Phil Fletcher's letter to the Standard

Phil Fletcher, who is standing as a green party candidate in High Barnet, sent this letter to the Standard. They printed some of it so if you want the rest, here it is:

To the Editor,

For those who think the Green Party is the Party of the tree huggers, it may be a surprise that we are in favour of free parking, and rather longer than the 30 minutes proposed by some other parties.

At any rate enough time to visit several (hopefully independent) shops in peace thus supporting you local high street and not having to eventually make several trips for top-up shopping.

If our high streets die, then the alternative would be to jump into your car to the nearest shopping mall, perhaps Brent Cross, joining others stuck in a traffic jam on the way.

Or, at some time in the future, getting lost in the Spaghetti Junction, part of the latest Brent Cross plans , to be built on the intersection of Edgware Road and the A406.

Incidentally, when these plans were passed earlier this year, none of the conservative members of the planning committee had any questions!

Of course, we Greens think negative effects of motor traffic are a blight on our society.
London’s air pollution is the highest of any other European capital city. Traffic congestion makes it difficult simply to move from A to B.

A large number of car trips are under 2 miles, so any initiatives to encourage one to use alternative means of transport, such as walking or cycling are to be welcomed.

A 20 mph speed limit in residential areas would discourage rat runs.

The results would be to free up road space for those who really have to drive for perfectly valid reasons.

Kind Regards

Phil Fletcher

Phil is a familiar sight on his bicycle around High Barnet & Finchley. If Mr Mustard overtakes him in the blogger bus (a van), he usually stops and throws the bike into the back and Phil into the front, and drops him where he is going. The hills of Barnet are pretty tough.

Green Party Business

NSL employ a rotten liar

A lyre, not a liar

Mr Mustard has been a debt collector since 1987. Thus, he usually knows when he is being lied to. It was therefore a foolish NSL employee who decided to tell Mr Mustard an absolute whopper.

Here is how the exchange went:

27 Nov 13: PCN issued to car.

12 Dec 13: Mr Mustard is introduced to the motorist. We are already out of time for the 50% discount so might as well fight to the bitter end.

30 Dec 13: Notice to Owner issued.

3 Jan 14: Mr Mustard files the formal representations. He includes the following:

I have a copy of the contract between NSL and Barnet Council. For a code 19 PCN the contract stipulates an observation time of 3 minutes which has not been adhered to so this PCN has been issued in breach of contract and is ultra vires. I further note the use of the "z" suffix for an expired permit but Mr G. hasn't had a permit at this address.

20 Jan 14; NSL, on behalf of Barnet Council, reject the formal representations and include the following:

It has been stated that the observation period given before issuing this notice is insufficient according to the contract between NSL and Barnet Council; however as with all contracts they are subject to amendments from time to time and contravention 19(z) is now an instant contravention meaning no observation period is required prior to issuing a notice.

Mr Mustard's nose twitched when his client sent the response on to him.

3 Feb 14: Mr Mustard filed an Appeal at PATAS.

9 Feb 14: Mr Mustard sent the doubtful response to the parking manager.

11 Feb 14: Mr Mustard saw the parking manager at a committee meeting. He was then told that no contract changes had been made since the contract started and an apology was on its way from NSL. The parking manager seemed not to be amused.

11 Feb 14: NSL write on behalf of Barnet Council to the motorist and say the PCN has been cancelled due to insufficient observation. They don't write to the representative, Mr Mustard, and apologise for insufficient truthfullness. The apology is not sent by the dirty rotten liar themselves.

26 Feb 14: The PATAS Appeal is dismissed as the council has thrown in the towel. The council are £40 down in fees.

12 May 14: Mr Mustard decides that NSL have no honour and that a proper apology will not arrive. He decides it is high time that the world knew what outsourcing means, it means that you have no real control of the outsourced process and that at least one employee (Mr Mustard knows who you are; you have had your one bite and will remain anonymous for now) of NSL will stop at nothing to deny a genuine reason for cancellation of a PCN.

This is why you don't stop when your first and second challenges get rejected and you stick with the process and Appeal to PATAS where you will get an inpartial hearing.

Why do parking contractors have no manners?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Note: The Parking Enforcement Contract which started on 1 May 12 for a 5 year period with a possible 2 year extension (if that idea hasn't already been squashed then we are managed by fools) is one of the earliest of the first wave of One Barnet contracts (and the sooner we wave goodbye to it the better) and this disgusting event just goes to prove Mr Mustard's point that outsourcing is not the answer to all your problems (Barnet cabinet councillors please take note) but simply removes some and replaces them with others. The big problem that you inherit is managing at a distance. If this had been a council employee writing to Mr Mustard such a stupid and blatant lie would not have been attempted as direct employees would know that sometimes the manager's phone will ring and Mr Mustard is on the line and sometimes Mr Mustard's home phone rings and a parking manager is on the line.

One Barnet isn't working.

No NtO

vital steps to reach the top

The Notice to Owner (NtO) is a vital document for a vehicle owner as it tells them a PCN has been issued which they may not know about because:

• the traffic warden photographed it on the windscreen and then removed it so you can't get the 50% discount
• someone else was driving and didn't tell you they got a PCN
• it was dark and raining and the PCN was slipped under the wipers and went flying when you used the wipers
• a schoolkid took the PCN for a laugh or a dare

If you don't respond to the PCN by paying it or contesting it, the cost of the PCN rises by 50% and you then have to wait somewhat nervously for the next document to arrive, the Order for Recovery so that you can file a witness statement at Court and go back to the beginning. You could be on a holiday of a lifetime whilst this happens and your car ends up seized by a bailiff.

The minutes of a meeting between NSL and Barnet Council "thin client" representatives has the following "Issue" (how Mr Mustard hates that word, this "issue" is a blunder, an error, a problem or some such other more accurate word) recorded at 16 January 2013

Issue: Failure of NtO issue.

Description: Audit screen in CE (the parking enforcement software) states NtO printed & posted on 17/08/2012, however correspondence screen states NtO failed to process. Customer states NtO not received, only CC (Charge Certificate) received in the post. Conflicting information within CE system. Example case AG########.

Action: Logged with Civica 16/01/2013 under support call ######. Awaiting update.

So there you have it. There has been a problem with a document that is vital to the legal processing of PCNs, not being issued, which should lead an honest council to stop what they are doing and undertake an audit of the system to see how many PCN were affected and cancel those PCN. Did they? Mr Mustard very much doubts it.

Mr Mustard turned to the minutes of 8 February 13. He couldn't find a mention of the NtO problem.

At the next meeting on 10 April 13 there is an item about "Civica issues" but no detail as to whether this includes the NtO printing problem. The action was to arrange a meeting so the problem certainly wasn't solved if it was included.

The meeting of 20 May 13 did note various failures to issue statutory notices (like the NtO) which had been going on since June 12 and were still ongoing at April 13 but didn't specifically mention this problem.

At the next meeting on 10 July 13 and the one after that of 10 September 13 (which was only about Key Performance Indicators) and the one of 8 October 13 and of 29 November 13 there was no mention of this NtO printing problem. PATAS accept a council report which says that a Notice has been printed and posted at face value so the independent adjudicator may have made some decisions on a false premise.

Maybe the problem was confined to just 2 or 3 PCN or maybe it affected 10,000 but given the poor minutes of meetings (which internal Audit have commented upon when they audited contract management as opposed to processing) we don't know. Mr Mustard will be sure to ask the parking manager next time he sees him.

Mr Mustard's experience of parking departments generally (and he has dealt with a few in London) is that they lack decency, good manners and honesty (excluding the two Barnet parking managers he deals with most weeks). They have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a moral and legal position.

Until revenue raising is not at the heart of the local authority parking operation, this situation is unlikely to change.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

p.s. The software has now been changed from Civica CE to ICES so this problem will have gone away. Some other problem will have replaced it, most probably.

Hold on a minute

Each month or so the Barnet Council parking department thin client side has a meeting with NSL, the enforcement contractor. The Internal Audit department has recently criticised the minutes as being insufficiently detailed, a view with which Mr Mustard concurs. He did wonder if it was because of him that the minutes were left a bit vague as he would pick up all the processing errors from the minutes and use them to get Appeals granted.

Mr Mustard has never thought that having a "thin" client side was a good idea. If you have a contractor you need to monitor them closely as otherwise it is possible they will take the wotsit and not perform in accordance with the contract.

NSL's performance at PATAS, the Parking & Traffic Appeals Services, has been lamentable at best and hilarious at worst and one adjudicator has simply said to Mr Mustard, after he gave one of their Evidence Packs a going over that led to a rapid cancellation of the PCN, "well, that is typical Barnet for you". Mr Mustard also sees Evidence Packs and the processing skills of other boroughs and NSL Barnet are certainly in the relegation play-offs.

In the pack of minutes for 2013 which Mr Mustard asked for in one of his nowadays rare Freedom of Information requests (only one official request this year with some other PCN representations wrongly being turned into FOI) was the following page which supposedly shows an average performance at PATAS (as your first argument in response to a PCN is an informal Challenge, the second in response to the Notice to Owner are your formal Representations and finally your third bite at the cherry is your Appeal to an adjudicator at PATAS).

If these statistics were correct this would be an acceptable level of performance.

DNC means Do not Contest and is when, even though the council might have turned down your informal challenge and your formal representations once they know that an independent adjudicator is going to look at the case that they think they will lose (or they have too many cases to prepare) and throw in the towel. What this tells you is that persistence pays. When the council tell you you were in the wrong, it doesn't mean that you were.The average London-wide DNC rate is 20% with the City topping the table at 40% and Enfield only giving up 7% of the time ( figures from 2012-13).

The won  / lost numbers are usually about the same so well done NSL, but 

Mr Mustard doesn't, based on many years of experience, trust statistics which help the party who produced them so he checked two days at random. Here is 17 December 12:

There were only 10 cases decided that day, not 24. Mr Mustard thought that was odd, so he checked another day, the 10 January 13, and here from the PATAS website, are the real numbers:

Mr Mustard sees nine Allowed Appeals (i.e. nine PCN were cancelled) and none were refused. Where those seven Refused Appeals got to that NSL are claiming is anybody's guess.

Mr Mustard thinks that the newly appointed Parking Manager will be looking much more closely at statistics from NSL from now on, especially as Mr Mustard will be looking over his shoulder at them. Mr Mustard does hope that no KPI payments were based upon false statistics.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

N.B. It is possible that Mr Mustard has got hold of the wrong end of the stick and that the date column when used by NSL is the date that they were notified of an Appeal and what the eventual outcome was (which would all be on differing dates) although those are much harder statistics to track.

£16.1m Capita hardware investment - partly solved now

Mr Mustard works from home and so many neighbours have their parcels delivered to Mustard Mansions. Delivery drivers and the postman are so well acquainted with Mustard Mansions that they also go straight to Mr Mustard if a signature is needed and the intended recipient is out. So it was no surprise yesterday when, after having already delivered Mr Mustard's post (which included a PCN evidence pack of 100 pages that was in a cheap standard weight envelope that was splitting, come on NSL you could spend a few pounds on reinforced envelopes) the postman knocked 2 minutes later and Mr Mustard signed for an envelope that was post-marked Coventry. Ah, said Mr Mustard, that will be parking vouchers or a permit; I wondered, said the postman, as there are lots of them today. Perhaps Capita have now started to work through the backlog of permit applications.

Having paid Capita the substantial sum of £16.1m for investment in computer hardware the least we can expect is state of the art permit / voucher software and a same day turnaround? You would think so but Mr Mustard can reveal that the capital investment that has been made in the permit system, and he had to sneak into the Coventry office of Capita to get this exclusive photograph, is this:

The price of biros has evidently increased markedly.

Mr Mustard really did expect more for his £16.1m

Here is part of the address (mustn't breach the neighbour's data rights)

There isn't, of course, a Camarvon Rd in the London Borough of Barnet or even in the country, the road is called Carnarvon Rd. A local employee would probably have known this, a Coventry based one won't and this is part of what you lose when you deal with somewhere 100 miles away (Mr Mustard has nothing against Coventry per se but would prefer to retain local employment and knowledge).

We might be within the London Borough of Barnet and have an outer London phone number but we have an Enfield postcode and Hertfordshire is our postal county so to write London on this envelope was just plain wrong.

I can't show you the name but that had a single letter where a double was required.

So, a mere 3 errors in 4 lines. Remind Mr Mustard why Private Eye call Capita "Crapita".

Finally, Mr Mustard may not be being entirely fair. Maybe we did get more for our money than this lousy biro, 

maybe we got 2.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

That £16.1m "investment" by Capita

Some stories never go away. Readers will recall that one of the (completely bogus) justifications for entering into the out-sourcing deal with Capita was that the council couldn't afford the upfront investment that Capita were going to make. Seemingly 10 minutes later (on 5 August 13) when the ink was still drying on the contract a cheque for £16.1m (it would have been a BACS payment but let's not be picky) was handed to Capita by the council to fund the investment.

One of our finer citizens, John Sullivan, has been mulling this over as he claims not to understand finance but he does know when he's been shafted and he has made an excellent protest song on the subject, and here it is:

A great voice that John has.

Whilst on the subject, has anyone seen the fruits of this £16.1m? Certainly it hasn't been spent on a new switchboard as that was broken last week, nor on upgrading the well out of date SWIFT & Wisdom (lack of) software in Adults & Communities which store client records and documentation on currently well out of date platforms (physical computer equipment) as that took a kicking at last week's Audit Committee.

Has anyone got a list of what the £16.1m has been spent on? 

(It is probably impossible to find out without the council's help as the over £500 spending list does not contain any really useful details, and Capita's contract is mainly based upon providing outcomes rather than inputs, and so it is mostly up to Capita to decide what to spend the loot on and they could be spending it on systems which serve more than one client and thus it is their spend and not the council's. Outsourcing leads to less openness and transparency).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard