Sorry Barry, us loudmouths don't want a megaphone, we just want reasonable answers to reasonable questions

 I have to say that I was more than disappointed to hear the answer of the new Leader of Barnet Council,  Barry Rawlings to a question I sent into BBC Radio London's Eddie Nestor show, who was being interviewed. Eddie asked for questions.  Eddie posted this tweet

Our #MeetTheLeader series is back

First up is new Labour leader of Barnet Cllr Barry Rawlings

If you have a question
📩 Email Eddie@bbc.co.uk

📻Listen live https://t.co/5wxIKa6FEI @EddieNestorMBE | @BarryJohnRawlin | @BarnetCouncil

⤵️More on Barnet with @susana_mendonca pic.twitter.com/jesTrnNAhq

— BBC Radio London (@BBCRadioLondon) July 6, 2022

I sent this in.

Hi Eddie, I'd like to book a question with Barry Rawlings for the show on Wednesday. In 2018, the then Conservative administration changed the rules regarding questions from the public at council meetings, imposing strict limits on what could be asked and how many questions could be asked, making proper public scrutiny almost impossible. Barry was highly critical of this and lead everyone to believe that a Labour administration would change the rules. They have not done this. Can Barry explain why he's gone back on his word and whether this is due to a desire to restrict scrutiny whilst the Capita one Barnet contract is being reviewed. Regards Rog

I'll post a link back to the interview, which was quite interesting. However, I was deeply disappointed with Barry's answer. He said that he doesn't want to "Give a megaphone to those with already loud voices".  Yes, I have a loud voice, I don't need a megaphone. The reason I sent my question to Eddie was because I had a chat with Mr Reasonable, AKA John Dix about raising the issue of Barnet Labour not changing the rules back. We were discussing whether to go public about the fact that Barry in opposition promised to remove the restrictions on public questions at meetings and has changed his mind. This is what John said.

Part of me was also tempted to leave it till September but they will have to discuss the Capita contracts by September and I am worried the delay on the gagging rules is to keep us out of the scrutiny/debate that will take place.  

I felt I had to ask the question. John is 100% spot on. The meetings where the Capita contract is being discussed are massively important to Barnet's residents and residents should be given the opportunity to have their say.  Barry has heard me ask hundreds of questions over the last fourteen years, I'd like to think he recognised the fact that every single one was the result of hours of reading council papers and doing homework. Yes I'm not a shrinking violet, a loudmouth, but I had liked to think that people recognised that I was serious and that my questions were the result of proper research. 

At the election count Barry suggested that I should not give up on scrutiny, when it was clear that Labour had won. I assumed that the first move would be to remove the Tory restrictions, so I could carry on as Barry suggested. Barry said on the show that he was putting together a People's Assembly, so people in Barnet could have a voice. As someone who is interested in the council and knows how it works, I know it would be far less effective for actual scrutiny purposes. It is committees where decisions are made. When there are technical issues or gaping holes in policies, it is the commitee where this can be rectified. I can recall dozens of instances of the Tories listening to questions and making small tweaks that lead to bad policies being changed and stupid ideas dropped. It resulted in the Metpro scandal being exposed. It resulted in the Mapledown respite changes being dropped. This was all prior to the 2018 rule changes. Former Tory Audit Committee chair Hugh Rayner, personally thanked myself and John Dix on many occasions for raising issues and he fixed them. This may have been a drop in the ocean, but it did make a material difference to how the Borough operated.

After the rule changes, I rarely bothered asking, unless there was a slam dunk issue. I developed a reasonable relationship with a couple of Tory Councillors. I realised that I couldn't ask questions, so I'd email them and they'd do the dirty work if they accepted my arguments. It was only when they didn't I'd bother showing up.  The problem with this was that there was no public accountability or recognition that the council wasn't putting its papers together properly. It gave Dan Thomas, the former Tory leader, the figleaf that his councillors were doing their job, when they weren't.

As to Barry's assertion that a Peoples Assembly will fix the problem, People's assemblies are good at setting direction and strategy, they are not good at allowing residents to forensically challenge specific defects in council papers. I suspect that they will provide a far better forum for a loudmouth like me to spout ideological nonsense and waffle for hours than when specific questions are required on specific issues in relation to specific policies.

I'm happy to make a deal with Barry. If he wants me to refrain from asking questions, I'll retire from going to meetings completely, so long as he changes the rules and allows people like John to ask questions, if thats what he really wants. Many people in Barnet fought for years for a change of regime and to oppose the policies of the Conservative regime. We genuinely believed that things would be better. I'm used to being called names by Leaders of Barnet Council, I don't take it personally, but I really expected a little better. 

The reality is that I'm in it for the long haul. I don't ask questions for the benefit of the two other bloggers sat in the public gallery at Council meetings. I do it because I want the London Borough of Barnet to be the best place possible for people like me and you who live here. I had rather hoped that this was recognised.

There is one good thing that came out of this. It gives me a chance to play one of my favourite tracks by the Ramones. Enjoy!

A blog you should read about how much we are paying Capita for their services

If you are a citizen of Barnet and you've ever wondered whether Barnet Council are being efficiently run, I would strongly recommend that you read John Dix's Reasonable New Barnet Blog. Mr Dix has put together a very detailed blog detailing the difference between what we were told Barnet would be paying Capita and what we actually are paying. Mr Dix does a blinding job of exposing just how the taxpayers of Barnet are being taken to the cleaners and reminding us of how the Conservative administration of Barnet have done everything possible to hamper anyone from shining a light on what is going on. Please have a look.

Mr Reasonable: Just what we pay Capita - How they billed £555 million to one council 

Mr Dix sums up by saying

To all of this you may say "So What?" My concern is the lack of transparency about so much of the goings on in Barnet, something they have been making even more difficult as the years go by. We are gagged at meetings, and the amount of information they used to produce has been reduced. For example, Barnet used to produce a quarterly, one page summary of the benefits the Capita contract had generated (Benefits Realisation). When I started asking questions about the numbers, Barnet's response was to stop publishing it. I used to analyse the senior council staff salaries from data they published. One day they just stopped publishing it. I never published staff member names even though it was available only ever their title. Now we haven't a clue other than for the top handful of staff. Even worse they removed years of historical salary data that had already been published.  

I do this because someone has to try and hold the council to account!

Reading Mr Dix's blog and final comment, it is great to see ordinary citizens holding the council to account. Why didn't someone think of that sooner!

Yet another scandal about to overwhelm Barnet Council

Over the last four years, the Barnet bloggers have uncovered scandal after scandal at Barnet Council yet Councillor Robert Rams, a Conservative Council regularly sneers at us bloggers. A classic example is on his latest blog. He says

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http://robertrams.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/private-v-public/#comments

I read with interest this evening that John Dix writes on his blog that,

“Conservative Councillors labour under the belief that all private companies are good and all public sector staff are bad”

http://reasonablenewbarnet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/lessons-barnet-need-to-learn-from-g4s.html?m=1

This is simply not true.

I can’t speak on behalf of all Conservative Councillors but this one believes in this tough economic times – better services for less money. Hence why the One Barnet project is looking at all our services and looking at better and cheaper ways of running our services.

The library service is a classic example of this.

By making changes to the way our service is run, moving Friern Barnet library and North Finchley library into the Arstdepot and letting the community run HGS library ( an offer which friern residents were given in Friary House) we are able to,

Spend more money on books
Put literacy at the heart of everything we do
Open our libraries longer
And make every primary school child a library member.

Other services will be outsourced and some will be merged with other boroughs – all to make the services better, cheaper and keep council tax down.

And our recycling service has been outsourced for years with out any problems!

But you will not read that on his blog!

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John Dix replied

If what you say is true why did Barnet Council expressly preclude an in house bid for the two massive outsourcing contracts? Without a public sector comparator how can residents be assured we are receiving best value? Given the massive costs of implementing the contract so far, the huge redundancy costs and the experiences of other public sector outsourcing contracts which have gone horribly wrong I remain extremely concerned that this outsourcing project will simply not deliver the objectives which I am sure all residents want, an effeicient and effectively run council. As you know Robert I have no idealogical problems against outsourcing. My issue is the scale and complexity of this contract without a pilot and which cannot be reversed should it go wrong.

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Earlier this week, Robert Rams had a go at me on his blog. Perhaps the most interesting point was that Rams criticises John Dix for not publishing facts he doesn't like on his blog, yet he failed to print my riposte to his comments. Rather oddly, Rams takes John Dix to task for a statement he made, yet completely fails to address the point. Nowhere in his blog does Rams state that public sector staff are the equal of private sector companies or that the public sector is better at providing some services than the private sector. 

For some rather strange reason, Mr Rams seems to think that giving the example of shutting two libraries and replacing them with one in a location which is less convenient for the majority of the users of the original libraries is an improvement. Mr Rams fails to state how many books were kept at the previous locations and how many will be available at the Arts Depot Library.

I visited the new Arts Depot libary on the day it opened and it had about 1/5th of the floorspace of the former Friern library. Is this an improvement?

But all of this is a little bit of a sideshow. Why has Mr Rams chosen now to have a go at Mr Dix. If I was going to attack any of the Barnet bloggers on the issue of honesty and credibility, John Dix is the last person I would start with. I happen to believe that all of the Barnet bloggers are honest, decent and intelligent people and write blogs out of a sense of public duty. I know first hand how much work goes into the blogs and how much of a personal commitment it takes. Unlike this blog, John Dix doesn't allow his personal prejudices and emotions dictate his agenda. John is thoughtful and intelligent in his writing and I suspect he chose the name "Mr Reasonable" for his blogging because he wanted to put some distance between his style and content and that of myself and perhaps some of the other Barnet bloggers (that is purely conjecture though, I've never actually asked him). 

Whilst it is well known that Robert Rams has a personal dislike of bloggers and has operated an agenda against them in his publicly funded role at the GLA since 2008 (Mr Rams boasted that he'd finished my blogging career in 2008, when he got the Hendon Times to shut my blog on the papers website down, following my campaign against an anti semitic video Barnet Council had posted on YouTube), it still surprised me to see his attack on John Dix. So why the attack? Why now?

Well sadly, the anyone who follows the Barnet blogs will know exactly why Mr Rams has chosen this moment to attack John Dix. You see a group of three Barnet bloggers (I am far too lazy to bother going) attended the Council offices, to exercise their statuatory right to inspect the books. There is a short period every year, where the law allows residents to check the accounts to see whether the council has spent our money wisely. The law says that members of the public can see anything they like and the council has a duty to cooperate as fully as they can. 

When Mr Mustard, Mr Reasonable and Mrs Angry turned up, they were taken to an office, offered no refreshment, given escorts to the toilet and when the documents appeared, the contents were heavily redacted with page after page crossed out. The bloggers found evidence that some of the contracts they requested to see were heavily redacted as "commercially sensitive" even though the companies who had the contracts had not asked for confidentiality. 

Furthermore, some of the requested documents did not appear at all. Given that the Council has a legal obligation to supply the information, we are now in a situation where there is a technical breach of the law. Anyone who follows these blogs, knows that Barnet Council is rather keen to involve the law in the most petty of disputes. Helen Michael has now had four visits from various police officers regarding a poster she and other traders displayed in their windows, concerning parking charges. She was reported by Nick Walkley, the Council CEO. We wonder whether Mr Walkley will report himself to the Police for failing to supply the bloggers with the information they were legally entitled to see.

So we have a situation where the council has failed (yet again) and the bloggers (yet again) find themselves asking why. Have the council obstructed the bloggers investigations purely to be awkward, or is there something they wish to hide? It is not beyond the wit of man to figure out that the bloggers asked for specific documents for a specific reason. I was not surprised to hear of the obstruction.

I do wonder about who actually advises the council in these matters. Have they not yet realised that the Barnet bloggers have excellent press contacts. As a result of this blog, I've been interviewed on the One Show, contributed to ITV Tonight, been interviewed on BBC London 94.9 and written articles for the Guardian newspaper. The bloggers also have excellent contacts with magazines such as Private Eye. I have no idea whether the council have figured out what is about to happens and sent Rams on a pre-emptive strike to try and undermine John Dix or whether Mr Rams has embarked on a half baked freelance mission. One thing I can assure all of my readers of is this. 

Whatever the reason, I would suggest that all that will happen is that Mr Rams will end up (yet again) looking  extremely stupid. On Friday, I attended Barnet Museum. The Londonist was recording it's weekly podcast and I was invited to participate. Before the recording started, Nick Quinten Woolf, the presenter had a chat about the museum and the threat of closure. He was bemused as to why Barnet Council should want to shut such a fantastic asset. During the course of the conversation, the name Robert Rams cropped up. 

When we were about to start the interview, Mr Woolf gave us a few guidelines. The final one was to "not mention Councillor Rams by name as I don't want a libel writ". It may (or may not) surprise you to know that the comment wasn't directed at me. It is pretty clear to me that, given the fact Rams has the job of press officer for the GLA on his CV, he really is pretty useless when it comes to dealing with the media. He has launched a tirade against John Dix, shortly before John Dix takes a major part in exposing a disgusting scandal at Barnet Council. I eagerly await Mr Rams attacks on Mrs Angry, Mr Mustard and Citizen Barnet. 

This issue is going to be a big story. It is not  a story the Barnet Eye has any role in, other than a bystander, it is a story for the other bloggers and a testament to their hard work. 

One Barnet - the facts that the Barnet Council do not want to listen to

On Satuday 7th July, the Barnet Alliance for Public Services held a conference, featuring presentations by Andy Mudd from the Association for Public Service Excellence, Professor Dexter Whitfield who is an expert  on the subject of outsourcing in local government and was originally engaged by Barnet Council to assist the local trades unions get to grips with the issues of outsourcing and John Dix, AKA Blogger Mr Reasonable, who is a consultant who advises organisations on outsourcing and management transformation.

Each speaker gave interesting and informative presentations. As you will see from the highlights presented here, none of these speakers are wild eyed lunatics,  speaking beyond their pay grade. All gave reasoned arguments to support their case that transforming Barnet into an unaccountable and opaque commissioning Council presents a huge financial risk to the people of Barnet.

How has Barnet Council responded to repeated attempts to engage in a grown up discussion? Councillor Robert Rams described APSE as a left wing organisation, despite the fact that it works with over 300 local authorities of all political persuasions and is generally held in high esteem. Needless to say that Councillor Rams didn't attend the presentations given by APSE. How he formed this opinion is a mystery. It is clearly not evidence based (unlike the information presented by Andy Mudd).

Here is a section of Mr Mudd's presentation, where he outlined the risks of outsourcing and how commercial companies have largely abandoned the strategy as a means of achieving efficiency.


Here is John Dix explaining the One Barnet program in lay mans terms. This is probably the best description of the process I've seen. Every Barnet resident should watch this clip, as it sums up what is happening and what how we are spending £20 Million pounds of taxpayers money


Here we have Professor Dexter Whitfield detailing how similar "experiments" at other councils have floundered. Of 44 major outsourcing projects, 11 have failed. That is a 25% failure rate. As Professor Whitfield asks, would you buy a car which had a one in four probability of going wrong?


Not a single Barnet Conservative Councillor attended the conference. They do not want to listen to the potentially calamitous risks associated with the project. They are planning to spend another ten million pounds (on top of the nine million already spent) purely on consultants reports into the process. The project has been running for four years and no savings at all have been delivered. The figures and business case are based largely on finger in the air guesses. Barnet has a poor record of dealing with private companies. We have seen major scandals with both the Metpro contract (£1.4 million) and RM Countrysides (£2.4 million). We are also hearing reports of major issues with the NSL parking contract, which is another major outsourcing, which was completed this year as part of One Barnet.

We urge all councillors to watch these presentations and get in contact with APSE to schedule a proper presentation for the Barnet Council decisionmakers.