Guest Blog – Planning to Outsource Planning by Julia Hines

Guest Blog – Planning to Outsource Planning by Julia Hines

The first part of the One Barnet project is to outsource the Planning department. I don’t pretend to be an expert on planning; I am just a middle aged woman who lives in the borough. I am not a member of any union or political party. I don’t work for the council and have never stood for office. This is my personal view.

What do Planning Departments Do?

Put simply, they shape the community in which we live. The Local Development Framework (LDF) will do much more than give guidelines about the size of buildings people want to put up, it is about how we help ensure that everyone lives in walking distance of a shop which sells fresh food (10% of older people living in their own homes suffer from malnutrition); how we design for healthy living, with open spaces and roads which are easy  and safe to cross to encourage exercise and reduce childhood obesity (currently rising in our primary school children), cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, depression and Alzheimers; mitigate climate change (there were 800 excess deaths amongst older people in London as a result of the last heat wave); and making sure that lifetime homes are well insulated, so that no-one has to choose between heating and eating in the future.

Get the design right and you save money in the future on health, social services and supporting the local economy.

Joined up thinking

The Planning department write the strategy, and then they implement it. I think this is helpful. The officers enforcing the plans, making the hundreds of small decisions which ensure the plans are realised, are the same people, who are integrally involved in forming it. They have an investment in the vision. Similarly, the officers writing the plan get feedback from the ground level of officers who deal with residents every day, coming into the department, writing letters of objection or meeting them on site visits. That way they know what is important to residents.

Councillors know the system and the local officers. They have input into both plan & implementation.

I am not clear whether strategy writing and implementation will be separated in outsourcing plans. This is because the One Barnet papers are shrouded in secrecy. If designing the plan is kept in-house bottom up, Big Society knowledge will be lost. If it is outsourced, then discussions with other Council departments will be more complicated, especially if they are outsourced too. I doubt the current system, of planning officers working in area teams, with in-depth knowledge of their patch and the people living there, will be continued.

Whether strategy is kept in-house or not, we will lose an element of joined up thinking and, in particular, I think the voices of the local community will be weakened.

Transparency and accountability

To me, this is crucial. Planning departments make decisions which have financial consequences. I am old enough to remember a time when local authority planning was a byword for corruption.

It is important to recognise that money changes hands in planning decisions, some of it going to Council coffers, through s.106 payments, So, if you build a housing estate you need to give a one off payment because of extra pressure on schools and libraries. If you build it on open space, or on a site which currently has a community building, which is a lost, for example a Church, you have to make a payment to compensate for that loss. The amount is negotiated, although there are guidelines.  

Transparency International UK published, in December 2010, Corruption in the UK – Public Opinion Survey. When they asked people what they thought of the statement “A supermarket obtains planning permission where others have failed” 74.2% of people asked thought this was a possible example of corruption, only 13.5% thought it was not.

Now, do you think those figures will change if the people granting the decision are employed by a private company, call it Company X.

93% of planning decisions in our borough are made under delegated powers. That means that planning officers make the decisions without any input from elected councillors on planning committees.

Because they make these judgements, officers’ terms of employment are very strict. They can be barred from membership of any political party for example. They have to declare any gifts, lunches or hampers they receive. If officers are not directly employed by the Council, can these rigorous standards of behaviour be enforced? If there is no say in the contracts of new employees (or current employees deployed onto council business), how is this possible? If standards are breached, the Council will have no say on the disciplinary implications, because they can’t (without putting both them and the employers at risk of a tribunal).

What about the situation where a planning officer is headhunted from Company X by another company who wants to develop in Barnet? Employment terms restricting where someone can work are very narrow and notoriously difficult to enforce.

Enough about individual officers. I think you get the gist. I do want to say this is about risk and perception; I am definitely not suggesting anyone in the planning department is in any way corrupt.

Obviously, Company X will have to be contractually barred from undertaking any development of its own in the borough. I say that. I hope it is obvious, because, less obviously, I don’t think that has been made clear yet. But what about a situation where the company who wants to develop a site in Barnet is, or might, employ Company X on lucrative business in another part of the country? If more and more Councils outsource in this way, how can separation be guaranteed? If it is guaranteed, will it hamper competition in the future? The Audit Commission suggested that, if this occurred, a different private company or a neighbouring council could make the decision, but where is the accountability, efficiency or cost saving, in that?

Salford Council outsourced its planning department to a joint venture company, in which it retained a stake. The Audit Commission thinks that this deals with the conflict of interest issues which may arise:

http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/localgov/nationalstudies/planningsystem/pages/jointventure_copy.aspx

Barnet are not considering a joint venture, or an in-house bid.

Implementation

Other people, notably blogger Mr Reasonable, Barnet Unison and the council’s own auditors, Grant Thornton, have raised issues of concern about the way the outsourcing project is being researched and implemented.

References are here

http://reasonablenewbarnet.blogspot.com/2011/03/one-barnet-outsourcing-sidestepping.html

and here

http://www.barnetunison.me.uk/sites/default/files/Barnet%20F-Shape%20Analysis.doc_1.pdf

They have covered the fact that alternatives, including joint ventures or in-house bids, have been excluded at a very early stage, which means that the risks cannot be assessed by comparison and that the poor old council tax payer may have to fork out for a judicial review.

Barnet Council’s head of legal has admitted that Barnet does not have the in-house expertise to draw up contracts of this complexity. She told the Cabinet Resources Committee that legal costs of One Barnet cannot be assessed at this stage, but will be a minimum of £500,000. She did not put a ceiling on the figure. Let me say that again, at least £500,000, but she cannot even hazard a guess how much more it might cost. By correlation, it is not clear that they have the in-house expertise to monitor the contract. It is clear, if the Catalyst contract is anything to go by, that if things go wrong, it is difficult and expensive to sort out.

To get a feeling for how complicated the contract might be, the (presumably similar) contract between Balfour Beatty Workplace and North East Lincolnshire Council involves reporting and monitoring of over 100 different targets. If they meet all of them over 10 years, then BBW will be paid £250 million.

http://www.regen.net/inDepth/ByDiscipline/Business/1041956/Done-deal-North-East-Lincolnshire-Council/

Homelessness & community investment are excluded from that contract; I am not sure they will be in Barnet.

Will it save money?

It will cost a lot to set up, it will cost a lot to monitor, it will cost a lot to sort out if there are arguments about whether targets are met, or if the contract has to be renegotiated because changes are needed over the course of the contract. Barnet’s planning department performs well and cost-effectively. Here is Barnet Unison’s view, written for them by Professor Dexter Whitfield.

http://www.barnetunison.me.uk/sites/default/files/Barnet%20CSO-NSOFINAL.pdf

But there is another issue. The planning officers I have dealt with are enormously helpful and hard-working. I have received emails at 10pm on a Saturday night, and from officers who were at home, unwell. I think that this is because there is an ethos of public service. Officers are prepared to put in 15 hour days because they feel they are serving the community, but will they feel so committed to lining the pockets of shareholders? 

And in conclusion

It may be there are ways round these potential problems. I think it is important that the Council talks about these issues, shows us that it recognises them and involves us in discussion about how they are dealt with. But I think I have to leave the final quote to Dr Ben Goldacre, writing in the Guardian on 5 March 2011 on a completely different issue (conflicts of interest between the pharmaceutical industry and its UK regulator).

“There is no a guarantee of a bad outcome here: it's just a risk factor, like driving after three pints, and so we police it.”

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Guest blogs are always welcome at the Barnet Eye. Dr Julia Hines is a local resident and regular reader and commenter on the Barnet Eye