Taking stock of library books

Reducing a stock

Following on from Friday's blog about the slowly reducing spending on library book stock, all brought about by Roger's blog at the Barnet Eye, Mr Mustard's friend also obtained for him the stock figures going back to 31 March 2000 and here they are:

 

2000	865,558
2001	866,429
2002	620,000
2003	597,062
2004	521,402
2005	537,850
2006	536,175
2007	502,393
2008	482,872
2009	485,662
2010	489,900
2011	469,836
2012	477,999

and in the much more easy to digest form of a table

click to enlarge, back to return

which is very interesting. As the spend has been going down the book stock level follows it but with a 5 year lag which is possibly the average life of a library book. Stock can only have gone up a smidgen in 2012 by buying less expensive books or by not throwing old books away as soon as in previous years.

Apart from the fantastically innovative Friern Barnet people's library, which sadly only has <6 weeks to go in its current format, although Pete Phoenix isn't so named for nothing (we can expect another library to rise from the ashes) it is evident that libraries are only treading water in Barnet.

The strategic library review foresees a reduction in the budget of £1,410,000 over the next 3 years. That is going to help our libraries, isn't it? It is what Robert Rams has put his name to. He couldn't have got it completely wrong could he?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

When free Parking isn't free

It is nearly Christmas, the time to give. No-one thought that Dean Cohen's gift of 2 hours of free parking was much of a gift, not even a stocking filler, and it certainly wasn't destined to be a High Street filler. The gift was sexed up as being a free weekend's parking but that was to over-state the case as only one High Street has charges on a Sunday in any event and you couldn't park all weekend without getting a parking ticket. Happy Christmas from Barnet Council.

Now you would hope that the council would have advertised this ungenerous offer more widely than they have. 

Were there any signs on pay & display bays advertising the free parking?  No.

Was there a recorded message when you phoned up the pay-by-phone number to say that you didn't need to pay for the first 2 hours? No.

Did Helen Michael of Cafe Buzz in North Finchley ask 200 people today if they knew about the free parking? Yes she did.

Did any of them know about it? No.

Will Barnet Council donate all of the money they have pocketed in error to charity, say Crisis at Christmas? What do you think? Mr Mustard thinks they won't as the council have no morals.

Is Cllr Dean Cohen actually Scrooge? Quite possibly.

Thanks for nothing Dean.

Update: Christmas Eve. Mr Mustard wandered past the Stapylton Rd car park in High Barnet. He saw a sign flapping in the breeze. Oh, he thought, the council did manage to put up a sign at one car park at least to say that parking was free for 2 hours. He went over to take a closer look. Oh yes there was free parking, but in July 12!

Evidently the same council that couldn't be bothered to take the old sign down couldn't be bothered to put new ones up, especially as it would cost them money which is about all that they care about.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

An extra £10,000 on books?

10,000 books not an extra £10,000 of book purchases

It is the season of goodwill and so Mr Mustard is going to give Cllr Robert Rams's blog a little extra publicity today. Robert likes to be in the public eye except that it is usually the eye of the storm he finds himself in.

Here are some of the words which Mr Mustard has cut-and-pasted from Robert's blog post of 7 June 2011:

As I said recently .............. the Library Review was never going to be universally popular. This is despite the extra £10,000 per year we will spend on books,................

Under our strategy, Friern Barnet library will move, and merge with the North Finchley library. All the services currently provided at the Friern Barnet site will be provided at the artsdepot. The library at the artsdepot will be one of our largest; it will be a landmark library that specialises in the arts. It will hold more stock, have longer opening hours, will open on Sundays, and have extra study space and facilities.

Ah yes, the Artsdepot. It will not be "one of our largest", it will not be "a landmark library", it will hold zero stock not "more stock", it will not "open on Sundays" it won't have any library "facilities". Perhaps Robert needs to go back and correct that entry on his blog and delete all the incorrect statements which will make for an interesting post, just white space.

Now Mr Mustard was interested in the spending on books in libraries but as the FOI department have got the hump with him, and deem every simple little request that he makes to be vexatious, he had to get a friend to ask the question. She received an answer in 16 days and luckily Mr Mustard has lots of friends who are happy to ask questions on his behalf.

So it was in June 11 that Robert said that an extra £10,000 p.a. would be spent on books. Did that happen in 2011/12? No it didn't as this table and graph show.

31-Mar	Spend £
2004	459,065
2005	674,094
2006	594,786
2007	470,659
2008	444,599
2009	416,668
2010	409,197
2011	390,762
2012	387,830

Will extra spend arrive in 2012/13? It probably will now as Robert will read this post and have to go off and bother senior officers to make sure it happens as an FOI question will be asked after the year has ended. The clear evidence though is that spending on books has been reduced year on year since 2005.

