.jpg)
Barnet is revolting
Tory Barnet Council
is arrogantly, and without remorse, ripping its own Borough apart with no
accountability, without democratic process. This week its Leader, Richard Cornelius,
and his inner Cabinet of rubber-stampers, announced their first major decision
regarding 'One Barnet'. They provisionally awarded a £320 million, ten-year outsourcing
contract of Council services to Capita. This follows the announcement last
month that the Home Office is ditching Capita when its ten-year contract
expires in March 2013. “There’s a
suspicion that Capita has been earning too high a margin on certain central
government contracts,” we read in The Times. Has Barnet Council contacted the
Home Office to ask what went wrong? Has Barnet Council taken a couple of
minutes on line to read about other disastrous Capita contracts that were
terminated early? And there is the well-known
case when in March 2009, Capita SIMS (Schools Information Management Software)
sent a truancy warning notice to the family of a Cheshire school student who
had died two months earlier.
The lack of concern of the Council for
those who elected them was revealed two weeks' earlier at a public meeting
where Cornelius was reminded by angry residents that when parking was
privatized in Barnet all the Council employees in the parking department lost
their jobs which were located elsewhere at a lower cost. Was this going to
happen on a grand scale when most of the services were outsourced? Cornelius
shrugged his shoulders and smiled as if he expected everyone to appreciate his
next remark: "It is, of course, very sad (he didn't even try to sound as
if he meant it), but they're all living on the same planet, aren't
they?"
The residents had a point. Yesterday, at 5.11 on a Friday afternoon just
before Christmas, a cold, callous email was sent to Barnet Council employees
telling them to go home and prepare for redundancy. In other words, employment in
Barnet, the financial benefits it brings to the community, the welfare of the
employees and their experience, knowledge and expertise, is not a priority, not
even a consideration. There was no offer of a meeting, a face-to-face
explanation, a show of concern at how the lives of these people might be
affected. No word of comfort or support. This devastating news was delivered in
the weekly newsletter from the Deputy CEO with the advice that more information
could be found on a screen saver or on posters. The evidence clearly shows they
couldn't care less.
To contact the Borough by phone in future, if 'One Barnet'
is agreed on 6 December, we've now learned that locals will have to ring a call
centre in Blackburn. Who knows where it might be located in 5 or 10 years'
time. Capita doesn't have a great record in managing call centres. Their
management of call centres for the London Congestion Charge was transferred to
IBM after its first stage, much to Capita's embarrassment.[1] But don't worry. There will be an online information service - fine for those
who are online, but there is no proposed alternative provision for those who
are not.
How does all this fit in with Eric Pickles' vision of
'localism'? This week things have moved fast in the
London Borough of Barnet. Alarmingly fast. In Tuesday's "Guardian"[2]
Cornelius claimed "Forget public v private. We just want the best value
for taxpayers' money". He must have meant 'forget public' as he has only
ever considered a private option, so how would he know how a public, in-house
future for Barnet would compare on price? And although Cornelius claims that £111million
of savings over ten years are guaranteed in the contract - his justification
for implementing 'One Barnet' - it has been pointed out to him repeatedly that this
is impossible to guarantee in practice.
On Tuesday night, two weeks before the contract is due to be
agreed, the 8,000-page contract was seen for the first time by Cornelius and
his Tory group. The next morning he declared in an official Council notice: “I will be recommending
that my colleagues approve these proposals when we meet on 6 December." In an email he was sure the contract could be read and fully
scrutinized in a week. If the Council is unfamiliar with the contents of the
contract, how can they recommend it and how will they be able to monitor it?
Will they rely entirely on the advice of their own pet consultants who are
costing local taxpayers millions of pounds? Will they be guided by the
profit-driven contractors? If this is the case, the Councillors will have no
role to play and could themselves be candidates for redundancy. The alarm bells
are deafening.
" Put simply, democracy is close to being snuffed out. "
John Harris wrote on 11 November in the Guardian[3],
and he was right. There is no Democracy in Barnet. The Council is autocratic, corrupt,
uncaring, but worst of all, inept.
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? After all, this is my life and the lives of
four generations of my family who all live in Barnet. There is a judicial
review in place. Local residents and organisations are united in their determination
and vision to defeat this hairbrained scheme. And on Friday Cornelius was
beginning to sound a little insecure. Why the emphatic: "My party is
backing me" and "the members of my group are happy that we're going
ahead. There is of course room for dissent and I'd be lying if I said there
wasn't but this is the decision we've taken." Was he trying to convince himself? Leader of
the Lib Dems, Cllr Jack Cohen has said that the Tories have a majority, so it
is going to be impossible to defeat them. Well it appears that if only 6 Tories
vote against, 'One Barnet' will be defeated.
Do Cornelius's words reveal a welcome wobble? Can every Tory
Councillor in the Cabinet feel easy with and totally in favour of 'One Barnet'
going ahead knowing that we now know they have been nodding this through at
every stage without being in possession of the facts. Perhaps they are beginning to realise their "the
peasants are revolting" "let them eat cake" attitude to the
people who they have been elected to serve will guarantee that from 2014 we
shall never look upon their like again. They should know that Barnet is
revolting. We haven't given up yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment