Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs.
Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
Word of my close connection to Barnet Council has reached the teenage youth of High Barnet.
They would like to have a basketball hoop to practice on but it would be better to give them a whole court and, who knows, some of the stars of the future might just come from Barnet. There are multipurpose courts available like this one pictured below which might represent better value. I suppose that giving them one hoop to start with, perhaps in a quiet corner of the Old Courthouse Recreation Ground, would be a cheap way of gauging demand.
Having said I would email about this they then wanted a skate park to go with it. The nearest is at Potters Bar and apparently it was too crowded to actually skate in today.
Please would you see what can be done, maybe with some of the S.106 monies. Once built, a skate park really doesn't have any running costs if it is made out of concrete.
You might also like to consult the Members of the Youth Parliament who will have a much better idea than you or I about the wishes of teenagers.
The more exhausting pursuits they have the less time there is for them to become bored and get into trouble.
Update 17 April 2012 from Pam Wharfe.
Dear Mr Mustard
Thank you for bringing this to my
attention.
I have passed this to Mrs Bishop for her views.
If you have a view you can email Lynn Bishop at this address.
Here is a copy of an email that Roger Tichborne of the Barnet Eye has sent to all councillors (Roger is dyslexic so makes small spelling errors for which I hope he will forgive Mr Mustard his two corrections - the understanding of what Roger wrote was not in any way affected but Mr Mustard's own pedantic nature forces him to edit ).
Dear Barnet Councillor,
You are cordially invited to the official opening of the
worlds very first Pop Up Library at Friern Barnet on Saturday 14th April. This
will give you a chance to meet the people of Barnet and discuss how passionately
they feel about the provision of local library services and why Barnet Council
should be expanding and not closing libraries.
We will be making a film of the days activities and we
will be asking local councillors and members of the public to tell us why they
love their libraries, what their fondest memories of their library are and why
they need a LOCAL library.
The Barnet Eye looks forward to seeing you at this truly
unique event. With the forthcoming GLA elections, we hope that councillors of
all parties take the opportunity to meet members of the public in a relaxed and
happy environment and listen to their views
Regards
Roger Tichborne
The Barnet Eye
You may have to talk amongst yourselves as it seems unlikely that any councillor who voted to close this library will be brave enough to attend, or will they?
Mr Mustard is sure the above gig would be, er well, how can one put this, oh yes.............Madness, but there is no absolute need to travel all the way to Minehead (and you would have fun at Butlins) unless you are a Madness nut (sorry) as if you work at the North London Business Park, the One Barnet madness is on a continuous loop.
If the youtube video does not show above please follow this link.
Hello everyone, it is Friday, the day when bloggers have a laugh and tell jokes and doughnuts (a Citizen Barnet speciality) and publish poetry and all sorts of stuff that is not necessarily true.
Well today Mr Mustard is evoking the spirit of the late Marjorie Proops (and giving away how old he is) and publishing a letter that might have been sent to her by a One Barnet consultant.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Dear Marge
I
hope you can help me as I feel that no-one loves me.
I
am a very important consultant who is paid lots and lots of money every day but
I just can't face going into work unless my nails are perfectly
painted and my hair isn't out of place. I am doing what I am told is a really
important job in Barnet but I think the staff talk about me behind my back and
use a codename when they talk about me.
They pretend to be nice to me but I
don't think they are.
They say they want to put the community first but all they
want to do is keep their jobs and it's my job to make lots of them redundant
because they are a lazy lot and there are 20 of them too many.
My
boss keeps saying to take the money and shut up and that this gravy train won't
last much longer before we have to move on. He
says we are like the emperor with no clothes - I don't understand him as
I always have very nice clothes.
What shall I do?
Yours in hope
Miss P
Dear Miss
P
Be Human
I can see the
problem. You are obviously working on the toxic One Barnet programme and don't
worry as everyone has doubts about that.
You have a
simple decision to make about yourself. What is most important to you? To be
loved or to be rich (well at least not poor and relying on help from Barnet
Council). If it is to be rich then carry on but sadly you won't become rich at
Barnet Council as your boss is right. The
gravy train is about to come off the rails and you will never be happy as you
have to make so many other people miserable to do that.
If you want to
be loved then give up the fancy clothes and the expensive make-up as it is only
a mask. Go to Africa and help to feed
starving children and villages that don't have access to clean water to
dig a well.
Then you will
see what truly matters in life, you will be happy and everyone will love
you.
Yours in
hope
Marge
Mr Mustard didn't realise quite how fantastic Marge Proops was. She is now at rest in the Hoop Lane Cemetery, Mr Mustard might pop round himself to see her grave quite soon and she is at peace as Barnet Council cannot sell the cemetery off as they don't own it. Mr Mustard read this obituary in the Independent. It is well worth a read.
Mr Mustard and his co-Director both live inside the CPZ. Not trusting the council to send reminders they keep a note of when their permits are due for renewal and they both happen to be on 30 April. Mr Mustard also supplied his email address to the council in writing in February but has yet to receive a reminder by email for the 30 April renewal. Once EPR read this blog they will probably send one just for him.
Mr Mustard could not find his applicant number which is essential for a renewal. It does not appear in the letter which carries the permit (please fix that EPR). He phoned up and got his applicant number and tried to renew on-line which is the council's, and his, preferred method. It would not work. He was then transferred to telephone payments, went through the personal details, got his debit card out and was asked for £105. I don't think so said Mr Mustard. Oh yes said the parking money man as rates go up on 30 April and that is when your permit expires. If you pay on-line it is £100 said Mr Mustard and your system won't let him pay on-line. That was not the issue. The issue was that rates go up at 1am on the day of the renewal. The existence of a £5 discount was denied. Mr Mustard told the man there was an advertisement in last week's paper and he would go off and find it and send it to him. Here it is.
Mr Mustard's co-Director did manage to complete her renewal and here is the receipt (personal details are hidden).
She has clearly paid £105 for a £100 permit and luckily she sits next to Mr Mustard. An email has now been sent to parking@gov.co.uk requesting a £5 refund.
If you have paid £105 for an on-line renewal then you need to send an email in asking for a £5 refund. If you paid by credit card you need a little extra back as well for the surcharge.
Barnet - the council that struggles to manage the simplest of tasks and thinks that it can run one of the largest local authority out-sourcing projects - One Barnet
A little birdie told Mr Mustard last week that EPR now double check everything in case Mr Mustard picks up an error. Best move to treble checking?
Update at 14.31 today. Under 2 hours after the post went live.
Proof of the power of blogging.
Well done to RR in the parking payment section who read the blog and took the initiative and emailed mrmustard@zoho.com to enquire as to the registration number of the affected vehicle. Hopefully the £5 will soon be back with his co-director (who had also emailed the council even before the blog posting and not had a direct reply).
There is also a posting today on the Barnet CPZ Action website here, which is worth a read. How to lose a day off of your annual permit.
As always, the DPRs omit the vital information such as the specification of the machines. If these documents were better written, and included all of the salient information, there would be fewer Freedom of Information requests.
The DPR though does say that it is the GLA wants to rent the machines; this is not Barnet Council's choice. Mr Mustard wondered if renting was the most economically advantageous way of doing this. He obtained the specification.
HP Desktop DC7900 SFF PC, 2Ghz Dual Core Processor, 4Gb Ram, 80Gb Hard Disk Drive, DVD Rom Drive, 10/100 Network Card, 19" TFT Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, Win XP, SP3
Mr Mustard isn't quite as old as the first ever computer but did buy an IBM PC/XT which came out in 1983. It probably had 128kb ( not Mb ) of memory and a 10mb hard disk. Wow.
I used to be all floppy but I'm hard now.
So having been around for so long Mr Mustard thought that the rental cost of £2,700 for 25 machines with a 10 year old operating system was perhaps a bit steep. They are £108 each + vat.
Mr Mustard buys some kit from Morgan Computers and they have supplied good value kit and been efficient and honest in their dealings. They email Mr Mustard now and then and today they emailed him the following offer.
OK so it is slightly slower at 1.86ghz and only has 1gb of RAM not 4gb, but the machines are to run XP with and that only needs 128mb of RAM. The hard disk is the same size, there is network capability and the screen is only 17" not 19" although Mr Mustard prefers the proportions of the 17" screen he currently uses to the 20" one he uses on the server which makes pictures of people shorter and fatter (not a good look).
Look at the price though. £99.96 + vat with a 3 month warranty.
Morgan also have a 4gb version for £141.63 + vat and a 2gb version at £116.63 + vat.
Basically there is very little price difference between renting and buying. What should the GLA do?
They should buy machines and give them to charities afterwards. The GLA are missing a trick here.
Can you have a word Robert do you think and suggest this. Mr Mustard doesn't even mind if you claim it as your own idea or just fail to mention that it is his; he would just prefer to see charities get the benefit.
There is one very interesting paragraph. Para 8.1 which admits, in effect, that the Barnet Craptops (a technical term) are worse than useless.
stop following Barnet FC and follow Bangalore Hockey Club (just in case)
You have had a few days to read the presentation that was
made to managers about the Revenues and Benefits restructure. The department is
more commonly known as Revs & Bens and it could be shortened to R&B which
is Rhythm & Blues. The department certainly has the blues for the moment.
Mr Mustard also has them as writing this dull blog has depressed him on a wet
bank holiday.
The headline is that 167 posts will become 126 but as this
is Barnet Council we are talking about, the picture is more complicated than that.
Some of the lost posts will reappear in the Customer Contact Centre (does that
sound like a call centre to you). 13 staff will become Revenue Officers i.e.
they collect the council tax monies in and 8 will become Customer Care Officers
who will conduct interviews at Burnt Oak (library) and Barnet House (there are already 8 officers at Burnt Oak). Mr Mustard
thinks that just these two locations is not enough. If the people who are
claiming are on benefits then the council should go to the claimant and not the
other way around. At least with face to face interviews for every claimant it
might be possible to avoid some of the worst frauds where a claimant changes
his/her name and applies for benefits for different properties as the staff
will hopefully be possessed of good memories for faces.
Customer Contact Centres are ghastly places
Many of the current posts are filled by temporary staff.
This is the result of a bad policy decision taken aeons ago to manage the
council with lots of temps so that less people had to be made redundant once
the outsourcing got under way.
Insufficient consideration was given to the in-built inefficiencies of
this approach due to lack of council knowledge and the effect on team building.
Mr Mustard has seen other documents that are contradictory.
24 managers have received "your job is at risk" letters, closely
shepherded around the office by Robert Burns of HR (whether as guard dog or
puppy dog no-one knew. Is Rabbie a Town Hall Tax Dodger? - details in
confidence to mrmustard@zoho.com) and yet the faux-Consultation Paper
says there will be an increase of 10.7 in the staff numbers in the Chief
Executive's department. All very hard to follow, as usual.
The man allegedly in charge of customer services is Bill
Murphy (fresh from his library closure antics) and it looks like he is what
Eric Pickles would call a "Town Hall Tax Dodger" as he is paid via
Hays and Murphy's Solutions Ltd and so it is hilariously ironic that he will
have responsibility for staff who are collecting Council Tax when he is
side-stepping PAYE. He is clearly an employee and simply should pay PAYE.
Looking at slide no. 5 (could we have numbered slides next
time please Barnet Council) you can see the idea that customer contact can be
split into 4 levels, 3 of which will be dealt with in Customer Services. Where
does one draw the line between the levels. A consultant will have to spend days
at £hundreds per day setting out clear rules for this because customer services
will be out-sourced and they will be trying to avoid doing the work of Revs
& Bens which will also be outsourced as part of Revs & Bens and unless
Capita hit the bullseye twice, the contractors will be different. It is always
hard to pick out the one most stupid One Barnet decision (apart from itself)
but having 4 graduated levels of queries could only be dreamt up by a consultant
with no practical experience. At present no customer is left without an answer;
if you ring up and ask an employee who doesn't know the answer they can find someone who
does to talk to you. This will not happen in the future; you will have to be called back. A
better service? No. Less money? No.
Oh no, slide 8, IVR is coming. Mr Mustard just changed phone
supplier and was treated to a closed loop IVR system. What is IVR? It is
interactive voice response. It is bloody frustrating, that is what it is. The
loop he got stuck in was press 1 to set up a personal voicemail message (no
thanks) or press 2 to listen to your messages. He kept on pressing 2 to be
presented with the same 2 choices every time. In the end he had to ring and
speak to a person, after he had been through 6 levels of choices, and a real
live person fixed the problem.
Even worse are the systems where one has to speak your
choices, like Aviva car insurance. "Put me through to a bleep bleep
person" has not yet worked; saying "help" did, if memory serves
correctly. When Mr Mustard finds out what key to press to bypass all the Barnet
Council options and get you talking to a real live human being, he will tell
you.
What bunkum is this on slide 12. There will be
"Creation of new opportunities at Officer level". How will that be
the case when the number of posts is going down or is it that 20 posts will be
deleted and 5 news ones will be created so that is 5 opportunities? It looks
like sleight of hand to Mr Mustard.
Slide 13. Mock, sorry, MOC criteria. Whatever are they? The
acronym stands for "Managing Organisational Change". So whether you
are going to be assimilated (kept) or not assimilated (made redundant) it is
possible that this may be done on the desktop (Mr Mustard has cast his mind
back to two employees in HR at a former workplace who got caught on the desktop
one night - hard at it, so to speak - he doesn't suppose the selection is done
that way - natural selection? ) and one supposes in secret. This means that if
you have upset the scorer in the past you may, by some bit of bad luck, be out
of a job.
desktop selection (naturally)
Slide 14. What does this proposal mean for the Management
team? Simple, you're fired.
No management resource will be transferred to the CSO; therefore,
they won't have a clue as the incumbent managers will almost certainly be
generalists who will need a crash course in Revenues & Benefits which will
lead to them knowing a 10th of what their underlings know. An
earlier draft of the plan did have senior staff moving from R&B to NSCSO
but some "genius" changed that.
Slide 15. What does this mean for Officer-level staff? As
you were. Carry on doing the work but don't get too comfy as when the time to
outsource comes the NSL type please move to Croydon game will start all over
again.
Slide 17. END. It looks like it for R&B management.
Now it was back at the meet the bidder stage that things
were interesting.
During the Capita presentations HR were all over them and
Capita fell short on answering the location question and this set the staff
against them. Capita don't need the managers as they have their own existing
teams in Bromley (nowhere near Barnet) and so can cope with the new slimmed
down structure although they will probably have to beef it back up a bit.
At the BT sessions Jennifer Burt of HR left them to it and
BT answered the location question ( at least 2 years in Barnet ) and so are the
staff's first choice. Also as BT have no experience in this field and so would
most likely want to keep all the managers so that they could learn from them.
Have either party been told of the massive changes being
made to the team just before outsourcing? Only "broadly speaking"
which means something like "I might have mentioned it to the bidders one
Friday afternoon in the pub after 4 pints and they probably won't
remember".
Now Mr Mustard is quite a big user of R&B as he usually
has a house under refurbishment and so is claiming for rebuilding relief or
empty property relief and is always taking over or selling a property. He has
been impressed by the speed with which the council find out about his
properties and bill him (he always plans to tell them within 30 days but they
get to him first) and the accuracy that they always exhibit. This department is
not one to mess about with as there is only about 1.5 % of upside and 98.5% of
downside; it is a stable department and if these sudden wholesale management
changes destabilise the service it will not be easy to reverse them as the
management will have moved to other employers or started their own businesses
(you could become Revs and Bens consultants at £850 a day and not work on
Fridays and don't forget to take your glasses off for photographs - you can
walk the walk and any old fool can talk the talk?).