Anything that Robert Rams says has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It seems that his Cabinet colleagues might agree as here are 2 of them, from a year ago, checking if they have enough salt in stock to cope with all the imaginary landmark library utterances, or something like that.

Have a Happy Christmas readers and go easy on the salt as it really isn't good for your health to have too much of it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Crapita - Did anyone from Barnet ask Sefton anything?

The Jolly Roger - look out for pirates from Sefton

So still on the Capita Symonds website was the following puff piece:

Capita Symonds’ ten year strategic partnership with Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council officially began in October 2008.

Key facts
Start Date: 1st October 2008
Duration: 10 Years
Value of Contract: £70 million
Primary Office location: Magdalen House, 30 Trinity Road, Bootle, L20 3NJ

Overview

Capita Symonds’ ten year strategic partnership with Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council officially began 01 October 2008, with the TUPE transfer of over 120 employees. The £70m partnership, which includes the option of a five year extension, will see Capita Symonds working with the council to deliver a wide range of projects and services.

The formation of a partnership is a bold and exciting step, which places Sefton MBC at the very forefront of public service delivery; providing the investment needed for transformation and ultimately world class services for the citizens of Sefton, Council colleagues and partners.

We’re working together to create a culture that embraces change; one which is rewarding, and encourages creative thinking and innovation.

Services offered

Architecture and quantity surveying
Building maintenance and M&E design
Engineering design
Property management
Highways management and street lighting
Drainage

and from the Liverpool Daily Echo of 25 November 2011.

SEFTON Council last night confirmed plans to tear up a £65m contract outsourcing swathes of the authority’s services to the private sector.

Council leaders claimed the contract was not delivering the savings which were anticipated when the deal was stuck.

Capita was awarded the contract to deliver the borough’s technical services after forecasting it would save 5.5% of Sefton’s predicted cost of doing the work in-house.

The engineering giant said it would invest £7.39m in people, processes and new technology and create 100 new jobs within the first five years.

But Sefton Unison union leader Glen Williams last night said the firm had failed to meet its promises.

So what is happening in Barnet Council? The planned outsourcing for 10 years of services grouped togther as DRS (Development & Regulatory Services) which are

 

So similar services are to be outsourced in Barnet with Capita Symonds being one of the two remaining bidders. The contract is set for 10 years with a possible 5 year extension. All shockingly familiar and very doubtful that anyone from Barnet Council has been on a train to Sefton to find out the reason why they are pulling the plug early but we wouldn't know as no-one is saying where they physically went, probably because no-one left the Town Hall to go anywhere.

Come back in 2018 to find out if Barnet Council appointed Capita Symonds and if they then let them go five years later.

Change costs money. Changing to Capita will cost money and local jobs and mess up people's lives, changing back will cost more money again.

Why don't Barnet simply sign up for 5 years with an easy get out clause?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Slower than snail mail - Capita email

not served at Mustard Mansions

Back on 9 November 2012, Mr Mustard sent the dear "leader" Richard Cornelius an email which read as follows:

Dear Cllr Cornelius

Last night you said "NSL is generating savings now" (based on my manuscript notes but it will be on film)

You know how I like to armchair audit this sort of thing.
Please send me the figures which justify your claim. Please make sure this includes how much overtime has been paid to get them up to the expected level of PCN and the number of CEO (traffic wardens) now assigned to the contract as opposed to the number at contract start (number of posts not people in post) which I do believe has increased.

By the way, based upon what happens at PATAS ( the independent adjudicator ) the contract still isn't going very well.

On Tuesday 6th November the hearings went as follows, and every single parking ticket was cancelled:

1. Allowed by Order of Adjudicator (this usually means no evidence filed by Barnet council)

2. TMO wrong.
3. No copy PCN filed.
4. Council failed to deal properly with correspondence.
5. By Order.
6. By Order.
7. Inadequate evidence from council.
8. By Order.
9. By Order
NSL are still not covering you in glory. Imagine this sort of mess in month 7 on DRS and NCSCO. Don't say later that I didn't warn you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Now Mr Mustard is sure that Richard received the email as they discussed it briefly when Richard was also in the public gallery at a committee meeting last week. Quite amusingly Richard told Mr Mustard that the answer was 50% done and then it turned out that Mr Mustard and Richard were talking about different emails as the Cornelius inbox is a place of repose for difficult questions and most of Mr mustard's have a holiday there, some of them on a  one way ticket. So here we are coming up to 6 weeks old and the email has not been responded to.

As you will know Barnet & Harrow "share" a legal department. It is generally seen as more of a takeover by Harrow, the top banana being a Harrow employee and the service being located in Harrow. How Harrow must be hating this deal. Barnet get themselves into more fights than a fairground boxer what with two judicial reviews and a Friern Barnet library possession hearing having come out of the woodwork in the last month alone, and there will be more to come. If Barnet followed more popular policies, ones they had carefully consulted the public about before implementation then they might find less resistance to their plans. They will have to learn the hard way.

Back to email, it seems that Harrow's email service is part of the IT service which is managed by Crapita (you knew Mr Mustard would get to the point in the end) and thanks to the iHarrow blog we can see that earlier in the year it had problems which they wrote of as a disaster which it is nowadays if your email is out for even an hour, it is like the end of the world has arrived (oh that is tomorrow I understand). It seems from what iHarrow have to say, and their links to other published accounts, that chaos follows Capita when it comes to computers.

Whilst on the subject of email not getting through I do hope that someone in FOI at Barnet Council is reading this email. Do you remember FOI that you were sending emailed responses to Mr Mustard and that they were not getting though to the dd........@cr.......co.uk address for some technical reason that only icasework could tell you. Well a few months have gone by and you are still sending replies to mrmustard@zoho.com from where they are auto-forwarded to the address Mr Mustard would prefer them at, his real person address. Have you sorted this out yet please? If so, do please let Mr Mustard know.

You haven't forgotten Mr Mustard have you? Oh no, as you have decided that 20+ of his FOI requests are vexatious. Let's see if the ICO agrees shall we?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Merde-ita

TV Licensing staff of Capita on strike

Mr Mustard doesn't watch live TV, he doesn't own a TV set and any TV he does watch is on iPlayer or on the TV of friends - he did catch a lovely programme about the preservation of steam trains yesterday evening (don't be surprised) after he had carried out a parking ticket consultation for a resident who is in front of PATAS later this week.

Mr Mustard now realises that he met a Capita employee a few months ago as, having shredded unopened a score of TV licensing letters, the inevitable visit from a doorstep enquiry agent arrived. There was at the time a notice on Mr Mustard's door saying that he didn't need a TV licence and that callers without an appointment should go away, as Mr Mustard does have a business to run and constant interruptions for people who work from home cost money. Needless to say the poor Capita employee knocked and was told simply to read the sign and then go away. They did. (If this employee happens to be reading - it wasn't personal, but Mr Mustard questions the wisdom of a system which starts from the premise that everyone is trying to wrongly avoid buying a licence they don't need. Mr Mustard doesn't have a pilot's licence either but no-one ever writes to him about that.)

So this week is Crapita week for Barnet Bloggers - so nice to have a theme although the Friern Barnet library story is hot this week (read all about it on Mrs Angry's blog or on The Barnet Eye, see the sidebar to the left).

The choice of blogs that one could write about Capita, or Crapita as Private Eye have named them, and which for the heading Mr Mustard has given a French twist, that being the language he has himself studied for the last 20 years, would actually fill a year and in late 2013 Mr Mustard predicts, the Barnet blogs will be full of tales of woe about Capita, with them being explained away by the council as teething troubles. One would think that a company turning over £billions would have learnt by now how to implement change without having to go through trial and error at our expense. Anyway, the story that appealed to Mr Mustard was the one about the Court interpreting service which he has been following in Private Eye all year.

Mr Mustard will let you read about the background elsewhere from other articles.

Here, on 7 October, from the International Association of Conference Interpreters from which this paragraph makes one ponder

Most shocking of all, however, was the finding that some of the MoJ staff understood that ALS would be unable to comply with the mandatory quality requirement of the contract in time for the ‘go live’ date, and therefore “agreed with ALS in December 2011 that, on a temporary basis, un-assessed and unmarked interpreters could be used in the justice system as a last resort.” 

What is the point of entering into a Contract on commercial terms and then allowing a variation without a commensurate reduction in price. Mr Mustard does not want to see this in Barnet but expects that he will as Mr Mustard doesn't trust senior officers to buy a paperclip without overpaying.

Next up, the Law Society Gazette on 30 October 12. From that we have the "it's not our fault defence" which is usually used, In Mr Mustard's experience of commercial dispute, as a water muddying device. It looks like it didn't wash with Margaret Hodge MP and the rest of the committee. You can see from this report that the company was given a Notice to improve. This simply gives a failing company the time they need to sort themselves out. If you want action you have to withhold payment for services not supplied and have proper penalties in the contract so that failure hurts the provider more than it hurts the customer. Will Barnet Council have any such penalties in the NSCSO contract? No, only 8% of fees are at risk for failure to meet KPI. Big deal, less than the profit margin on the contract.

Finally from the Evening Standard of last Friday, a report of a risible (laughable) fine of £2,200 for "total chaos". Far too many contracts are written in a one-sided manner and given that none of our Cabinet have admitted to reading any of the 2,500 pages (the latest estimate of how many there actually are in the Contract) as none of them answered Mr Mustard's email asking how many pages they had read or intended to read, and our council "leader" Richard Cornelius doesn't even see the need to read it they won't know until too late how little protection has been negotiated for them.

Look forward with trepidation to Barnet Council and Crapita appearing in Private Eye, local and national newspapers next year when the latest chaos hits us.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Why contractors don't often get sacked - maybe?

link to BBW article about DVLA

This week is Crapita week but Mr Mustard hasn't finished doing his research and he has a related blog post to write as to why local authorities and governments don't often take contractors to task.

Has Mr Mustard told you the joke, or is it, that he tells his clients? Mr Mustard has been in business for 25 years helping to sweep up the mess that supposedly commercial companies have made of their businesses. His firm acts in effect as an outsourcer to liquidators providing a service that is subject to peaks and troughs in demand and which needs considerable negotiating skills and the ability to ask people to pay up (which is a skill that the reserved British seem to find hard to master). His firm has been the recipient of a government contract in the 90's which was rarely the subject of a complaint and so it was held for several years.

What Mr Mustard tells his clients is that his firm is only average but because he always follows people who are useless then his firm looks brilliant. Clients are never sure if Mr Mustard is having a laugh but they do stick with him for years and years.

So when Mr Mustard discovered that Big Brother Watch had asked a very interesting question of the DVLA about which councils had been banned for various periods from obtaining details of car ownership he went off to see if Barnet Council were in the list. They were, on three occasions as follows:

24/3/11 to 11/5/11 - not authorised to make enquiries

27/1/12 to 26/3/12 - audit issues

19/6/12 to 24/9/12 - no contract in place

Now the parking enforcement contract with NSL started a month late on 1 May 12. One wonders if part of the reason for the one month delay was to allow time for the council to get out the pickle they had got into in the first quarter of the calendar year 2012. They weren't to know when the DVLA might lift the ban and so 1 April was a bit tight for being able to fulfil the council's presumed part of the bargain of providing access to DVLA. (Mr Mustard has about 90% of the contract, all the really interesting sections have been redacted, but from what he can see the responsibility for the DVLA link rests with the council). 

Now readers will recall that the Special Parking Account was down by £1.2m at 30 June 2012. When the interim Director of Environment, Planning & Regeneration, Pam Wharfe, who is the chosen one in the new order (otherwise known as commissioning chaos) to become the Director of Place (were there really no better candidates?), reported on the parking recovery plan to the Budget & Performance Overview & Scrutiny Committee on the evening of 25 October 2012, she didn't mention that for two of the weeks in that quarter the council had been unable to obtain details of car ownership and that must have affected the income.

This must be one of the reasons why when put in the spotlight about claiming compensation from NSL by Cllr Cooke the reply was an irrelevance about not having targets for parking ticket numbers and that "the contract had been properly managed". Did Pam not know about the lack of a contract with DVLA, especially after the Procurement Action Plan had by then been in place for a year? in which case her competency is questionable, or did she know and did she just fail to mention it as a factor which is.....well, you dear reader can make up your own mind what that is.

(Digression - Whilst we are on the subject of Pam Wharfe, Mr Mustard hears that when she took the e-learning module for Contract Management Introduction, she failed it the first time getting 3 of the 15 questions wrong. A much better score the second time, just 5 minutes later, with only one wrong answer; let's hope it wasn't for something vital.)

Now the parking enforcement contract is one of the simplest that could be imagined and it should be a simple task to highlight all of the failures of NSL but if on the client side you have a worse failing then as an Officer (employee of Barnet Council) you are going to shy away from involving legal as your own inadequacies are about to be thrust into the spotlight.

Multiply the contract up to a humongous one with Crapita and try to blame them for failure and their clever lawyers will be all over the contract looking for the client side failures, which given the general ineptitude of Barnet Council overpaid senior managers, will be easy to find, especially as under the new corporate structure it isn't entirely clear who is meant to do what and internal division and infighting will be rife.

Councillors on scrutiny panels. In future you might like to ask Directors if there are any parts of a contract which the council itself have not fulfilled 100%.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard