Councillor Mike Freer is trying to make a name for himself as a Council Leader by championing an initiatve called "Future Shape of the Council". As he fancies himself as a right wing Thatcherite, you've probably guessed that this involves much ideological mumbo jumbo.
In lay mans terms, his plan is to Privatise everything he can. If the Council runs a call centre for residents, let the cheapest provider take the function over, they may not know where Barnet is, but it'll save a few bob. Now most people don't call the council for a chat or to discuss the price of plums. They call because something has gone wrong. They call because there is a serious problem. When you need your council to help you, you will be speaking to someone, who "cheapness" was THE PRIME FACTOR in their selection.
If you could pick anything the council does and select the thing where quality of service was the most important factor, what would it be? I thought long and hard about this and given that Mike Freer is planning to outsource the lot, drawing up major contracts, I would say legal services. Barnet has already had experience of what happens with shoddy contracts. Barnet Council's sale of Underhill suffered from a badly drawn up contract. The result? A £1 Million bill for lawyers and accountants during a protracted inquiry. That was just the expense of the case, the actual loss to the taxpayer is many times that. Another example is the outsourcing of care homes to Fremantle. This has resulted in multi million pound claims against the council. The reason? Badly drawn up contracts.
You would think they'd learn, wouldn't you? You'd think they'd realise that when you are dealing with complex legal issues, you need the best lawyers. Has Mike Freer learned?
Well today the following cabinet report was brought to my attention Appointment of Panel of Legal Advisors. The reason for this report (drawn up at huge expense)?
3.2 The service provided by the in-house Legal Service is in high demand to deliver on theSo there is a tacit admission that privatisation requires huge legal expenses. When the council decided to select lawyers, what criteria did they consider important and how much importance did they associate with each.
Council’s priorities. Moving to the Council’s ‘Future Shape’ will involve additional and
extensive legal input.
APPENDIX A – “Successful ‘Tenderers’ Scores
Organisation Authority Comment(s)
Price Score 55% Quality Evaluation Score 30% References Score 10% Overall Tender Quality Score 5%
Total 100%
There it is, in black and white. The Council ascribes a 55% importance to the cost and a 5% importance to the OVERALL TENDER QUALITY. If quality is so unimportant when choosing lawyers, who draw up the contracts, how can anyone believe that Mike Freer's baby, FUTURE SHAPE will ever really work or save money.
So I ask you this - Do you really believe that a leader who has so little regard for quality, really has what it takes to lead the 9th largest authority in the Country. Reading this report explained one thing though. I now understand why we've lost money in Iceland, the Aerodrome Road project has overrun, we wasted a million on equirys into Underhill.
It's because the Council, from the very top, has scant regard for attention to detail. As far as I'm concerned, if I was looking for Lawyers and I went through a tender process and a firm submitted a Tender where the "overall tender quality" was rubbish, that Tender would go straight in the bin, no matter how cheap and cheerful it was. Believe me, if the Council really pay as scant regard to quality as this document implies, the Icelandic experience is just the tip of a huge Iceburg, one which we will all pay for (except those lucky Councillors such as Mike Freer who are hoping to move to Westminster next year).
Mike may think he's the King of the Jungle. Truth is though, he's out of his depth !
Rog
ReplyDeleteThis is a shocking indictment of how badly the council is run but you could replace the name “Barnet” with any other council and the story would be the same.
The people who devised the selection criteria are cosseted public sector workers, most of whom wouldn’t last 5 minutes in the private sector. They don’t want outsourcing to succeed because if it did, it would prove that they could be made redundant.
Of course cost is an important consideration, but to factor it higher than quality is just absurd and your article proves that, like Gordon Brown, Mike Freer has no control of the events around him.
As a different example, look at the £31,000 the council is spending on a room booking system which could be purchased for £2,000 (perhaps even less). The assessment for that project was page after page of gobbledegook. All designed to keep unproductive officers in non jobs. One of my readers spent two minutes on Google coming up with a better solution than the council's
Freer talks the talk about bringing private sector discipline to the council, but by his actions he has shown himself incapable of walking the walk.