Kicking Out Capita - an Inquiry at the House of Commons

A trio of Barnet bloggers


Arriving at Westminster, on Tuesday night, and being a little early, I thought I might park Mrs Angry on a bench somewhere, reading over her speech for the meeting, and laughing at her own jokes, as usual, and go and have a quick peek at the river below the Parliament buildings, now shrouded in discreet veiling during the period of renovation.

This was an entirely unrelated mission to the purpose of the evening - I thought I would take a look at the spot where, in the tradition of my family's spectacular tradition of sensationalised lives and deaths, my great-great grandfather managed to drown himself, in October 1864, falling over the edge of a giant caisson, a metal cylinder placed in the water in the course of work on the Thames Embankment, between the bridge and Parliament. He managed to get himself in the Morning Advertiser, (Shocking and Fatal Accident At The Thames Embankment) and the Evening Standard, anyway: probably the only incident of note in his difficult life, born by the river in Essex, married by the river at St Mary Lambeth, living by the river in the notorious slums of Waterloo. 

Poor forgotten Thomas Garnish's ignoble death by the river, in the murky waters below the mother of all Parliaments, happened because it had been considered necessary to create a massive new sewage system for London, after years of rising pollution - and notably as a result of the long, hot summer of 1858, the year of the Great Stink, when Parliament could not keep away the noxious fumes from the foul water of the Thames. The stench had been intolerable, for our elected representatives, whose upper class sensitivities were of course rather more refined than those of the workers like Thomas, who lived in extreme poverty, with no sanitation, and every risk of an early death from disease - or accident - as a result.

That was then, and here we are now in an era when our Tory politicians appear to want to reduce the less advantaged members of society to the same level of squalid poverty and dependency they would have faced in the nineteenth century: a thought that reoccurred with chilling impact once in the palace of Westminster, watching an icily disapproving Iain Duncan Smith glide past the crowd of Barnet residents waiting in the committee room corridor. A couple of those residents clocked who it was, and ventured a muted jeer as he moved on, his feet barely touching the f*cking floor.

The air that wafts into the committee rooms of Westminster, filtered through the billowing sheets draped over the scaffolding, may be more sweet smelling these days - or it may not: as the evening progressed, there did seem to be a distinct odour of something indefinable in the air, that was not entirely pleasant. 

Because we were in Parliament to take part in an meeting that wasn't exactly a meeting: an Inquiry into the impact of Capita on the London Borough of Barnet, an event organised by Barnet Unison's John Burgess, chaired by Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty, and attended by the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. Evidence to be given in the form of testimonies by residents, activists, councillors, bloggers.

McDonnell welcomed all those present, and introduced himself with becoming modesty as the man whose most important job was booking rooms for John Burgess. 

He is well acquainted with the state of things in Broken Barnet, as he reminded us, having visited our picket lines and protests over the years - including, with Jeremy Corbyn, the march for libraries that some of us foolishly went on, from Finchley to the occupied People's Library in Friern Barnet - in a blizzard. Local activist Tirza Waisel pointed out that blizzard actually took place in the Barnet Spring. Indeed it did.

He spoke about the business of outsourcing, conflicts of interest, and the need to reform the process, as well as the state of audit, shared out as it is, between the magic circle of four major companies. And Barnet? Barnet had been a testing bed for outsourcing, he observed - the Easycouncil model was of course considered a flagship policy for Tory authorities.

Time for the evidence: first up, three Barnet bloggers: Mr Reasonable, Mr Tichborne, and Mrs Angry. Mr Tichborne has written about the meeting here.

You can see our testimony here, if you're bothered: 

           


Mrs Angry's contribution (from about 16 minutes in) was about the creation of the London Borough of Capita, as the last outpost of their failing empire. 

In pleasing irony, the massive picture above our heads depicted King Alfred 'inciting the Saxons to prevent the landing of the Danes ...' 

Also pleasing to see the Shadow Chancellor guffawing at Mrs Angry's Crapitorial jokes for lapsed Catholics, of course:

A steady progression of speakers followed: Barbara Jacobson, from grassroots campaign Barnet Alliance, mentioned the recent £2 million fraud by a Capita employee - how many others might there be, she asked: a question Barnet's Tory councillors are keen not to explore - at least publicly.

Resident Nick Dixon told a shocking story about alleged malpractices within the planning service.

Resident Janet spoke of the appalling state of adult care in Barnet, and the lack of interest by members of the committees tasked with scrutiny of provision.

Holly Kal-Weiss, from Chipping Barnet Labour, who is hoping to be selected as the parliamentary candidate to stand against Theresa Villiers, told us about an extraordinary sequence of events involving a resident wrongly charged massive fees by Capita - twice.

Several Labour councillors made the effort to attend the meeting - although unfortunately not the group Leader, Barry Rawlings - and two of them now spoke: Ross Houston, who commented that the Easycouncil test alluded to by John McDonnell had failed, along with One Barnet and the 'Thin Client' model imposed on our local services. He criticised the lack of transparency and accountability, and most of all the gross mismanagement that had led to the wrong, understated deficit figures being published before the May elections, adjusted to a far worse level immediately after the Tories won back control of the council. 

He rightly commented that the only explanation for this was mismanagement, or something far worse. There can only be one of two explanations. Yet no action appears to have followed in terms of investigating how this happened. John Mc Donnell nodded as he suggested we needed to restore the scrutiny of an Audit Commission - abolished, of course, by Eric Pickles.

Labour member Kathy Levine also spoke: criticising amongst other Capita failures the truly awful administration of the local Pensions Scheme, the £2m fraud and the Grant Thornton report that was withheld from publication.

Aditya Chakrabortty, Holly Kal-Weiss, Cllrs Ross Houston and Kathy Levine

New councillor Sara Conway made a very good point, that Labour needs to communicate on the doorstep to voters the reality of outsourcing, and explain why it is that their local services are failing.

As the flow of testimony continued, the odour of something not quite definable moved about the room, not from the river, something we brought with us from Broken Barnet: something rotten, and dying.

Barnet Unison's John Burgess, a man who has worked tirelessly over the years, all too often ignored, to warn what would happen in the course of the mass privatisation of our local public services, wound up the meeting, with a notice of the forthcoming council meetings, such as P&R on 11th December, and the next Full Council a week later, where we expect the Tory councillors, despite all that has happened, to announce they intend to continue with the catastrophic coupling with Capita, both parties struggling in the water, dragging each other down to the depths, rather than admit their gross incompetence, and face up to the truth.

Residents are invited to attend these meetings, and make their feelings known: further details to follow.

John Burgess

Capita Inquiry address: 

I’ve been writing about the London Borough of Capita for five long years, and about the process of outsourcing for much longer: since the days of ‘Easycouncil’, Futureshape, and One Barnet. Which came first? Can anyone remember?

When we took Barnet to the High Court, to challenge the mass privatisation of our council services, the judge found it impossible to understand the ever changing shape of what became the One Barnet programme, or to identify the point of decision at which it could be challenged. But that had been a deliberate strategy: to invent a Trojan Horse, to enter the city walls, and win the war.

The truth is these shape-shifting concepts are all versions of the same thing, or rather part of the same process of metamorphosis: and they all have the same meaning, and significance, which is – no meaning at all. They are all an act of deception; smoke and mirrors.

Language, in corporate culture, which is now the culture embedded in our system of government, is not a medium of communication, but the reverse: an attempt to obstruct transparency, and accountability; to facilitate the exploitation of profit, even at the point of delivering vital public services, in a time of austerity.

Easycouncil was an empty, meaningless idea, deployed by a local Tory MP in search of a claim to some sort of political vision. It is the perfect testimony to his career. Unveiled as a new model of local government, it was in fact another version of the same model of outsourcing being rolled out by the same team of companies throughout the public sector.

It is impossible to write about Barnet, and Capita, without using the metaphor of empire: because this is what we have become; colonised by Capita: the last outpost, in a virtual invasion, and occupation. It is the twenty first century equivalent of the East India Company, perhaps: an incremental appropriation of land, and wealth, by stealth, for the commercial exploitation of resources.

By stealth, and not won by open battle or siege: Barnet was an open city, the keys willingly handed over by our empty headed Tory councillors, assured by a scheming court of senior officers, and a cabal of consultants - some of whom were moving in and out of Barnet and various would be tendering companies - that mass outsourcing was necessary, that mass outsourcing was the answer to all their problems.

