Dear Roger,
On Monday, Cabinet will be voting to proceed with privatisation of the Council's Development and Regulatory Services. To you and me, it is Planning, Environmental Health, Building Control, Land Charges, Cemeteries and Crematoria, Highways, Regeneration, Trading Standards.
I am a member of staff in this bundle of services.
The process to get there has been a total joke. The project team has refused to involve staff and trade unions. Like most Future Shape / One Barnet projects, the published documents are a real insult to staff's intelligence and residents. The report to Cabinet is based on assumptions and clearly driven by ideology rather than facts. Staff in those services are really worried about their jobs and the services that residents will receive in the future if our departments are privatised.
Some of those services are amongst the most efficient in London and provide very good value for money. Staff are dedicated and understand that cuts will have to be made but also want to ensure that they are done in a way that will not affect the quality of the service to residents. Residents and the democratic accountability of decisions are totally ignored by the project team and this has to be exposed.
Last month 80+ staff stormed out of a staff meeting when our Director, Stewart Murray, refused to answer reasonable questions from a Union official.
On Monday, staff from those departments will be outside the Town Hall to protest against the proposed privatisation. We will be presenting Cabinet with a petition endorsed by a huge majority of staff.
I read your blog daily (as do a lot of my colleagues!) and I would be grateful if you could help staff in the affected services by publicising the protest and expose the Council's mad rush towards privatisation at all costs! I am sending this message to a couple of other Barnet bloggers.
Many thanks.
All the blogs are up in arms about these things and I would have expected our local newspaper to have led the campaigns......but the silence from the Hendon/Barnet/Mill Hill Times can be heard from all over the Borough of Barnet. I believe that Alex Hayes attended some of the meetings you mentioned Roger - so why isnt he allowed to write and campaign for our local services.
ReplyDeleteIf we dont stand up for our services our area will be decimated. We have very little in any case compared to many other places. At the very least our leading Newspaper should be the rallying point for all of us both in printed press and in the blogosphere.
Hopefully the front page this week will lead with the Libraries petition and the TV coverage that it has now gained.
I have loved the Hendon Times since the late 1980s when they helped me with a campaign to save one of the local schools ( Hendon ) from closure and amalgamation with Whitefield. It seems a shame that 20 years later they have lost their bottle for local issues./