Bork Update - Voted Conservative in Barnet - Is this what you expected from them?

It's less than a month since the Tories won Barnet Council. Was this in their manifesto?

http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/8199423.New_jobs_worth___300k_created_by_council/

It seems that Barnet Council thinks that the best way to spend £300,000 of your money in these times of hardship is on more managers. The jobs :-

Assistant director of strategic finance job, which boasts a salary of £110,000
Assistant director of financial services  for £90,000-a-year
Audit and risk management assistant directorship for £90,000

Why does a London Borough need an assistant director of Strategic finance? What does it entail? “management of the corporate business planning process” and managing the council's “transformation programme”. Given that if that's an assistant post, there's two people getting huge salaries doing this (at least). The spec contains the following rather alarming statement - "A sophisticated finance function is critical. We need to be creative, enabling, with balanced risk taking, whilst maintaining robust stewardship of increasingly tight resources. We need people who can create new models, for types of organisation and partnership forms that don’t yet exist anywhere else." In other words, us, the Barnet Council Taxpayer are the guinea pigs. What usually happens when the public sector tries to set things up from scratch?

Assistant Director of financial Services? “creating a high performing culture that drives improvement and efficiency savings”. Again there's at least two of them, as this is for an assistant. The spec goes on "An understanding of local government finance and current best practice is essential, ideally with experience of dealing with a financial services provider." So ideally an assisatant director of financial services should have experience of dealing with a financial services provider (that's a bank in English).


The Audits and risk manangement assistant Director? They will be “essential to meet the challenges to come”. The Spec goes on "With the ability to analyse complex information and issues, and the inter-personal skills to convince your colleagues, you will offer extensive audit and risk management knowledge and experience, preferably gained within a local authority context." Let's get this right. They think the person, on £90,000 per annum should have the "inter-presonal skills to convince your colleagues". This person is managing risks. This is crap, all they need to have is the skills to say "do that and you'll get the sack".



I've got a better idea. Why doesn't the council stop inventing highly paid jobs, which they've never required before. The descriptions are written in gobbledygook and are packed with phrases from the Borking manual. By the time of the next election, this mob will have cost over a million pounds. Would the people of Barnet be any wiser or wealthier if they weren't appointed.

I just hope some of our local Mill Hill Tories, John Hart, Brian Schama and Sury Khatri have a bit of sense and rebel against this profligacy. Now is not the time to start inventing jobs. I wonder how long it will be before these assistant managers need assistants to deal with all the Bork they create

The War on BORK - Have you been Borked by a Borker?

I've sort of invented a new meaning for a new word. In fact I've invented two new meanings for two new words. As I sit here filling in endless pointless forms,  I was looking for a word to describe the process of filling in useless paperwork and my google searches delivered me to this site :-

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=borker

In the description of the uses of Borker it gave the folling example of being Borked by a Bork.

The bork insisted that I come to the office to fill out 20 pages of useless paperwork.

Now Borker is a bastardisation (or a misspelling) of Broker according to the Urban dictionary. I however from hereon in deem that a Borker is also someone who makes you perform useless and time consuming tasks, which exist only to make work for other Borkers. To have to fill in such rubbish is to be Borked. The person who forces you into Borking can be called a Borker. The whole genre of useless paperwork is to be known as Bork and doing it is to be known as Borking.

Now not only have I redefined the word Bork, this blog is today officially launching a war on Borking (or performing useless tasks). I humbly ask Nick Walkley - CEO of Barnet Council, Lynne Hillan - Leader of Barnet Council, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and anyone else who is in any position of responsibility in any organisation anywhere in the world to join this crusade.

I urge Everyone, everywhere to write on the bottom of all useless paperwork "This is BORK".

Most new words and phrases dreamed up by the PC brigade are long and complicated. This blog, being run by a dyslexic thicko is going the other direction. All the new words we will use will be short, funny and sound slightly rude. Having said that, if we ended BORK, we'd save millions of trees, completely get rid of the fiscal deficit and have far more time at work to do useful tasks, such as real work, planning our next trip to the pub or daydreaming about being crushed to death between Uma Thurmans thighs.