Bork Update - Voted Conservative in Barnet - Is this what you expected from them?

It's less than a month since the Tories won Barnet Council. Was this in their manifesto?

http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/8199423.New_jobs_worth___300k_created_by_council/

It seems that Barnet Council thinks that the best way to spend £300,000 of your money in these times of hardship is on more managers. The jobs :-

Assistant director of strategic finance job, which boasts a salary of £110,000
Assistant director of financial services  for £90,000-a-year
Audit and risk management assistant directorship for £90,000

Why does a London Borough need an assistant director of Strategic finance? What does it entail? “management of the corporate business planning process” and managing the council's “transformation programme”. Given that if that's an assistant post, there's two people getting huge salaries doing this (at least). The spec contains the following rather alarming statement - "A sophisticated finance function is critical. We need to be creative, enabling, with balanced risk taking, whilst maintaining robust stewardship of increasingly tight resources. We need people who can create new models, for types of organisation and partnership forms that don’t yet exist anywhere else." In other words, us, the Barnet Council Taxpayer are the guinea pigs. What usually happens when the public sector tries to set things up from scratch?

Assistant Director of financial Services? “creating a high performing culture that drives improvement and efficiency savings”. Again there's at least two of them, as this is for an assistant. The spec goes on "An understanding of local government finance and current best practice is essential, ideally with experience of dealing with a financial services provider." So ideally an assisatant director of financial services should have experience of dealing with a financial services provider (that's a bank in English).


The Audits and risk manangement assistant Director? They will be “essential to meet the challenges to come”. The Spec goes on "With the ability to analyse complex information and issues, and the inter-personal skills to convince your colleagues, you will offer extensive audit and risk management knowledge and experience, preferably gained within a local authority context." Let's get this right. They think the person, on £90,000 per annum should have the "inter-presonal skills to convince your colleagues". This person is managing risks. This is crap, all they need to have is the skills to say "do that and you'll get the sack".



I've got a better idea. Why doesn't the council stop inventing highly paid jobs, which they've never required before. The descriptions are written in gobbledygook and are packed with phrases from the Borking manual. By the time of the next election, this mob will have cost over a million pounds. Would the people of Barnet be any wiser or wealthier if they weren't appointed.

I just hope some of our local Mill Hill Tories, John Hart, Brian Schama and Sury Khatri have a bit of sense and rebel against this profligacy. Now is not the time to start inventing jobs. I wonder how long it will be before these assistant managers need assistants to deal with all the Bork they create