The Friday Joke - Guest blog from Oz

This posting is copied straight from down under, from the following website http://www.radisol.com/cows/political.htm

click to enlarge; back to return

 

As for democracy in Barnet, Mr Mustard will leave you to decide what it is, if any of the above.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Tonight's cabinet meeting

a drinks cabinet; the most useful kind of cabinet

 

Mr Mustard is unclear as to why these meetings exist. He spent some time printing out 246 pages of the report pack in case there weren't any public copies, as sometimes happens, and what with having chosen to travel by motorbike and the extra time that getting dressed in his safety gear takes, he was 5 minutes late. This meant that Mr Mustard missed Cllr Coleman berating a person who was getting ready to film the meeting for filming before the meeting started ( he wasn't, but it takes time to set up the equipment ) and calling him a failed ex-councillor (ouch!). See some film of the meeting here.

He missed Mr Reasonable's perfectly reasonable question being swatted aside like a wrong answer in trivial pursuit and arrived to find Cllr Thomas in full flow about what a marvellous job the council had done with the budget. He sat down next to Mr Reasonable and wrote "bullshit night" on the top of his agenda. Mr Reasonable nodded and rolled his eyes in a "why the heck do we bother" manner. Mr Mustard does not know anyone more reasonable than Mr Reasonable and he is starting to despair at Barnet Council.

The Cllr Rams spoke and said that the savings in the library budget had gone backwards because of the extra time given to community groups to present their ideas. There was also some nonsense about One Barnet savings in the budget. Mr Mustard didn't pay full attention as One Barnet savings just mean that the budget has been slashed to ribbons.

So 7.10pm and Mr Mustard noted that pages 1-85 of the meeting, headed Business Planning 2012/13 to 2014/15 had been agreed. So if we take away 4 minutes for the minutes of the previous meeting. the absence of members to be noted, the declaration of members interests ( probably none as they aren't interested in council business ) and public question time, that left 6 minutes for 85 pages of detailed financial documents to be considered and cross-examined.

So on to item 6. Schools with Cllr Harper, who oozes mis-placed confidence, presented his report. All; is rosy in the kitchen wrote Mr Mustard in his notes who has long since given up making verbatim notes as he pukes when he gets home and reads the real words. Cllr Rams put in a plea for leisure to be considered alongside schools. Now Mr Reasonable knows more about this subject than Mr Mustard as he actually tries, with his family, to use the leisure facilities of the borough and they are disappearing fast; almost as fast as our schools are becoming academies and can put 2 fingers up to the council ( why would you want the council to interfere in the running of your school if you can manage without all of their stupid rules? ). Cllr Harper said that more than half of all Barnet secondary schools are now academies and they saw themselves as part of the Barnet family. Mr Mustard doubts that somehow and time will tell. The question becomes why we have so many administrative staff in the schools section; I should look for another job if I were you.

So 7.18 pm and pages 86-101 of the schools report were nodded through.

On to Item 7 and Tom Davey was saying why it was so marvellous that new council tenants would not be able to sleep easy in their beds any longer, or have longer than a 5 year tenancy as he put it, or 2 years if you were under 25. Take up your bed and walk would be how Father Benjamin would put it wouldn't he Mrs Angry? The future policy is to be based upon Need not Desire. Now as it happens Mr Mustard used to do door to door debt collection on the Dollis Valley Estate and he never met anyone who desired to live there. Davey went on " if the taxpayer is paying for your accommodation then he expects you to live in the correct size of accommodation". Mr Mustard was under the impression that tenants paid rent but perhaps he got that point wrong?

Anyway let's not waste time on poor council tenants. It's 7.22pm so the 16 pages of report & new policy are approved.

On to item 8. The North London Waste  Authority - Inter Authority Agreement - purely a technical report according to Cllr Coleman so 1 minute later it is agreed. The devil is in the detail. Did anyone look at the detail?

Item 9 was a rather interesting report about the Finchley Church End Conservation Area Character Appraisal. Someone has gone to a lot of time & trouble to record the history of the area and included a lot of photographs. Cllr Coleman was so fascinated by local architecture that he called out Agreed before Mr Lustig had even presented the report. Cllr Coleman then complained that he recalled that these sort of reports had been designated to Area Environment Committees in order to save money and not waste the time of Cabinet. Cllr Cornelius did say this was something that could be looked at but Mr Lustig was allowed to present the report and it was agreed at 7.24p. Only a philistine could think that our history is not worth a little study.

