Mr Travers has a nice day out

Mrs Angry's favourite Fat Cat, lying adoringly at her feet, of course






Andrew Travers. Unlikely to find himself in the same position.


Everyone has their guilty pleasures. Mrs Angry has far too many, but then, being the product of a good Catholic upbringing, she knows that guilt and pleasure always go hand in hand, and these emotions are usually mutually beneficial. This is not always the case, of course, in Broken Barnet.

The London Borough of Broken Barnet's own guilty pleasure, our favourite friend without benefit, small but costly Andrew Travers, the £1,000 a day deputy Chief Executive and Chief Finance Officer, is having a big day out today.

He has gone up to town to a big hotel to give a talk, you know. Andrew will be attending a Capita Conference - 'New Models of Service Delivery', exploring the timely subject of 'Opening up Local Government to New Providers'.

By a happy coincidence, the London Borough of Broken Barnet is, as we speak, opening up local government to new providers, and goodness me, look: Capita is one of the four short listed companies tendering for £750 million of our council services.

The conference will be beside themselves with excitement, therefore, at 12.25, waiting for Andrew to pass on, in his twenty minute slot, the wisdom of his views on the following issues:

The One Barnet Transformation Programme

• Creating a new relationship between public services and citizens
• Encouraging self-help and behaviour change
• Simplifying systems and access to services
• Creating a single customer services organisation
• A single Barnet insight function to support joint commissioning
• New ways of ‘bundling and delivering services’

Andrew 'Black Hole' Travers is of course a world renowned expert on all these issues, as we discovered at the time of the MetPro Audit Report. Just in case you are lost for words, Andrew, here are some briefing notes for you, thoughtfully prepared by Mrs Angry. No need to thank her.

One Barnet certainly has transformed the relationship between public services and citizens: from one of apathy and lack of engagement to one of overt hostility, mutual loathing and open warfare.

Self help is a concept familiar to all senior executives of the London Borough of Broken Barnet, particularly amongst the ever increasing number of fat cat, over paid, 'interim' consultants who manage to wangle themselves lovely jobs in our borough, at our ever increasing expense.

Simplifying systems means throwing everything together for the ease and increased profitability of outsourcing companies, but without regard for the effects for residents.

Creating a single customer services organisation is a disastrous idea, trying to combine differing types of access needs into one function is ludicrous and presents serious risk for vulnerable service users.

Joint commissioning? Anything which emerges from the One Barnet PR mouth with the words 'insight function' is doomed to fail in the real world. What does 'insight' in this respect mean, in fact, other than a team of largely pointless senior officers sitting around all day reading twitter or staring out of the window?

Bundling and delivering services: rushing out an OJEU the day after the catastraphic MetPro audit so as to get the £750 million package process in course before anyone can stop them, and the outsourcing companies might have had to come to terms with a grave disappointment, and broken promises.

Just to make our Mr Travers feel at home, and support him on his big day out, some Barnet residents, including blogger Citizen Barnet, will be there at the Lancaster Hotel today, waiting to greet him warmly - and to protest against the shameless prostitution of our local services.

MetPro Part Three: Black Holes

It was now time for the MetPro audit report to be presented formally to the committee. Lord Palmer asked the Chief Executive,Nick Walkley, who had been hiding in the audience, to sit on the table with the other officers. The room was silent as Mary Ellen Salter, the head of internal audit, proceeded to read out her summary of the report, in her laconic Australian accent, a long, long, terrible litany of failure upon failure, breaches of regulations, mistake after mistake. The senior officers of Broken Barnet stared at the table. The councillors and the two independent members looked on in ill concealed horror.

John Dix, aka blogger Mr Reasonable, now addressed the committee. The report, he said, was shocking. An authority with a one billion pound budget had ignored the most basic procedures. But what is also signifcant is what is not in the report: the issues of safeguarding and data protection - who was going to address the matter of the destroyed footage, for example?

All these issues left uninvestigated were not going to go away, they would prove to be a festering sore. And then there is the question of who is to blame? There is an extensive and highly paid management team, and yet not one of them had taken responsibility. Who is going to be disciplined? He noted, by the way, that the bloggers who had uncovered all this had gone unacknowledged in the report.

In Mr Reasonable's view, the report's recommendations were ill conceived and utterly ineffectual. The problem was a flawed management culture. The language of change is everywhere, but the management team had taken their eye off the daily processes of administration. He went on to criticise the council's over dependence on so many supposedly short term and extravagantly paid consultants. At this point, Mrs Angry noted, deputy CE and Chief Finance Officer Andrew Travers, an interim officer on a contract of £1,000 a day, had the grace to sit back in his seat, and look embarrassed.

If you think MetPro is bad, continued Mr Reasonable, wait for the arrival of One Barnet and massive outsourcing.

Quite.

Tory Councillor Hugh Rayner suggested to Mr Reasonable that it was more sensible to get new systems in place than to 'punish people'. Ah but, thought Mrs Angry, the problem is not so much a lack of systems as the fact that officers have been allowed to ignore the systems in place ...

Labour's councillor Brodkin asked Mr R to elaborate.

One Barnet, said Mr Reasonable, was not the be all and all of everything: by being obsessed with this concept officers were losing their focus on the everyday, the nitty gritty, making sure public money os being spent properly, instead of 'flights of fantasy'.

Hello, time for the officers to speak. Let's hear Mr Andrew Travers speak (hold on, can we afford the overtime?) Andrew accepts that the 'core processes' are fundamental. Oh, good. He takes full responsibility - oh? - for issues raised. Oh. More good news: 'We accept the challenges to respond' - thank God, for one moment I thought you might have a prick of conscience and tender (ha, as if) your resignation, and where would we be then, apart from £1,000 a day better off?

They are going to make sure all directors performance is appraised, said Mr Travers. At this point. I'm afraid, Mrs Angry heard herself yell out 'let's appraise yours, then'. You mean these posts aren't already subject to assessment? Just like the appraisal of our councillors, which we were told a year ago by this Tory administration was going to take place but has never been put into effect? Every ordinary council employee, ladies and gentlemen, on a modest salary, regularly has to answer for the work they do by a regular system of appraisal, yet our senior officers and councillors simply take the money and run. Do you think this is fair?

Tory councillor Brian Schama was visibly appalled by what he had seen in the MetPro report and had some scathing suggestions for a basic system to ensure compliance with procurement and accounting regulations. He had an interesting question: how had auditors allowed invoice failure to continue?

Tory Hugh Rayner was also at a loss why the fundamental procedures were not being adhered to. Andrew Travers gave a load of old flannel about control frameworks, and robust systems. He was happy to discuss these issues further with councillors, but 'in a controlled environment'. I'll bet.

Both Mr Traver and Craig Cooper, Director of Commerce, were by now displaying signs of intense unease, hunched up defensively in their seats. Even the external auditors were beginning to move from an attitude of cynical detachment to a state of face touching, chin gripping anxiety. By the time doubts were raised in respect of the full competence of the external audit process, this had moved on to hysterical pen jabbing. Interesting.

Ms Salter declared that the council needed to inspire ' a culture of improvement.' Hmm. there was a lot of talk of culture, last night, which must have been a challenge for the Tory councillors of Broken Barnet, Mrs Angry would guess.

The Chief Executive thought there should be more 'follow through'. He had noted that things come around and around. Oh. That's nice. He thought the action plan would sort things out though. Really?

An independent committee member, Robert Harbord spoke: you cannot defend the indefensible. True. Barnet had controls there, but they were not operated. Indeed. The whole MetPro thing had only been discovered 'by error'. Thanks. And there could be a lot more to come. True again.

The CE wanted to talk about culture (in corporate speak, culture is an amorphous, indefinable entity you can blame for cock ups, whilst absolving yourself of all personal responsibility - useful for retaining a salary of £200,000 plus in the midst of a crisis). He also noted that all these horrible, bad things had happened years ago, funnily enough just before he came. The fact that they were not challenged since is apparently immaterial. He blamed the procurement failures on the devolution of responsibility and thought they needed to make a big shift in the way the council operates, by centralizing power.

The other independent committee member, Deborah Lewis, declared that she thought the MetPro report was 'shocking'. Ms Lewis was obviously concerned about the larger picture too. At one point, talking to Andrew Travers, Ms Lewis made an interesting reference to the possibility or otherwise of a 'big black hole' in the council accounts. Ms Lewis, accidentally or not, used an allusion which did not entirely pass by some of the members of the audience. Mr Travers may not be unfamiliar with the phrase himself: in his last post before fetching up in Barnet, he found himself in the midst of another crisis - working for the London Development Agency, there appears to have been a bit of a problem with the Olympic accounts, which he apparently had to investigate, poor chap:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23711358-olympic-agency-investigated-over-100million-black-hole.do

A convenient place to stop. Enough for today. Final part tomorrow.