Stormy April skies over Barnet

April skies over Mill Hill last night

Whilst the skies are stormy, there is another storm brewing in the Borough. It is one which concerns our library service. The Boroughs library system crashed in early March. There is a rather misleading report in the Hendon Times which claims the system is fixed, but then explains that it isn't. What is even more interesting is that there is an anonymous troll leaving rather puerile commets aimed at irritating Mrs Angry.

There are a few patchy details on the Council website in a press release updated today. The system is provided by Capita. When the big outsourcing deal was struck, we were promised better services. It seems to me that an IT fault that takes over a month to fix is not an indicator of good service, but hey what do I know.

There is an election next month for a plum job at the GLA. The winner will get a hefty £50,000 a year for a non job. The architect of the whole library fiasco is Dan Thomas is the Conservative Candidate. Strangely we've not heard a peep out of him on the subject. So it falls to us bloggers to remind the voters. There are many stormy clouds over Barnet at the moment. wouldn't it be sad if it rained on Dan Thomas and his record of bad putsourcing deals and destruction of the libnary services (for those of you that don't know the job of the GLA is to scrutinise the mayor, whatever that means).

I for one would like to see Mr Thomas show that he's fit for the (non) job. As the job is one of a scrutineer, maybe a bit of scrutiny of what Capita are up to (with Barnet Taxpayers money) would be a great place to start. Taking a bit of responsibility would also be nice. Of course if you want someone to get a £50 grand a year job for doing the square root of absolutely F... all, then Dan is an excellent choice.