the form and give you the Vouchers, they will merely print out the form for you to complete and pass it on. Councils are restricting choice to one method which they find the most convenient rather than providing a number of methods to suit their many residents, young and old. The tail should not wag the dog.

Might Mr Mustard mention at this stage that Barking & Dagenham Council has many services which are run by a joint venture with old friends Agilisys who are neither agile or systematic if this process (one presumes it is provided by them as it is IT) is the yardstick. Mr Mustard thought that one of the justifications for such a venture was the supposedly cutting edge technology they provide. 

Transformation can leave you worse off than before

About as sharp as a beachball.

Then on to Barnet, where permit renewals are done by Crapita.

Visitor vouchers can be purchased on line (and by phone). The bit that caught Mr Mustard's eye was the requirement to set an expiry date 3 year's hence. Being Mr Mustard he tried to bend the system and get future dated vouchers, that failed with a maximum 7 days forward dating being allowed. He then tried to short date his vouchers and was allowed to steal a year of validity from himself, viz:

Mr Mustard knew this was not council policy, as he and others had been over this particular matter with councillors and parking management, so he tweeted the Chief Executive but the tweet seems to have gone into a black hole. He also contacted parking management who responded that Crapita's system has to have an expiry date. The expiry date of their contract can't come soon enough.

So the council sign up for 10 years with Crapita because ruling councillors think they are the answer to all their prayers and we get clunky software foisted upon us, probably because they have already written it for another council which does use expiry dates, and is not tailored to our specific needs. Mr Mustard will henceforth refer to software from capita as Crapware. Doubtless Crapita will argue that you can just ignore the expiry date, it isn't printed on the front of the vouchers and no harm is done but it sows doubt in the mind of the person, probably causes people to order fewer vouchers more often so they don't get stuck with ones which have "expired" (except they haven't) causes phone calls to the call centre and makes think people think that Barnet Council are an incompetent bunch of t*ssers which doubtless ruling councillors would prefer not to be the case (add own joke here).

Councillors need to actually experience what residents do in order to find out for themselves how Crapita things are. They won't because they won't want to know the answer. Crapita could probably press the nuclear button and councillors would say that lessons have been learned and it won't happen again going forward. They would lose too much face to admit what a disaster the outsourcing is.

Buy how ever many visitor vouchers you need and don't worry residents, they do not expire, whatever the council website tells you to the contrary.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

A moment of Madness

The Madness of the King of Bling

tarnished bling

From Brian's low rent flat (fancy thinking in Court that the whole world didn't know where he lives, you only have to follow the gritting lorry as it leaves the depot) to the cashpoint at HSBC in Finchley High Road is a mere 0.8 miles which one can walk, per google, in 16 minutes or cycle it in half of that. Why oh why did Brian feel the need to take the car that fateful day in September 2012 when he needed some cash for his handyman. Mr Mustard frequently walks from the junction between Etchingham Park Rd and Ballards Lane back to Cafe Buzz as it saves his pennies, being outside the CPZ, and gives him much needed exercise. It is probably how he got falsely accused of stalking councillors although the blogger bus having his name on the side makes it a bit obvious! Incidentally google streetmap was updated on the day the Olympic torch came through, there are cones everywhere.

History

First some history for non-Barnet Residents. In the spring of 2011 Brian Coleman was the Cabinet Member with responsibility for parking. Although he loves driving, badly it seems as he is always picking up points, 

(and we are all guilty of that occasionally. Mr Mustard took his road legal race track Aprilia Tuono V4 to Uxbridge as that gave him free parking in the residents' bays and he looked away from the road for a few seconds and when he looked back a car had stopped a bike length in front of him. Emergency application of the front brakes saw the front tyre bite into the road suface, thankfully better in the LB of Hillingdon than in the LB of Barnet, and the rear wheel lift of the ground! This is a trick known as a stoppie for those who don't ride. Don't try this at home. It puts your heart into your mouth. A collision was averted which is just as well as the bike cost as much as a medium sized car and would have probably been a write-off)

he wasn't averse to punishing the motorist with a massive hike in charges. The charge for parking all day on street was increased from £4 to £7 i.e. by 75% (no-one at the council knows anything about elasticity of demand) and visitor vouchers, which are meant to be concessionary, from £1 to £4 for a day, an increase of 300%. At the same time the price for a resident to park their first car within the CPZ was increased from £40 p.a. to £100 p.a. an increase of 150%. These changes are the subject of a Judicial Review which is expected to come before the High Court on or about 2 July (Mr Mustard is taking all of his annual holidays in Court this year). These changes were the first event to catapult Mr Mustard into blogging.