So 7.25 the Referrals to Council were all noted and the meeting closed. Only 3 minutes longer than the shortest meeting that Mr Mustard had ever attended. He would have liked to have gone home at that point but there was a meeting of the General Functions Committee scheduled for 8pm

25 minutes of his life had gone for ever, to no great improvement in society.

Update Friday am

Decision making
Meetings of the council happen approximately 7 times a year. These will decide on the budget, major policy issues and plans. An executive, or cabinet, of nine councillors together with the leader of the council make most of the other decisions. Each cabinet member is responsible for an area, or portfolio of council activity.

If 25 minutes represents the entire debate by the Cabinet then every councillor present should resign as they are not doing their job properly.

If the 25 minutes meeting does not represent the entire debate then there must be another meeting or meetings in advance of this one.

Thus, democracy is being denied as the public are not privy to the earlier discussions.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Will turning the lights off or down reduce burglary ?

Now here is a conundrum. Cllr David Longstaff has suddenly become very interested in burglary. You need to read Mrs Angry's blog on the council meeting first for illumination and then do come back.

So Cllr Longstaff has been burgled which is a pity. Knowing what a fine actor he is the burglars probably expected to find an Oscar statuette they could purloin. What! there wasn't one, oh dear, or at least a solid gold cast of his bottom ( haven't you seen his show reel, take a look here ) but were foiled again.

I agree with Cllr Longstaff that we want safe streets. Many burglaries happen at night. They would be aided by street lights being turned off or down so Barnet Council aren't thinking of doing such a thing, are they? Oh yes they are.

£5million is to be spent on nodes to enable street lights to be turned off or down ( sorry street lighting manager but I think you might find Cllr Longstaff popping down the corridor to see you to tell you why the street lights in his road shouldn't be turned down but how its all right for everyone else. Oh, and if you value your job I wouldn't turn them down in Essex Park either - ask the snow plough man why he goes down that little side turning as a first priority even though it isn't a bus or commuter route : what's that? rules are made to be broken, especially by cabinet members; of course, we don't want taxis sliding around dangerously with precious cargo on baord, now do we? )

Here is the Delegated Powers Report about street lighting energy saving ( money saving it should say ) and also in the box below

1330 Street Lighting PFI Energy Saving

What happens when street lights are turned off.

There will be more road accidents.

There will be more burglaries.

There will be more crime of other kinds.

There is lots of information on the website of the Institute of Lighting Professionals including some downloads about bats and lighting which the Campaign for Cat Hill group probably ought to take a look at in case there is anything of help.

Street lighting is in the same category as rubbish collection & libraries. It is one of the services that residents expect and value and they notice when it isn't there and they complain.

Look what happened in Pontypool, report from the South Wales Argus.

PONTYPOOL residents claim they are being made prisoners in their own homes because of Torfaen council's controversial street light switch-off.

As the clocks are due to move back an hour, the residents of Greenhill Road, Pontypool, are determined to keep fighting Torfaen council to have their street lights turned back on, 18 months after they were left in the dark.

Resident of Greenhill Road Barbara Vaughan, 65, says she is not looking forward to the coming winter months.

She said: "I am dreading the clocks moving back as it cuts the daylight and I'm afraid to go out. They are sentencing me to a life sentence, like I'm a prisoner."

Another resident, David Bassett, explained that there were five street lights in the road, and last year four were switched off as part of Torfaen¹s decommissioning scheme. Following three break-ins in the road, one street light was subsequently switched back on, but it still leaves the middle of the busy road in darkness.

He said: "People won't even walk to the local shop, or even step outside, because of how dark it is."

Thousands of lights were switched off in Torfaen since February 2009 in a bid by the council to save money and also to reduce its carbon footprint.

By January 2011 a total of 643 written appeals were received by Torfaen council, all of which were assessed and replied to.

This was seen as a strain on resources and it was proposed in April that the appeals process be formally discontinued, but councillors rejected this.

Mr Bassett added: "To consider discontinuing the appeals process is madness - it"s like they want us silenced."

Think how many emails and letters you will receive Barnet Council if you start turning the lights off. You would probably get 643 in the first week alone.

Best just leave the lights alone?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard 

The price of failure

As you know Mr Mustard asks quite a few questions as allowed for under the Freedom of Information legislation. He has the deputy leader's backing to do so ( being deputy leader is such a low profile bag carrying role that I probably need to tell you that the deputy leader is Cllr Daniel Thomas aka by bloggers as John Thomas or Doubting Thomas ) 

Members of the public are entitled to request information and I, of course, do not see anything wrong with that. Cllr D Thomas.

So here is a question and answer that Mr Mustard put in.

Dear Mr Mustard,

I write with our response to your request, received by us on August 30 2011, for the following information:

“Please provide a list of all payments made to GatenbySanderson since 1 April 2009 giving the date and the amount paid.

Please state the service provided for the fee paid and if the fee was for recruiting a person please indicate if the vacant post was filled by a candidate put forward by GatenbySanderson or if their work was fruitless and the post was filled by other means.” 

We have processed this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). The information should have been sent out to you within 20 working days. Please accept my apologies on behalf of London Borough of Barnet for the delay in responding.

Response

Doc. Date	Net Value	Inv No.	Member of Staff/Post
28/04/09	7,981.65	5641	Interim Consultant's Fees - G Cutts
28/04/09	7,857.45	5366	Interim Consultant's Fees - G Cutts
02/06/09	14,267.01	5942	Interim Consultant's Fees - G Cutts
27/11/09	2,016.30	7110	Assessment for Internal Directors - Assessment for Internal Candidates, profile and exercise materials and consultant expenses
27/11/09	9,225.00	6908	Advertising of Deputy Chief Executive & Director of Coporate Services, Print Advertising and Online Advertising - not filled
10/12/09	5,940.00	7188	Advertising of Director of Corporate Services - Second stage fees and expenses
10/12/09	4,841.62	7285	Assessment for Director of Corporate Services - Assessment for five candidates, profile and exercise materials and expenses.
12/01/10	21,800.00	6907	Advertising of Deputy Chief Executive Director of Coporate Services, First stage fees, Recruitment website development and expenses - not filled
02/02/10	3,960.00	7254	Advertising/recruitment of Director of Corporate Services which was filled, Invoice for Final stage fees and Expenses

Your rights

If you are unhappy with the handling of your request you can ask for an internal review. Please send such requests to our postal address or to foi@barnet.gov.uk and address them to the “FOI Officer”. Please also explain why you feel we have not correctly processed your request.

If, having exhausted our review procedure, you remain dissatisfied with the handling of your request or complaint, you will have a right to appeal to the Information Commissioner at: The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF (telephone: 08456 306060 or 01625 545745; website www.ico.gov.uk). 

There is no charge for making an appeal.

Yours sincerely,

Antoinette Carter  
Governance Officer  
Corporate Governance Directorate  
London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP
1 November 2011

A style point Barnet Council. Please don't put commas after the salutation and the sincerely, it is so old fashioned and the Barnet Council style guide says they interrupt the flow.

This would not have taken long to answer. Probably about an hour which is costed at £25. Nothing like the average of 9 hours which Cllr Thomas was waffling on about without having checked his facts first. 

Now look at the dates. Requested on 30 August 2011 and only answered on 1 November 2011. What were Barnet Council doing all that time? They were counting up how many requests Mr Mustard had made and blabbing to the press. Your time would have been better spent Barnet Council in actually answering the questions.

Now let us look at the answers. 

G Cutts is a new name to Mr Mustard as 2009 pre-dates his interest in the council. His more learned readers will contribute and tell us all if £30k in 3 months was money well spent. Probably replaced by Mr Savage Cuts.

So the rest of the money, more than £40,000 was spent on finding a Director of Corporate Services and on not finding a Deputy Chief Executive.

So the Director of Corporate Services who was appointed was Rod Matthews. He joined, according to his Linked-In profile, in December 2009 and left in January 2011. In the Accounts for 2010/11 he is shown as having been paid £80,000 for working and £58,923 to go home ( otherwise called Compensation for Loss of Office ). If he had been sent home within 12 months it could have been done for free. Mr Mustard does not know why he left the nest of vipers that is Barnet Council so soon but expects that someone will enlighten him.

So £20k or so was spent on not finding a Deputy Chief Executive and that is how we ended up with Andrew "Black Hole" ( copyright Mrs Angry ) Travers who is a consultant and not on Barnet Council's PAYE ( that is being avoided or evaded, never quite sure which one of those is legally ducking tax & which is breaking the law - expect that eventually the taxman will come knocking and Barnet residents will end up paying penalties for non-compliance )

copyright: Bank of England

It is shocking though isn't it that it costs £20,000 to not appoint a senior executive. That is more than some staff actually earn in a year. Recruitment agencies should not be rewarded for failure.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The leaked procurement document - a letter to councillors

The One Barnet Programme: a high stakes game

Dear Councillor,

As you know the Council is embarked on a massive outsourcing project, the One Barnet Programme. This programme has never been put before the borough’s residents for their comments let alone their approval. It was not in the manifesto of the winning party at the local government elections.

No Conservative councillor or senior Council officer has ever appeared in a public forum to defend the programme. It has been left to concerned residents such as ourselves to make their own investigations into the scope and scale of the planned changes.

We have recently seen a copy of the core principles adopted by senior council officers in March 2011, early in the process of beginning the outsourcing. They would alarm any resident who cares about the state of the borough. You can read the document here: http://barnetfutureshape.blogspot.com/

We do not know whether these principles have been modified in the course of the process. The fact that we do not know in itself is a matter for deep concern and only highlights the fact that residents are being kept in the dark about what the Council is doing with their own services and their money. We must insist on residents’ right to know more about One Barnet.

Of course, it might well be that councillors themselves are also in the dark about what the Council is doing. You have a duty to represent your constituents and we think you should share information about One Barnet with them. You should represent any concerns they have to the Council Cabinet and senior officers.

We think that the principles we have seen probably are those along which the One Barnet Programme is proceeding. The points from the principles that alarm us most and which we think particularly need public discussion are highlighted below.

One Barnet is likely to cost jobs in the borough

The Council appears to have decided that there will be no requirement on the companies awarded contracts to create new jobs within the borough. Moreover, they have decided that services do not have to be delivered locally: that is, staff currently employed by Barnet Council could be made redundant and their jobs done by people in another part of the county or even overseas, most probably in a call centre.

Staff made redundant will be offered basic TUPE terms, which, as we have already seen with outsourced services in Barnet, usually means that sooner or later staff will be re-employed on worse terms. That is bound to affect the quality of the service to residents.

There is a risk that residents will foot the bill if it goes wrong

The document is shot through with concerns about who will bear risks, including financial risks. For example, the Council is looking into taking out insurance against contract failure, and is worried about the implications of outsourcing for paying the pensions of transferred staff. Here is one particularly startling quotation regarding the pension fund:

“At the end of the contract period, there are risks of potential large deficits being built up by the new employer during the contract period. A recovery plan will need to be put in place well before contract ceases.”

The ostensible reason for going down the outsourcing path is to save money, but if contracts fail in any way, it will cost us money and disruption in our services. Other areas of provision will need to be cut to make up any gaps in the Council’s budget.

The quality of our services is in jeopardy

In the document senior officers acknowledge that contractors are interested in the One Barnet Programme for one reason alone: to make money. Take this, for example:

“There are... many examples of long-term partnerships where the commitment and enthusiasm of the provider has waned over the duration of the contract. Major... organisations will generally resource extensively during the first year, or two, of a new contract but this level of resourcing diminishes as the contract moves to a more stable business as usual position.”
Residents, however, are interested in the quality of their services, and councillors should be too.

***

We believe that councillors have a duty to inform themselves about these issues as a matter of urgency so that they can discuss them with constituents. Moreover, it is in your interest to do so.

The One Barnet Programme has major implications for the future of the Borough’s services and finances and for the way it is governed. One day the discussions behind closed doors must spill out onto the streets, as residents feel the impact of the changes to their services. That will be too late for them and you suddenly to be involved in the debate.

We therefore urge you to take an active interest in One Barnet now. Speaking for ourselves, we oppose the programme; we believe One Barnet will jeopardise local finances, the quality of services and democratic control over them.

Please let us know what you think.

Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne

Sorry seems to be the hardest word - special request for Cllr Thomas

Do you remember that Mr Mustard got something wrong and it was picked up by Cllr Rawlings. He wasn't home at the time but within 24 hours Mr Mustard had posted a correction and issued an apology. It is not difficult and you feel better for it unless you are the deputy leader apparently. 

Let Mr Mustard start at the beginning.

He was in Portugal going round and round the racetrack in Portimao for 3 days when word reached him, via the bloggers early warning system that he was being maligned in the press, here is a link to one of the articles. He was also receiving emails and phone calls about this.

So in the evening instead of having a beer with his mates in the bar Mr Mustard had to get his laptop out and defend himself.

Once he was back Mr Mustard decided to get to the bottom of the supposed £40,000 figure. He wrote to Cllr Thomas as follows on 6 October

---

Dear Cllr Thomas

I have seen the article on www.publicservice.co.uk

I believe that you were referring to my requests although I can't agree the number of 175 without further enquiry.

I do not believe that my requests can possibly have an average cost of £225 being 9 hours work at £25

Below is a typical request and response.

---

27 September 2011

Dear Mr Mustard

I am writing regarding your request, received by the London Borough of Barnet (the Council) on 30 August 2011 for access to the following information:

“Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Finchley & Golders Green Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

5 January 2011

9 March 2011

23 June 2011

14 September 2011

Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Chipping Barnet Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

17 January 2011

22 February 2011

23 June 2011

20 September 2011

Please provide the cost of hall hire for the Hendon Residents' forums on the following occasions:-

18 January 2011

15 March 2011

23 June 2011

12 September 2011

If any of these meetings are followed by an environment sub-committee please provide the total cost of hall hire for that evening ( i.e. you do not need to split the cost of hall hire across the two meetings but just state the total fee due or paid for that evening ).”

We are processing your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the FOIA). My response to your request is below.

Response

I can confirm the following:

The cost of hall hire for the Finchley & Golders Green Residents' forums on the following occasions -

5 January 2011 - Avenue House - £180.00.

9 March 2011 - St Michael’s Church Hall - £50.00

23 June 2011 - Greek Cypriot Neighbourhood Centre - £120.00

14 September 2011 - Trinity Church Centre - £106.00

The cost of hall hire for the Chipping Barnet Residents’ forums on the following occasions -

17 January 2011 - East Barnet School - £105.00

22 February 2011 - Chipping Barnet Library - £168.00

23 June 2011 - Coppetts Wood School - £247.50

20 September 2011 - All Saints Art Centre - £30.00

The cost of hall hire for the Hendon Residents' forums on the following occasions -

18 January 2011 - Sangam Centre - £175.00

15 March 2011 - Barnet Multicultural Centre - £100.00

23 June 2011 - Sangam Centre - £200.00

12 September 2011 - Copthall School - £420.00

Your Rights

If you are unhappy with the way your request for information has been handled, you can request a review by writing to the FOI Officer at: The London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London, N11 1NP (email foi@barnet.gov.uk).

If you remain dissatisfied with the handling of your request or complaint, you have a right to appeal to the Information Commissioner at: The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF (telephone: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45; website: www.ico.gov.uk).

There is no charge for making an appeal.

Yours sincerely
 

Mandy Byfield

Governance Officer

Corporate Governance Directorate
London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP
Tel: 020 8359 7072
Barnet Online: www.barnet.gov.uk

---

Let me first of all observe that this simple request took exactly 20 working days to answer. The Information Commissioner says that answers should be sent promptly. The 20 working days are the maximum time that a response should take. Barnet Council treat the 20 days as a target to hit, not one to beat.

I think that to answer the above question/s about hall hire would be about 15 minutes work at most. Do you agree?

Firstly, I need to know if you counted the above request as 1, 3, 4 or 12 questions ?

Secondly, as you have used an average of 9 hours for a response time in order to arrive at your figure of £225 then, given that many questions were much quicker to answer than that, some must have taken more than 9 hours to answer. Please tell me which questions did take more than 9 hours to answer.

Please provide a list of all my 175 questions so that I can check them.

publicservice.co.uk implies that I should not have submitted so many requests because of the administrative burden it places on the council.

Do you think that I have done anything wrong ?

