What Barnet Council needs is a bit of DOGE and Elon Musk, not baleouts from Government!

The biggest mistake that inept politicians make is that they cannot accept that people they disagree with have some good ideas. The last thing I am is a fan of Donald Trump, but I have no doubt at all that the creation of the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) will save American taxpayers billions. I say this based on my experience of dealing with the inept bureacracy that is Barnet Council, having written this blog since 2008. It appears to me that much of what DOGE is doing is what the Barnet bloggers spent a decade urging the leaders of Barnet Council to do. Perhaps the greatest victory of the Barnet Bloggers was to force Barnet Council to hold the "Metpro Inquiry" in 2011. This exposed the total failure of Barnet Councils oversight of suppliers. The fallout lead to savings of millions of pounds and tightening of fraud controls etc (You can read about it here). At the time, the convention in the Council was that an opposition councillor chaired this committee, to ensure that a critical eye was passed over the council's business. The chair was LibDem Lord Monroe Palmer. He did a good job and gained the confidence of all. Eric Pickles, then local government secretary congratulated the Barnet bloggers for our efforts exposing waste and potential fraud. What did the Barnet Tories learn from the debacle? Well they learned that they had lost control of the process. They abolished the convention of putting an opposition councillor in charge of audit. This had the added bonus of giving another Tory a healthy fat 'special responsibility allowance'. One of the biggest critics of this change was Labour councillor Arjun Mittra. Sadly, when Labour won, his criticism of the concept of a member the administration running the audit committee disappeared and he copped a nice fat allowance himself. 

Last week, it was announced that Barnet Council were receiving a big fat £55 million baleout from central government to plug the holes in their finances. It may surprise you to learn that Barnet Unison union came up with a plan to slash costs. Here are the key cost saving measures that they have identified.

• Reduce Executive Directors by deleting the following 3 Executive Director roles: Strategy and Innovation; Resources; Assurance and Public Protection. 

• Delete the Deputy Chief Executive role 

• Create one Executive Director role: Corporate Resources. All of the services covered by the deleted Executive Director roles transfer to the newly created Corporate Services Directorate with the exception of Public Protection which should be transferred back into the Environment Directorate as it was before the TUPE transfer to Capita in 2013.

• Greenspaces should be moved from Communities, Adults & Health back into Environment.

 • The Assistant Director (AD) role for Greenspaces and Leisure should become the A.D for Libraries and Leisure.

 • The Senior Management Team (SMT) restructure should incorporate all Heads of Service and Assistant Heads of Services levels of management in order to ensure greater equity in terms of numbers of staff managed by individual managers. 

• The Senior Management Teams (SMT) of The Barnet Group (TBG) and Barnet Education and Learning Service (BELS) are to be included in this restructure to deliver savings, avoid redundancies and making cuts to services.

 • For transparency and accountability Barnet Council should instruct BELS and TBG to publish all salaries over £50K as per the Localism Act 2011 – Openness and accountability in local pay. 

• Save £7.299 million annually by insourcing services thus avoiding the increase in national insurance which has been imposed on the private sector by the Labour Government. 

 • Impose financial penalties on Capita for underperforming of the collection of Council Tax and Business rates. 

 • Conduct an urgent review of the back-office services of TBG and BELS.

 • Use economies of scale to help deal with the increased wage bill 

• Barnet Homes, part of TBG, should be brought back into the Council. 

 • The Housing Service should be merged with the Directorate of Growth to become the Housing & Growth Directorate.

This, to me, looks like some serious cost cutting that Elon Musk would be proud of! The slashing of highly expensive and completely unnesscary management roles and boards seems like a very sensible idea. It also improves transparancy, seeing where taxpayers money is being waste on fat salaries.

The best way to beat your opponents is not to ignore their good ideas. It is to nick the good ideas and make them better. Barnet lead the way in the UK for citizens holding the council to account. We have replaced an inept Tory council with an inept Labour council. You may be tempted to vote Reform. Well, personally I wouldn't bother. They have one councillor in Barnet, who defected from the Tories. Brian Coleman reported "He has an appalling reputation in Barnet . In May he stood for Group Leader and was roundly defeated by his colleagues who recognised that he is known for his lazyness" 

Sury Khatri campaigniong for the Tories

They have also acquired two former Tory Councillors as candidates, one of whom was deselected in 2018 and then endorsed both the Lib Dems and Labour in 2022! Coleman said of him "He was never capable which was why he was deselected in 2018 by Hendon Conservatives"The other was a former Barnet Tory Mayor. Coleman said of her "As for Lisa Rutter she applied to be the Conservative candidate in the Barnet Vale by election in July and was rejected (she is as thick as two short planks) and this is a fit of pique". Now I wouldn't give Brian's views too much credence normally, but these people were all mates of his, not too long ago. It is widely recognised that the Barnet Tories were inept and according to Coleman, the most inept of them are now running as Reform candidates. If you think they will sort Barnet Council out, then you must still believe in Father Christmas. 

Sadly, the UK is unlikely to have a DOGE style authority any time soon. Whatever I think of Musk, the fact that we've got completely inept councils run by people who are useless is something that his approach may sort out. I'd have no problem paying higher salaries to the best people to sort Barnet Council out. Sadly we have a bunch of stuffed shirts who's primary concern is their own wallet. That is why we have litter filled pavements and potholed roads. Every year tax goes up and the Borough deteriorates. I quite like Elon Musk's idea of getting Federal Staff to justify their employment. People like me, who run small businesses don't carry passengers. I see no reason why the taxpayer should. In Barnet, whenever their is cost cutting it is the people who do the work who suffer, whilst the bosses simply put up their own wages. I'd reward the people who do the work, get the fat cats on high salaries to justify their wages and get people who understood what they were doing to run the place. I'd also cut the number of councillors by 1/3rd. In Mill Hill, we have three councillors, one of whom doesn't bother attending. He gets paid £11,000 for the privelidge - Members allowances paid 2023 to 2024 (ODT, 22 KB) -You are paying that. Has anyone in Mill Hill actually noticed his lack of work? Barnet does not need 63 councillors. Council Leader Barry Rawlings said of the bale out "The pressure on our finances has never been greater. As a council, we face an unprecedented crisis in financing our services, driven by a perfect storm of a decade of funding cuts from central government, high interest rates making services more expensive to deliver, and ever-increasing demand for complex and costly services we have a legal duty to provide, such as adults’ and children’s social care and temporary accommodation." -

Cutting 21 councillors would save nearly a quarter of a million quid a year. It may be a small amount in the budget, but it would be there for other services that matter.  It would also show that the political classes are willing to share the pain. But that will never happen without a DOGE style purge and that won't happen in the UK because no one has the balls to actually call out the waste. We have a culture of laziness in public sector management and political leadership. They are happy so long as someone else does the dirty jobs and their wallets bulge.