Although Brian was the lead councillor for parking, there is collective irresponsibility in the Cabinet who met on 14 February 2011 (The Valentines Day Massacre of motorists and businesses?) and agreed to the increases having plainly failed to apply any restraint to their over enthusiastic colleague. The entire Cabinet should be ashamed of their failure to act which has contributed to the enormous financial pressures piled onto the businesses of our High Streets and should have prevented Brian from pursuing an obviously bonkers policy. I doubt they had all read every line of the Cabinet papers as surely otherwise they would have moderated the worse excesses?

Then during the summer of 2011 Brian signed a Delegated Powers Report to remove all the parking meters in the whole of Barnet, approx 450 parking meters which each cost £4,000 to buy and install, hence about £1.8m worth and turned it into scrap for which less than £10,000 was recovered. Brian did have the power to sign the DPR as technically in the relevant legislation this was a minor amendment although it had major consequences. When the legislation was enacted pay-by-phone probably didn't exist.

Parking meters were removed in late 2011 and early 2012 and this left motorists without both a mobile phone and a credit or debit card at a huge disadvantage. Trade for businesses plummeted by 30% and has not been recovered.

Slowly, card only parking meters are being reintroduced but they do not fix the problem for the unbanked.

What history could have been like.

What could have happened that fateful day in September 2012 when Helen Michael of Cafe Buzz was tipped off by an observant friend that Brian Coleman had naughtily stopped his car in a loading bay in order to use the cashpoint.

Brian could have laughed, given Helen a wave, got back into his car with Tom and driven carefully away.

Helen is one of the team when it comes to bloggers and she would have given the footage to bloggers. It would have appeared on various blogs and for a day or two Brian would have been the centre of attention. Brian could have agreed to pay the equivalent of a Penalty Charge to the Lord Mayor's charity. Given his record for outrageous statements and behaviour the matter would have been just a small extra blot on his copybook.

Brian would then have had less of the Barnet blogosphere rowed up against him (red, blue, green, yellow supporters all got together and the ABC campaign, Anyone But Coleman, gathered momentum) and might not have lost his seat on the London Assembly. That would have allowed him to remain on the Fire Authority and there would have been no need for him to stand down as Chairman of the Budget & Performance Overview & Scrutiny Committee or lose his place on the NLWA. 

Mr Mustard went to the last meeting which he chaired, having asked Richard Cornelius why Brian was still being allowed to chair it after his arrest (rules of the council's due process apparently, the full council had to remove him as chair, although Mr Mustard thinks Richard was too frit to do anything) and one thing he will say for Brian is that he had clearly read all of the papers, knew what was in them and stood no nonsense from committee members although he was a horrible bully to members of the public.

Conclusion

So if Brian had walked away and paid £110 to charity he might not have lost about £110,000 off his annual income and would not now have a criminal offence on his record, look, it is already on Wikipedia.

It is reported in the Telegraph that Brian was hated by a section of the Barnet community, a large cross section Mr Mustard would hazard, however Mr Mustard reckons that Brian's biggest enemy is, himself.

The Future

Mr Mustard would expect any other person to do the honourable thing now and resign and leave public service (oh how we laughed when that old chestnut was advanced in Court, how Brian has dedicated himself) do some charity work (helping victims of crime perhaps?) and get a proper job and sink out of public sight.

As this is Brian we are talking about the future won't be that predictable.

Will bloggers still be writing about Brian in May 2014? Come back then and find out.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Permits figure differences - Mr Mustard has some of the answer

Mr Mustard finds that in his not as yet dealt with FOI responses he had some weekly figures for permits. The visitor vouchers and annual car permit vouchers are included in one column with bay suspension income and all types of vouchers and permits but the two main strands of income are visitor vouchers and annual car permits.

It is easy to see that the reason why income is over budget in the first 2 weeks of the year is because residents were taking the final chance to buy concessionary visitor vouchers at £1 before the £4 price made them a penal rate. After that sales fall off a cliff and even the fact that 90% of residents are forced to renew their annual permit at extortionate cost does not make up for an even larger fall in the sale of visitor vouchers.

