I was sort of amused (and sort of saddened) today, when I was looking at the blog stats. The most read blog this week has been one contrasting the running of Barnet Council and the restaurant chain Chez Gerard. I wrote the blog in February 2011. I congratulated Chez Gerard for their excellent food and good customer service. They had asked us to take part in a survey about why we used the restaurant and what we liked and didn't like. The restaurant was full, the food was excellent and the only real complaint was the chairs could be more comfy. They were looking at a rebrand. Our advice, keep things as they are. I noted that Barnet Council doesn't engage with customers and is not interested in hearing their views. TBH I'd forgotten writing the blog, I've written about 10,000 blogs in the eighteen years this has been running, so not surprising. But re-reading the blog, I was saddened as I had liked Chez Gerard and the chain went bust in 2011. Whilst I thought they were getting it right and noted the restaurant was full, clearly they weren't. As I noted in my blog, if a private company gets it wrong, they go bust. That is what happened.
If a council gets it wrong, they just up your taxes and there is nothing you can do. As I noted in the blog, the Tories had made a big deal of cutting council tax, but had actually hiked it massively. Fifteen years on, tax has reached levels even I hadn't expected in my worst nightmare. The Tories were replaced by Labour in 2022 and have shown that anything the Tories can do, they can do worse. If you look at local government in Barnet since 2002, it is clear that democracy doesn't work in local government. Running a council is a massively complex task. What happens is you have a bunch of elected councillors, most of whom couldn't run a whelk stall running the show. They have a bunch of highly paid profession councillor directors who actually do all of the work. There is no scrutiny of these officials. They can do what they like and know that taxpayers have no choice but to pay. They can't get the sack.
The Barnet Tories came up with the idea of outsourcing everything. The idea was that they could control costs by sacking bad contractors and getting people who could do it cheaper and better. There was one big flaw. The whole thing was administered by the executives who were unaccountable. The council employed far less people, but ended up employing a whole bunch of handsomely renumerated senior staff to manage the whole fiasco. They managed to get rid of all sorts of functions that weren't broken, but kept the one part of the council that is hugely wasteful and inefficient in place.
Before the Tories One Barnet outsourcing I had a clear idea of how Barnet Council could save money, improve services and keep taxes reasonably low. Now, it is so broken, that I cannot see any way to sort the whole mess out, without scrapping the whole thing. And in that I think is the answer. Barnet council is too big to be in touch with its residents and too small to get any real economies of scale. Many of the services it provides are used by residents of other boroughs. Local residents have no say in anything. Schools in Barnet are used by residents of other Boroughs. Similarly roads are. Adult social care uses all manner of other services. London needs a joined up approach.
So here is what I'd do. I'd break up all of our local councils. Put things like education under a London wide authority. I'd put all roads under TFL I'd have a London wide Adult Social care authority. If youid did this, administration costs would be slashed. Where there were 33 council departmenst, there would be one for these. I would break Barnet Council up into three smaller councils, Hendon, Barnet and Finchley. They would deal with local issues and nominate members to sit on the boards of the London wide authorities. I would have ten-fifteen person boards drawn from the councils, reflecting the political make up of London and ensure that budgets were spent in proportion to the number of residents in each area, or in the case of schools, the number of pupils served.
I also believe that the London Mayoralty has failed. Whilst Andy Burnham seems to have done a good job in Manchester, in London it is too politicised. Personally I'd prefer to see an non politically affiliated Mayor appointed by the Boroughs, according to strict guidelines.
Would all this work? I genuinely don't think it would be worse and may be a lot better and save a lot of money.
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