They could provide better services, for less money. Did they really believe that? Hard to tell, as most of them lack the ability to scrutinise the most basic report, let alone a billion pound budget.

Barnet’s Tories are old school, unrepentant neo Thatcherites. They are an evolutionary anomaly: the last of their breed, still living in the days of glory when Margaret sat in their council chamber every election night to see herself re-elected and pretended to remember who they were. She was very good at that: the older members still recount, with moist eyes, the tiniest anecdote connected with her; to the younger ones she is a mythical figure from the past, but one whose spirit still haunts the corridors of Hendon Town Hall.

They were easily persuaded, then, that their instinctive distrust of the public sector should be reason enough to embark on the wholescale privatisation of our local services. They didn’t need much persuasion, in truth: their hands off approach to governance, and preference for an easy life, meant their approval was guaranteed, despite any reasoned arguments not to undertake such a risk laden venture.

And there were reasoned arguments, from every side: from unions, from grassroots campaigners like Barnet Alliance, from local bloggers, from Labour councillors. Reports were commissioned from leading academics, legal advice was taken, and acted upon: the Judicial Review would have been won, if not deemed out of time: and it was out of time largely because no one had spotted the moment when it had all begun, the shape-shifting of Easycouncil, Futureshape, One Barnet.

As we know, Barnet’s Tory members approved the contracts, five years ago, without properly scrutinising the details – the 8,000 pages of details. They were not allowed to, given only a few hours to skim through. The contracts were assessed and approved by … the same lawyers who had written them.

The members may not have read the contracts, but we did – which is how, incidentally, I came to discover that hidden within one section dealing with the enthusiastic commercialisation of our local crematorium, now the Crapitorium – literally making money out of my dead grandmother – Capita had proposed mitigating the risk of negative publicity by offering discounted, pre-used graves to the local bloggers! Yes: a Capita joke, and legally binding! An offer which I am not quite ready to take up. Still: in the midst of life, we are in death: and always we are in the hands of Capita. There is no escape. They own us, body and soul, & no doubt will pursue us in the after life, too, having won a contract for the provision of eternal torment, in the many rings of hell.

The Tory members had not spotted the many variations within the contracts that enabled Capita to maximise the opportunities for profit by way of extra fees such as ‘Gainshare’ payments: all of which means instead of better services for less money, we have seen a rapid decline in the performance of services, and rising costs.

One example of how this works in practice was the shameful revelation – by local bloggers – of the ‘opportunity’ taken by Capita to gain extra fees by taking over the provision of Freedom Passes to local residents with disabilities. Young people with autism and other difficulties were finding themselves stranded, unable to get home, and deeply distressed because their passes had been cancelled by Capita with no warning, and without any valid reason. Only after public outcry did the Tories intervene, and restore the passes.

Planning and enforcement is another area in which profit for shareholders is prioritised over providing a fair and transparent service for residents. Want to get your development approved? Pay a whopping fee, and you are fast tracked all the way. You can even pay to choose your own planning officer: now why would you want to do that? Where are the safeguards to ensure probity within the planning service? As for enforcement, there is no profit to be made there, so little has taken place. As a result, even Tory councillors are beginning to see the outcome in terms of electoral damage from their own voters, furious at the rampant proliferation of unauthorised development, now posing a threat to their own best interests.

Capita is in serious trouble now in regard to its botched handling of the Barnet Pension scheme: anyone like me who has experienced the level of incompetence and lack of adequate information given to scheme members will be in despair at the thought of their future financial security left in their hands.

From the moment the contracts were signed, the language changed once more: One Barnet disappeared. The word was never used again. No name was used at all. There were only coy references to ‘the change programme’.

And right from the beginning we knew there was no hope of any effective oversight either by commissioning officers, or Tory members. The committees tasked with this role were simply rubber stamping exercises. The Tory councillor who was Chair of the Performance committee actually said that scrutiny was not meant to be critical. He continually repeated the view, even as late as this year when all was falling apart, that he wanted only to hear ‘positive comments’.

And it is all falling apart now: but as in the last days of any empire, the rise and fall of Capita Barnet is a slow and painful process. It is politically expedient, however, for the Tory administration, and for the reputation of Capita, to keep face, and retain a colony in Barnet.

What’s happened here is only perhaps an extreme example of what is happening elsewhere, all over the UK, all throughout the public sector, and it raises a more fundamental question than our local concerns, which is the real point of significance here: the principle of the democratic control of public services.

Private profit cannot, should not, be made from these services. It creates a distance between accountability and the community, takes power away from that community.

Local services, local jobs, local democracy: let’s have these rights returned to us, and begin to rebuild a system of local government that works for us, and not for Capita, and its shareholders.

Project Rose: the devastating report Barnet Tories didn't want you to read

  

Barnet Tory leader Richard Cornelius at a recent residents' meeting

Summer in Broken Barnet has always been a dangerous season. 

A time when devious council strategists quietly slip out any awkward political announcements; when developers submit any awkward applications to demolish yet another piece of our built heritage (more of that in the next post) - but increasingly now it serves as a lull in the storm: a time of desultory Tory inaction, some of our more privileged elected members sitting idly in the garden of their French summer homes, safe in the knowledge - or so they think - that nothing much back home is happening, can happen, and if it does happen: no one will notice.

This year, this summer, before our Tory councillors packed their bags and headed off to the sun, something already had happened - and the long break until September offered them a welcome respite from the gathering clouds that now have broken over their empty heads, only this week, in the form of further trouble, and the publication of a damning report that exposes, in visceral detail, the extent of failure in the corporate management of this borough.

Only after the elections were safely over was it revealed that the authority's pre-election financial statements were wrong, and predicted deficits actually on a catastrophic scale, far worse than previously given. The council also now admitted that the mass privatisation of council services, thrown in the hands of Capita, in the form of two enormous contracts, was failing - or rather, as they put it, required a 'realignment'. Capita itself, of course, is struggling to survive: all of which together has left the borough in a perilous state, at unprecedented risk of financial collapse.

At the same time, again, shortly after the elections, rumours emerged of a scandalous story involving a massive fraud alleged to have been committed by a Capita employee. A fraud said to be more than £2 million in value, and one that had gone undetected until the employee's own bank had reported it to the council. Little could be said, as the matter was going to court, and although the authority had commissioned a report by auditors Grant Thornton into the wider issues raised by the fraudulent activity, they would not publish it yet, claiming that it was not 'in the public interest'.

On Friday this report was quietly made available on the council's website, spotted only by fellow blogger Mr Reasonable - no announcement was made, of course. Why would there be? It would be in breach of their policy of denial, and counter transparency.

But let us set the scene for the latest developments.

A couple of weeks ago, Tory Leader Richard Cornelius returned from his long break to begin a set of three low key public meetings with residents. These engagements, clearly reluctantly undertaken, are lip service to the statutory requirement to consult the public about forthcoming budget expenditure, and the corporate plan. As such, of course, they were given little publicity, in the hope that almost no one would turn up.

Some of us did turn up.

We trailed along, in the dismal early autumn rain, up the steep slope from the tube station to the venue in Chipping Barnet, passing on the way a discarded copy of one of the many leaflets local Tory MP and Brexit enthusiast Theresa Villiers has been stuffing through residents' letter boxes, in the frantic hope that she can, in the event of a snap election - any election - retain what is now a desperately marginal constituency, and one that is staunchly Remain.

 

Poor Mrs Villiers, marginalised, and digging her own political grave

The venue chosen was the Old Bull theatre: once an inn, so named for the Bull's head drain that used to spout water from the roof - an inn dating back perhaps as far as medieval times, when Barnet itself was a venue for a battle that was one of the pivotal moments in the War of the Roses. 

In the window was a poster for a local society's talk on Richard III, who was of course present at the Battle of Barnet, as a young man. His beady eyes gazed out on to the street that he once must have passed along, after the battle, on his way to London. 

Inside the theatre, another Richard stood waiting on the tiny stage, about to give a soliloquy not on our glorious summer, or the looming winter of discontent, but to expand upon a vision of life as it never is and never can be, in Broken Barnet, where everything, as he put it, is Nice, or at least, parts of it are Nice, and in defence of which he intends to make sure the Nice parts remain Nice.

Sat in the audience were some well heeled residents of Chipping, relics of the days when Barnet was still a Tory stronghold, awash with fundraising strawberry teas, and Pimms on the lawn, and Brian Coleman in a deckchair, and residents' wishes instantly accommodated by local party representatives. 

The sense of entitlement was palpable: two women vied with each other to be the most outraged over the council and police failing to remove homeless people daring to sleep in shop doorways, and spoiling the high street with their poverty and mental health needs, urinating in public and Worse, as one enraged woman at the back hissed across  the auditorium. Defecation! 

No shit. 

No: shit happens, even in Chipping Barnet. And it isn't at all Nice.

The Tory leader promised to 'clamp down' on such unspeakable acts, and said they were all foreigners, anyway, theses homeless people - as some of us looked on in horror, and instantly objected.

Another resident objected to investment in the less advantaged western side of the borough: why should they have 'so much' rather than Chipping? This was a step too far even for the Tory leader, and for one shining moment - a theatrical moment as breath taking as anything ever seen on the boards of the Old Vic - Mrs Angry and Richard Cornelius agreed with each other, and remonstrated with the woman. 

An event so unexpected, in fact, that he stopped to inform the audience it that such a thing had never happened before. 

It is unlikely ever to happen again.

The event was meant to be a consultation on the corporate plan.  Fellow bloggers Mr Reasonable, Mr Tichborne and Mrs Angry all tried to bring the discussion back to this point, and raise serious questions about the massive deficit, and the damage from the failure of the Capita contracts, but to little avail. Cornelius seemed, under any difficult questioning, to cringe, and even shrink in stature: less of a Shakespearean performance, than a puppet whose strings have been cut. 

He denied that successive Tory administrations had been guilty of financial incompetence. He insisted the Capita contracts were making savings. He blamed all financial shortfalls on funding shortages, without attributing this to the policies of his own party in government. Yes: a load of old bull, spouting forth, at the Old Bull. 

In short, Cornelius, and Barnet Tories generally, are in a state of absolute denial. Or at least that is their public facing approach - to deny to others what they must know to be the truth - that the borough faces financial meltdown, and may well end up in the dire straits facing Northamptonshire and other council authorities. Stare it out, deny it: bad news is fake news. 

A twitter follower spotted something rather alarming about the photo of Barnet's Tory leader at his recent stand up/sit down roadshow ...

In order to maintain some sense of equanimity, they have adopted a defence mechanism of total silence - a sworn allegiance to the code of omerta, defiantly maintained in the face of the earlier revelations - immediately after the local elections - of the gravity of our perilous financial position. This was inadequate then: after what has now emerged in the course of Friday's revelations, they find themselves with no cover at all, and exposed for all to see as they really are.

Eventually the Capita fraud case was brought to court, and the culprit pleaded guilty to 62 incidents of fraud, involving payments for non existent cases of Compulsory Purchase Orders of properties in regeneration schemes -  to the value of more than £2 million. He was given a five year prison sentence.

The council had commissioned a report from Grant Thornton to look into the circumstances in which this incredibly serious fraud had occurred. But they refused to publish it, or disclose the contents to members, citing as an excuse - preposterously - that it was 'not in the public interest' to do so. Why not? 

Tory leader Cornelius, Chief Executive John Hooton and senior managers earlier in the summer

Because, they said, it 'contains financial and business information about Re and Capita'. 

Quite clearly public interest is not the same as the commercial interests of Capita: but such is the extent of power, the inversion of power, between customer and contractor in this perverse relationship that Capita has been allowed to move into the more dominant position, leaving Barnet Tories too frightened to hold them to account. And of course the contract requires the council to promote the reputation of its own contractor, making it even harder to hold them to account. 

What sort of fools would sign up for such a contract, you may ask? 

Ask them yourselves: most of them are still sitting at the committee table.

By September, the report had still not been published. 

On 3rd September, Mrs Angry had decided to submit a Freedom of Information request for the report: 

Please give me a full copy of the report of the investigation undertaken by

Grant Thornton into the recent £2million+ fraud perpetrated by an employee of

Capita.

Please do not claim it is not in the public interest for this report to be

published, as quite clearly that cannot be true, and the ICO will not allow such

a pretext.

Please do not refuse publication on the pretext of future publication as the

report should already have been published, in the public interest, and anyway

no date has ever been given for publication.

There was nothing to lose by formally requesting the report: and it would force the authority, if refused, to explain itself to the Information Commissioner, a body which has always been very supportive when dealing with complaints about Barnet's attempts to obstruct the disclosure of material that is demonstrably in the public interest, and indeed has put the authority into 'special measures' when found to be in breach of statutory requirements.

And it was a timely test of Barnet's culture of counter transparency, as over recent months, almost every politically sensitive FOI request made to the authority by me and others appears to have resulted in delays, delayed demands for 'clarification', and other difficulties.  Last week patience ran out, and a complaint was made to the ICO about two such requests, on two matters that are of serious significance, and should most definitely be put in the public domain. 

This seems to have had a beneficial outcome in one way at least. Within days, the Grant Thornton report was - with no public announcement - at last published on the council website, and Mrs Angry informed that her response had been supplied - and five days early - albeit, as we know, with some redactions. The timing may or may not be coincidental. 

It is now clear, however, why it has taken the authority so long to release this document. 

The report - which you can find here - commissioned under the code name 'Project Rose' - is a devastating exposure of both contractual failings, and the failings of the commissioning side of the council to manage with any measurement of competence, the safeguarding of its own financial investment in services, and the process of privatisation. 

Ultimately, of course, it is an absolute indictment of the Tory group, and the Tory leadership. 

It must be noted, as observed within the report at several points, that Capita does not lend its endorsement to the contents, and that the report had to be redrafted no less than seven times. One hesitates to guess what the original version was like, bearing in mind the state of the final one.

'Project Rose', then.

O Rose, thou art sick.

Where to begin?

First of all it is confirmed that the massive fraud, perpetrated over an eighteen month period, was only detected by the employee's own bank. It was not spotted, throughout this period, by any manager, in either of the two Capita organisations: CSG, or the joint venture Re, or anyone in the commissioning side of the council, or in internal audit, or CAFT, the Corporate Anti Fraud Team. 

The way in which 'the Individual', as he is referred to throughout the report, managed for so long to perpetrate this series of fraudulent acts, was by taking advantage of the inherent vulnerability of a privatised council with complete disregard for basic accounting safeguards,  let alone any adequate system of financial control - or indeed any proper mitigation of the risk of fraud.  

This open larder of opportunity was made all the easier to access, due to something we have so often reported in this blog: the multiplicity of roles played by Capita, the conflicts of interest so deeply embedded within their range of functions - and the double contract system that increases the risk of fraud or corruption, with a lack of protocols guarding against any potential for such activity. The interaction between Capita CSG and Capita Re has been effectively unregulated, or insufficiently regulated. A failure that has been compounded by another, overarching role in which the same contractor is responsible for overseeing the authority's accounts - and reporting on its own financial performance. 

Above and beyond this mess, there is something which goes right back up to the highest levels of governance, and accountability. Something noted repeatedly in a phrase used throughout this truly shocking report, and that is -'insufficient oversight'. 

(Part of) the Capita contracts that Tory councillors did not read fully before approving

The story of the Barnet Capita contracts has been chronicled in detail here, over the years, and elsewhere. 

Go back five years, if you like, and follow the genesis of this reckless process, right from the beginning, and the ineffably vacuous 'easycouncil' model of local government promoted by former Tory leader Freer, now MP for Finchley & Golders Green, one which was fostered and developed by a succession of neo-Thatcherite councillors, senior management officers, and consultants, in order to soften up the ground for the mass outsourcing of our local services. 

Read how Barnet Unison, and anyone with any sense, tried to warn Barnet Tories what would happen. Remember the reports that were submitted to committees, and ignored, unread.

Remember the staff who lost their jobs, the services moved out of the borough to all around the UK.

Remember how the Tory councillors allowed the tendering process to develop, with only one contender, in the end. 

How they were not 'allowed' to read the full contract, and how the same lawyers who worded it approved it on their behalf, and how the Tory councillors voted to approve contracts they had not read.

Richard Cornelius signing away direct control of our local services in 2013

How after they had done so, some of them allowed themselves to express grave doubts about the whole process - too late.

How in the years that followed, one man - fellow blogger John Dix, Mr Reasonable - has continued to scrutinise the performance of the contracts, and explain, in forensic detail, the reasons for his serious concerns about the risks of failure that were evident to anyone with even the least critical eye.

Think about the consequences, for our least advantaged residents, of any serious failure in the local services on which they rely. Combined with a self inflicted lack of funding from council tax frozen for purely ideological reasons, by Barnet Tories, who at the same time were happily endorsing the most brutal cuts in those local services, magnified by a policy of further slashing of funds from central government: and we have a disaster on our hands.

Who will take responsibility for this? 

And has anyone been sanctioned in any way for the gross failure of the authority to prevent the fraudulent activity and widespread financial incompetence uncovered by the Grant Thornton report? 

The line of accountability goes right up to the top. The Tory leader, the Chief Executive, the senior management team; the Chairs of council committees - have any of them accepted responsibility, or lost their posts? 

No chance of the Tory leader standing down: in fact it is rumoured he has only recently seen off a challenge for the leadership. So we must accept that his captaincy of the ship that is now hitting the iceberg somehow equips him to lead the rescue mission, must we? 

What will happen now? 

What has the opposition said about this completely avoidable disaster?

Hard to tell, as there has been no statement on the party website, they say because they have lost access to it - and there is little to see on twitter. Some members have tweeted part of a statement emailed to them, in which apparently the local party is calling for the resignation of the Tory leader and the deputy leader, Dan Thomas, (who has always been the strongest supporter of the Capita contracts, but now appears to have been struck dumb: and who left twitter, by chance, earlier in the year, when the stuff now appearing in the shop doorways of Chipping Barnet began hitting the fan).

Barnet Labour are also now calling for the termination of the two Capita contracts. Better late than never: but really, far too late in the day to have any impact.

Since the contracts were signed, Labour in Barnet has largely failed to communicate successfully to electors the significance of the contractual bondage, or to express any effective condemnation of the continuation of the arrangements, citing the potential financial penalties that might accrue should we threaten to make an exit - without fully exploring whether or not this is correct. (In regard to this, it is also significant that it was a team of local activists - including the local bloggers - who sought legal opinion, backed by Labour lawyers, about the One Barnet outsourcing programme, and saw it through to a Judicial Review, whose judgement found the contracts to be based on flawed consultation, and would have been won if not deemed out of time). 

As to Cornelius's ship of fools, sailing full steam ahead towards and over the edge of the horizon, what is there to say? 

Denial, evasion, and a refusal to accept a duty of accountability will not stop the inevitable conclusion to their years of folly. They will struggle to free themselves of Capita: Capita will desperately try to retain as many services as possible, despite everything that has happened. The Grant Thornton report, incidentally, says very carefully that they 'understand' the £2 million stolen from Barnet has been 'reimbursed' - but where is the proof? Has it been paid in cash, or will it be deducted from fees?

Well: let the Tories sink their own political lives, and leave the careers of the three local Tory MPs clinging on to the wreckage: but let's not allow them to take us with them.

Time for the Labour party in Barnet to shape up, step up: show real opposition, effective strategy - and real leadership. A radical, robust fight is what is needed, not a consensual approach to politics, and an indulgent relationship with senior Tories, and senior officers - the latter habit often excused to Mrs Angry on the basis of having to work with them in the future. Friends, there is no likelihood of gaining power for the foreseeable future, and there never will be, if we carry on like this.

It is not enough to call for an end to the contracts, when in the meanwhile there are largely still the same senior officers in place, the same management structure, the same dependence on hugely expensive agency staff and, unaccountable consultants. Heads should, and must roll: and cuts made in a top heavy, hugely over rewarded senior level of management.

There are also many unanswered questions that emerge from any reading of the Grant Thornton report. 

The failure of the internal audit process, and CAFT, to identify the CPO fraud. The possible occurrence, in the years since the contracts were signed, of other fraudulent or corrupt practices, as a result of the absence of proper safeguards. Planning and enforcement clearly needs a closer look, and regeneration: has there been any wrongdoing in any of the the previous CPO programmes? 

All of these areas clearly require review, and an independent investigation - Project Rose was limited to the scope of immediate impact of the CPO fraud, but the implications go far wider, and in my view that is why we must all now demand a fuller inquiry - for the reassurance of residents and tax payers that their money, and their services, and the community in which we live, are safe from further exploitation, and further financial loss.