Mr Mustard feels some sympathy for the parking manager in this situation as he was never going to be able to make the budget (which will have been closely related to the previous year) once Brian's bonkers "brainwave" came into effect.

	Permits & suspensions
Dates	Budget expectation	Received	Variance	Cumulative variance
1 - 9 Apr 11	£11,111	£34,895	£23,784	£23,784
10 - 16 Apr 11	£39,216	£48,446	£9,230	£33,014
17 - 23 Apr 11	£82,316	£38,866	-£43,450	-£10,436
24 - 30 Apr 11	£76,092	£17,338	-£58,754	-£69,190
1 - 7 May 11	£61,632	£18,601	-£43,031	-£112,221
8 - 14 MAY 11	£35,451	£40,885	£5,434	-£106,786
15 - 21 May 11	£61,775	£52,536	-£9,239	-£116,025
21 - 28 May 11	£47,939	£39,998	-£7,941	-£123,966
29 May-4 Jun 11	£44,323	£28,268	-£16,055	-£140,021
5 - 11 June 11	£46,296	£49,822	£3,526	-£136,495
12 - 18 June 11	£87,462	£63,115	-£24,346	-£160,842
19 - 25 June 11	£76,571	£54,846	-£21,725	-£182,567
26 Jun - 2 Jul 11	£74,628	£46,364	-£28,265	-£210,831
3 - 9 July 11	£65,334	£43,205	-£22,129	-£232,961
10 - 16 July 11	£57,504	£47,492	-£10,012	-£242,973
17- 23 July 11	£75,916	£48,062	-£27,855	-£270,827
24 - 30 July 11	£64,155	£44,273	-£19,883	-£290,710
31Jul - 6 Aug 11	£60,269	£37,532	-£22,737	-£313,447
7 - 13 Aug 11	£56,352	£48,088	-£8,264	-£321,711
14 - 20 Aug 11	£76,648	£54,860	-£21,788	-£343,499
21 - 27 Aug 11	£63,623	£39,829	-£23,794	-£367,293
28 Aug - 3 Sept 11	£62,413	£30,982	-£31,430	-£398,723
4 - 10 Sept 11	£43,442	£39,614	-£3,828	-£402,550
11 - 17 Sept 11	£62,352	£30,145	-£32,207	-£434,757
18 - 24 Sept 11	£51,916	£31,707	-£20,209	-£454,966
25 Sept - 1 Oct 11	£55,095	£52,821	-£2,274	-£457,240
2 - 8 Oct 11	£49,959	£30,936	-£19,023	-£476,263
9 - 15 Oct 11	£44,155	£40,668	-£3,487	-£479,750
16 - 22 Oct 11	£72,803	£51,137	-£21,665	-£501,416
23 - 29 Oct 11	£65,516	£42,335	-£23,181	-£524,597
30 Oct - 5 Nov 11	£61,434	£49,000	-£12,434	-£537,031
6 - 12 Nov 11	£63,499	£47,325	-£16,174	-£553,205
13 - 19 Nov 11	£62,776	£41,616	-£21,160	-£574,365
20 - 26 Nov 11	£55,455	£39,415	-£16,040	-£590,405

So the price of not standing up to Brian is a hole in the budget of £590,405

This makes his taxi bills look like small potatoes.

The role of the Chief Executive

It is the case that councillors decide on policy and officers have to execute it but as ever life isn't that simple. Nick Walkley should have seen that the excessive permit and voucher increases were going to end in tears and as part of the requirements set out in the role summary of the Chief Exec. is "Commercial acumen is also essential" he ought to have had a quiet word with Brian Coleman (is that possible?) to challenge the decision and save embarrassment for the whole council, officers and members alike. Mr Mustard doesn't know the full career history of Nick Walkley but he does know that it involved spells in local and national government and possibly as a lecturer. If it doesn't include any spells in industry then perhaps the members chose the wrong man for the job.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

A foreseeable implosion. Sub-title: How much does a backbone cost?

Correction. Barnet Council have woken up to the bad publicity and now say that the FOI response they issued was incorrect. That it contained a typing error. Mr Mustard has mentioned many times the errors in reports, remember the table that was 1,000,000 telephone calls out, and he hankers for the good old days where one person wrote something and another one checked it for reasonableness ( the sniff test as it is known ) a practice that is followed to this day in his office for important emails. The council say that instead of typing 166,109 the (unfortunate junior) officer typed 16,696 which is a spectacular piece of typing which even the ham-fisted Mr Mustard could not manage to wrongly type and to not then notice. (The words in italics are Mr Mustard's interpretation of the rank of the officer - are junior officers properly supervised by the 462 managers?). 


The outcome is the same. The number of voucher sales has fallen drastically. Mr Mustard won't be going back over the figures below until and unless he sees the original prime books of entry. 

Corrected at 6.30pm 6 February

Before Mr Mustard goes through the entirely predictable numbers for sales of visitor vouchers he wants to share with you a most interesting site he has found on the internet

implosion research

Now you might think that the people at Implosion Research are not completely in control of their faculties (Mr Mustard has watched a former colleague use rods to do water divining so has an open mind on the subject) but the question is, is Brian Coleman more in touch with the world than they are ?

If Mr Mustard asked absolutely anyone what would happen if the price of something was increased fourfold overnight he can predict the answers:

1   they would stock up before the price rise ( we see this when petrol goes up in price ) and

2   they will look for alternatives.

The Barnet CPZ action group wrote a blog post about this a few days ago. They have compared the loss of income to budgeted figures which could be misleading as it depends on whether budgets were put up or down and by how much. Mr Mustard is going to look at the figures in absolute terms.

Let Mr Mustard firstly repeat the FOI  responses.

2011/12 (to date)
Number of residents permits sold = 9,510
Number of visitor vouchers sold = 194,689

2010/11
Number of residents permits sold  = 13,453
Number of visitor vouchers sold = 331,614

18/04/2011 to 07/01/2012
Number of residents permits sold = 8,825
Number of visitor vouchers sold = 16,696

2010/11 -  01/04/2010 to 31/03/2011
Number of residents permits sold  = 13,453
Number of visitor vouchers sold = 331,614

There were two sets of answers as the first time the council answered the question slightly incorrectly.

Mr Mustard will discuss just the visitor vouchers today.

Let him put the numbers in a different form that is easier to follow.

From	To	Days	Vouchers	Cost £	Income £
01/04/2010	31/03/2011	365	331,614	1	331,614
01/04/2011	17/04/2011	17	177,993	1	177,993
18/04/2011	07/01/2012	265	16,696	4	66,784
08/01/2012	31/03/2012	84	5,292	4	21,169
Total		366			265,946
01/04/2012	31/03/2013	365	22,996	4.20	96,585
Movement	from	2010/11	to	2012/13	235,029

Figures in blue are projected in proportion to time and the one in red is the drop in income that is likely to occur in a full year.

These figures are a textbook example of price elasticity of demand.

So what has happened.

Many residents stocked up with 200 vouchers each. Most of Mr Mustard's road did this. They won't buy more at £4 each when they run out.

Residents don't now feel so inclined to give a voucher to, say, the electrical repair man and they leave him to make his own arrangements. Just tell him sorry a voucher now costs £4 and you don't have any vouchers left. If he is going to be less than 2 hours it is cheaper to let him pay for the parking and as a mobile workman he is more likely to have a mobile phone and a credit card so he can register once and he is then set up for the whole of the borough.

Many people now park on the edge of the zone and walk.

Many now go to their visitor rather than the other way around. Mr Mustard used to have 2 visitors on a Monday morning and now the meeting is at one of their houses. They do not now visit any of the High Barnet shops.

Many use alternative spaces such as the Spires Car Park which for a short visit is much cheaper. The same goes true for other car parks for supermarkets etc and you could buy a pint of milk or something else you will definitely use to show goodwill.

Why didn't anyone say anything?

Residents could see what would happen when a £1 charge became £4 so why couldn't Brian Coleman, Pam Wharfe, the interim ( for now) Director of EPR, any member of the Cabinet, non stick Nick Walkley the Chief Executive, Andrew Travers the £1,000 a day Chief Finance Officer or any One Barnet consultant see it.

Why wouldn't any person at the council have the backbone to tell Brian that his price increase would have the reverse effect to the one planned.

Your supine behaviour will cost the council £235,000

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard