Yet another Capita Cock Up damages Barnet Council's reputation and costs taxpayers money

Last night, the Barnet Eye, along with fellow bloggers Mr Reasonable and Mrs Angry attended the Audit committee meeting at Hendon Town Hall. The meeting was scheduled to discuss the annual audit of the Council business. It was a long meeting. The Audit committee is a rather dry committee and reviews of the Council accounts are serious matters. This was reflected by the number of questions submitted by members of the public (The full set of papers and an audio recording are available here).

I had submitted three questions on the subject of commercial waste collection and two on water safety. I asked two supplimentals (I wanted to ask a third about the water safety issues but the volume of questions meant that this was not possible).  The second supplimental question, asked in response to the answer to question eleven was "The question I asked was in relation to Performance Monitoring Issues, specifically mentioned in the papers and included in the question. The answer does not reference these at all. Please can you detail specifically what has been done to mitigate these issues". For once, I got a completely honest and sensible answer. It was "Sorry, we don't know". The chair complimented me on my question and suggested that this was the type of question bloggers should ask.

He hadn't appreciated the previous question from naughty Mrs Angry, who had asked him whether he took responsibility for the cock ups and was going to resign for being useless. The Public gallery took a different view

My suggestion that if the Chair didn't like taking responsibility, he might like to resign was well received in the public seats.

— Theresa Musgrove (@BrokenBarnet) July 17, 2018

 I was a tad disappointed with Councillor Finn. For a long standing politician, he missed a golden chance to say "This is my first meeting as chair so it's not my fault. It was all down to the former Chair Hugh Rayner and he did sling his hook, so surely you should be happy". In his final meeting as chair of Audit, Hugh said that the committee was not up to the job and required proper training and experienced councillors. You may be interested to note that the Barnet Tory regime completely ignored his advice. The two latest Tory members to this committee are Laithe Jajeh (pronounced "Zsa Zsa" as he rather narkedly told Cllr Finn). The two departing members were Cllr Rayner and Cllr Khatri, both of whom who had eight years experience, both of these councillors had proven to be sensible, pragmatic and suitably cynical about what they were being told, to earn the respect of bloggers and the public. For his diligence, Councillor Khatri was deselected by the Tories. As for Hugh Rayner, there is an ongoing "did he jump or was he pushed" debate. He seems to be enjoying himself a bit more these days, so I suspect that either way, he's not too sad to be out of the firing line.

Once the fun of public questions had died down, it was onto the long slog of ploughing through the audit. Nearly an hour of scrutiny prompted me to tweet the following

Given the seriousness of the findings in @BarnetCouncil audit, I am disappointed that after nearly one hour, not a single member of the @BarnetTories contingent have asked a single question #scrutiny @Laithe_Jajeh @pzinkin why so quiet chaps?

— Roger Tichborne/RogT #CTID (@Barneteye) July 17, 2018

Mr Reasonable was less than impressed by the sorry tale of woe from the head of internal audit

Head of Internal Audit speaking. A sorry tale of declining performance over the last year.

— Mr Reasonable (@ReasonableNB) July 17, 2018

On we ploughed. The Labour members making a reasonable stab at trying to clarify the myriad of issues that an audit which was significantly worse than last years might justify. Eventually we had a couple of less than searching questions from a few of the Tory members. I have no idea why they are so acquiescent. They really should realise that if they want to run a successful administration, they need to take scrutiny seriously. Simply nodding and agreeing with officers and the man from Capita has landed the council in a complete mess. It is telling that in Barnet, the most serious questioning and scrutiny comes from bloggers and activists, as demonstrated by the public questions (all 36 of them).

I have long advocated that Mr Reasonable, AKA John Dix should be co-opted as an independent member onto Audit. John reads the papers and formulates the right questions to ask. Any sane and rational administration would have done this years ago. I genuinely have no idea why they haven't. If they had, it is perhaps possible that One Barnet may even have worked and saved money. At one stage, Councillor Finn started to rant about the hundred and sixteen million pounds that Capita had saved. He clearly hasn't been doing his homework. John Dix has comprehensively destroyed this contention, using the council's own figures.

Then we got to the part where the external, independent auditors give their presentation of the audit. More or less as soon as it started, the auditors dropped a bombshell. The Pension fund audit was going to miss it's filing deadline. I filmed the moment for posterity (apologies for the shaky mobile phone footage). Note the gasps when the bombshell is dropped.


So the obvious question to ask was "who is to blame". The Auditor pulled no punches.




The auditor spelled out that the problem was fairly and squarely down to Capita. The auditor also spelled out that there would be additional costs associated with the extra work caused by the latest issues with Capita. This is not the first time that Capita have caused audits to be late. Capita have been virtually running the council for five years. They were brought in to save money and to give better service. As Mr Reasonable discovered, they don't save money and as the auditors have revealed, the service is worse. The council has no control of it's own business.

It is time to take back control and Kick Out Capita. Join our campaign now. It is clear that the One Barnet experiment is not working.