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

---

Now the council's standard for answering correspondence is 10 working days. Having blabbed to the papers you would think that Cllr Thomas would be keen to reply as it's obviously an important manner. Not so, Mr Mustard had to nudge him on 27 October to reply. A reply did come on Sunday 30 October, as follows in sea-sick blue (teal!) and further comment by Mr Mustard in red

---

I think that to answer the above question/s about hall hire would be about 15 minutes work at most. Do you agree? 

The information you requested does appear basic enough to obtain quickly however there will be factors I'm not aware of such as the number of records/invoices to search (the Council deals with many property matters) and officer prioritisation of workload/more urgent matters. 

That's a yes then. 15 minutes work. I also don't have any idea about the council's procedures.

Firstly, I need to know if you counted the above request as 1, 3, 4 or 12 questions ?  

The questions regarding hall hire were treated as one request as demonstrated in the list attached.

Fair enough.

Secondly, as you have used an average of 9 hours for a response time in order to arrive at your figure of £225 then, given that many questions were much quicker to answer than that, some must have taken more than 9 hours to answer. Please tell me which questions did take more than 9 hours to answer. We do not keep a record of the amount of time spent dealing with a request. The 'typical cost' figure of £225 is derived from research into the costs of FoI requests carried out by UCL.

No question, or set of, took 9 hours to answer so no question cost £225 to answer.

Please provide a list of all my 175 questions so that I can check them.
See attached list.

Mr Mustard isn't going to burden you with the list but he did ask the 175 questions. Even though Mr Mustard numbers his requests in order the council didn't quote those numbers or get the list in the same date order.

It is a legal duty of the council to respond to Freedom of Information requests. I accept that I have sent in quite a few. That is necessary because the council is not open and transparent enough for my liking and the website is difficult to navigate. The response that you made, as reported by publicservice.co.uk implies that I should not have submitted so many requests because of the administrative burden it places on the council.

Do you think that I have done anything wrong ?

Members of the public are entitled to request information and I, of course, do not see anything wrong with that. I also see nothing wrong in publicising the costs of responding to such requests in the interests of transparency.

No! Good, you can expect many more requests when Mr Mustard has the free time. Please make sure that you don't identify Mr Mustard in the future.

The more information the Council can publish on a standard basis the less need there will be for FoI requests. This Council was one of the first to publish spending on items over £500. I gather in June you were invited to suggest areas to be added to our publication scheme but officers have not yet received a response. 

Please see the previous blog post on this subject.

---

Mr Mustard felt that he & the situation had been misrepresented and so he emailed Cllr. Thomas today as follows :-

Dear Councillor Thomas

Thank you for your email of 30 October 2011 from which it is apparent that you simply cannot support the following made to www.publicservice.co.uk

"Thomas said one of the bloggers had submitted a total of 175 FoI requests between April and September of 2011. This meant a total nearing £40,000 was spent by the council responding to this one individual, based on a typical cost of £225 in dealing with each request"

Now I may have submitted 175 requests as per your attached list but the council hasn't answered 175. I have added a notes column. There are 9 that have been aggregated for cost purposes and then refused. The total cost to answer the 9 requests, counted as 140 line items, was estimated to be £1,400 which would make each individual line item £10 to answer if they had been answered ( and your £40,000 estimate was overstated by 9 * £225 = £2,205 ) .

2 questions were only answered today and so were late, as is often the case. At the time that you made your statement they had not cost the council anything to answer.

3 questions have been refused. ( £675 of your estimate not spent )

7 await an answer and are late. ( £1,575 of your estimate not spent )

I have not looked in detail at every line, I have just annotated the questions which sprang readily to mind.

There is no evidence that the typical cost of answering my requests is anything like £225 although there is evidence from the council itself that it isn't a typical cost.

In summary, both the number of items and the cost estimate are wrong and you should now issue a correction to www.publicservice.co.uk

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

---

Did this prompt an apology. No. This response arrived 17 minutes later and from this you can gather that the question of an apology has been given insufficient consideration.

---

Dear Mr Mustard,

Thank you for your observations and assumptions.

I disagree that requests not yet answered or where answers were refused have cost the Council 'nothing'. Requests currently worked on or refused still receive officer time.

Thank you for your feedback.

Regards,

Cllr Daniel Thomas

---

This reply talks about feedback. Mr Mustard did not give feedback. He asked for a correction to be sent to www.publicservice.co.uk - It has not been forthcoming. Mr Mustard has been misrepresented in the press and thinks the councillor is being churlish in his failure to acknowledge that the requests made did not cost anything like the £40,000 he stated without any substantiation whatsoever. 

This standard of behaviour is below the one that we should receive from councillors, especially one who is the deputy leader.

If you think Cllr Thomas should correct the misleading impression then please email him on cllr.d.thomas@barnet.gov.uk and if you think Mr Mustard should drop the matter then please email him at mrmustard@zoho.com

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

As transparent as a brick wall

As you know Mr Mustard searches out information of interest to readers. It made work for governance which they didn't seem to like as they sent the following email.

Dear Mr Mustard

I am writing in relation to the series of requests for information you have made to the Council under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the FOIA).

The Council is committed to developing and improving transparency across the organisation and the volume of requests we receive under the FOIA from you suggests that there is information not currently made available that you would like to see.

We would be grateful for your suggestions of what information the Council could and should routinely make available via the website that may assist in minimising the need for information to be requested under the FOIA.

If you would like to assist, please contact the Council via foi@barnet.gov.uk. We will then consider your suggestions and keep you updated on their progress.

Kind Regards,

Standards and information Rights Team

Corporate Governance Directorate
London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP

---

Mr Mustard didn't reply at first as he is a busy man, work to do, motorbikes to ride etc and then Cllr Thomas effectively outed him to the papers ( subject of next blog coming soon ) which made Mr Mustard decide to reply. Mr Mustard decided to research what a typical council should be publishing. You will find it on page 6 in the below window and you can download the document from the Communities website here.

Code of Practice on Data Transparency for Local Authorities

Here is the text of what Mr Mustard has today sent to the council:

Dear Sirt Team

Thank you for your email of 2 June 2011.
 

If you had studied my requests for a few minutes you could have identified that they were quite wide ranging and come to two conclusions :- 

1 - that the lists of spending over £500 are inadequate as they do not give more than an inkling of exactly what the money was spent on ( as an aside they are inaccurate - how can they contain negative numbers ? and incomplete - where have the £1,000 a day payments of Andrew Travers / Halliford Associates Ltd gone to ? and also contain duplications, Mr Reasonable identified one of over £250,000 ). They are not informative in that they do not say what the money was spent on e.g. fireworks at the Finchley Carnival.

2 - that I am interested in many different topics.

Rather than have me design a publication scheme for the council ( 90+ people in Governance, many of them handsomely paid, have more time for this than a blogger in his limited spare time ) I have an alternative suggestion would would allow Barnet for once to have some positive publicity rather than negative.

My suggestion is that you start by deciding to publish everything ( every tender, every order, every contract, every job description, the salary scale of every job, every report received, the minutes to every committee, the minutes to every meeting ) and then hold back those documents that contain obviously personal data ( these will mostly be in Adult Social Care & Children's directorates ).

My FOI requests would then drop to virtually zero. 
 

Of course, it isn't me who wants information about local councils to be out in the open, it comes from the very top of Government. 

I have spent a minute or two looking at what the Department for Communities & Local Government expects and that is set out in the Code of Recommended practice for Local Authorities on Data Transparency. I am sure you must have a copy but to be helpful I attach one for you. 

If you look at paragraph 12 on page 6 there is a list of the minimum data to be published. Barnet Council is a bit behind with this list and I think that you ought to try and make the The Right Honourable Eric Pickles MP happy before worrying about me. 

For example, the over £500 lists are incomplete and inaccurate. The S151 Finance Officer is a contractor on £1,000 a day and yet has not appeared on the lists since April 2011. I suspect that Barnet Council are fiddling with the lists. 

The senior employees data is incomplete. I was refused a list of the 137 staff earning over £70,000. A reworded request will now be submitted.

The organisational chart is only about 20 officers which does not give a clear picture of staffing and vacant posts.

You are still trying to secure missing contracts following the "procurement action plan" which had to be put in place after over £1m was paid to MetPro without a contract.

It would seem that there is plenty for the council to be getting on with rather than telling the press that one blogger has cost them £40,000 in 6 months, a statement which was not true.

The best possible reply that you could make to this email would be to start improving the quantity and quality of the published data.

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

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We will have to wait and see what happens next. It may be a long wait?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard