Newham Council are Cheats - #18

 

Mr Mustard thinks that Newham Council are being conveniently stupid in order to facilitate their PCN issuing frenzy and stop motorists from having free parking (cash or permit free).

Many adjudicators have now spelt out the law, that a parking bay must have a sign. The prior issue of a warning notice is no substitute for the legally required sign. 

Mr Mustard has now found this on the Newham Council website

This is compeltely wrong. The law is that the motorist is obliged to adhere to the rules set out in the traffic order which the council are under a duty to bring the provisions of to your attention by signs.

The driver is under no duty whatsoever to get a mobile phone out, even assuming they have one or have one with them, to start researching the rules which the council must tell you by signage.

Don't tell a CEO of a missing sign, they themselves should be reporting them but instead they are likely to issue a PCN and mark the vehicle down for removal.

Newham Council admit they are Cheats, they tell the public that they are.

Why is the £750,000 Barnet Council website so useless?

Go to this page

and click on the Ravensdale Avenue FOI entry and you get this

 then click on Download and it all goes pear shaped

Others have had the same problem.

Sort it out Barnet Council.

Optimistic in the extreme

the original www logo

Barnet Council is updating its horrible websites. Here is a Delegated Powers Report from January 2011

DPR 1235 Barnet Council Web content management system purchase

So this DPR records the decision to spend up to £130,000 on a content management system. Mr Mustard will forgive you if you wander off to this link for a read-up on the subject of CMS and then come back. OK, now you are an expert on CMS. Note that the web manager named on the cover sheet has moved on to pastures new - that cannot have helped with development.

Para 5.1 contains possibly the most hideously optimistic sentence ever seen. Not the sentence which says that this new contract, which most people will probably & wrongly equate to the cost of a new website, is expected to cost £130,000. No, the one that goes "The work is expected to be completed by April 2011".

Now what has been spent on the new website? ( it had better be awesome after this spend ). Mr Mustard will set out for you the major and/or interesting items. Amounts are not yet all spent; some are budgeted figures but as Mr Mustard only wanted you to get a feel for the cost, that isn't a problem.

Supplier	Amount £	Item	Note
JADU	48,420	Hosting & Support
JADU	39,999	Licences
JADU	1,200	Implementation
JADU	1,200	Implementation
JADU	1,800	Training	1
JADU	11,200	ePay
Google	6,200	mini search apps	2
LBB	123,600	staff costs	3
Agilisys	78,700	Requirements gathering	4
		Technical Specification
Agilisys	117,675	CMS config & development	5
Agilisys	50,450	Website design	6
Agilisys	48,350	Form review, design	7
		& implementation
Agilisys	127,750	Project management	8
		testing support
CDT	15,000	Graphic designs
Total	671,544		9

Notes

1. The training was paid for in October 11 so 6 months after the supposed go live date.

2. You can read about these here. This should offer a vast improvement over the current search facility at the price of google knowing what you did today.

3. That is just the staff who are dedicated to the project. It must be taking up the time of loads of other staff.

4. Barnet Council needed a consultant to tell them what they needed.

5. If you read about CMS earlier it is meant to be a piece of cake. Why all the time spent on configuration?

6. Design. It had better be pretty & easy to use.

7. We don't want to be straitjacketed by webforms. They are wretched. Here is an example from Camden Council. You cannot simply send them an email so that you have a copy yourself that you can file in your own email system and so you can use a pre-prepared signature to save your own time.

Webforms are about convenience for the council. Councils work for us, not the other way around. Mr Mustard is in correspondence with the Assistant Chief Executive Julie Taylor about this. If you also sent her an email ( link above ) saying that there must always be an email alternative to a webform that would help the cause. Mr Mustard will not use webforms. He will go back to letters if the council start to hide email addresses. 

Has there been any consultation on webforms? None seen by Mr Mustard.

8. Charging to project manage at the same time as doing most of the work. Crafty.

Bloggers would have tested for free, as would other regular users.

9. That seems like a lot especially as over 60% of it has been given to consultants.

Barnet Council are going for the big bang approach to the new website, on 30 March 2012 ( a Friday which is a quiet day and gives them the weekend to troubleshoot ). The alternative would have been to move one department at a time from the old site to the new one. Time will tell if the correct approach has been taken.

All the time that this website is under development and the invitation to quote kicked off in August 2010 ( It doesn't look like Agilisys had to quote specifically for this work ) and JADU got the job, the old website has still had to be hosted with Keltec and that has meant that 2 website hosting contracts are in place at once which means double bills.

DPR1476 - Barnet Council Keltec Contract Variation

So that is an extra £31,000 to Keltec due to the one year delay in implementing the new website.

Mr Mustard is off to put 30 March 2012 in his diary.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Where your money goes #1 - CDT Design Ltd

Mr Mustard is going to develop a series of blogs in order to highlight some of the spending of Barnet Council because very little is known about it. As the Council are committed to transparency I feel sure they will be falling over themselves to write and thank me.

The following payments were made to CDT Design in the first quarter of 2011:

Date	Reference	Amount
16/02/2011	5000292078	£750.00
06/01/2011	5000286711	£12,500.00
06/01/2011	5000286710	£11,500.00
31/01/2011	5000289685	£750.00
06/01/2011	5000286712	£650.07

Please provide full details of the services provided.

My response to your request is below.

Response

CDT Design supported the design of a new website for the council to be launched later in the year and their charges cover work associated with this.  "Supported" the design. More OneBarnet speak. Did they design it or did they just sit and watch. Another FOI request required.

They have also been involved in supporting the ‘Barnet Jobs’ website. Anyone else want £25,000 for supporting Barnet Council ? How many websites does OneCouncil need. One less.

Hang on a minute. 2,700 jobs are going and you are running up a new website to find more staff. Doesn't that seem a bit perverse or is it a website to help newly sacked staff find new jobs elsewhere ?

Both of these websites are expected to lead to significant savings for the council. Now where have we heard that before, perhaps it was in connection with SAP whose cost has more or less trebled from £8million to £20million-odd ( not exactly sure ) and the shortcomings of which have been so painfully exposed in the MetPro debacle. But if the expectations are not met will anyone notice and can that vague hope ( significant ? - no figures provided ) even be stood up anyway, I doubt it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Nick Walkley