What is happening to your local council? Workers looks at Barnet Borough Council in North London which is proposing to reduce itself to a “strategic hub” driving a “capacity vehicle”…
The new strategy for councils: everything must go!
WORKERS, APRIL 2009 ISSUE
There was a time when the term “local council” or “the Local Authority” was a well-understood term in Britain. It referred to a provider of local services which was overseen by locally elected councillors whose decisions were made in full council or committee mostly open to the public.
But does your locality now have the “mayoral system” with most decisions taken by one man (the Mayor, and it usually is a man) or a “cabinet system” where decisions are taken by small groups behind closed doors, or perhaps like Barnet Council in North London your local council is in the process of reducing itself to a “strategic hub”?
The proposal
In December 2008 the London Borough of Barnet, a Tory Council, promoting the Labour government policy of supposed sustainable local communities, produced a document called the “Future Shape of the Council”. It announced that doing things as they had been done “will not be financially feasible utilising the current service delivery model”. It went on to propose the outsourcing and privatisation of all services except a ‘strategic hub’.
If the proposal is accepted 4,000 staff will be transferred to something called a joint venture/service delivery vehicle. This could be private sector, voluntary sector, other public sector – health trust, local university, local probation service, police. Using the language of forked tongues and double speak much is made of social enterprise and community interest when the reality is that service delivery will be by private companies and multinational interests. The council will abdicate all responsibility for public service provision, passing all service delivery issues to third parties.
The concept of shared services to save costs and duplication is being aggressively used to cut services, staffing and terms and conditions of staff. It will place billions of pounds into the hands of private capital. More recently, like other councils, it has formed something called a Local Strategic Partnership with membership from other public sector organisations.
At this stage it is not clear whether this will be used to give “respectability cover” to the proposals or a more strategic drive to encourage all the public sector organisations in the borough to outsource their services such as IT to the private sector in one grand “strategic partnership to boost private profit”.
Why is the council so short of money?
When the December 2008 document was produced the local population knew that the way the council was going about things currently was not financially feasible but for rather different reasons than those in the document.
The launch of the proposals coincided with news that the Borough of Barnet had lost £27.4 million in two Icelandic banks. At the time the local population was told that the banks were on the government recommended list of institutions and the council was “not to blame”.
On 12 March it was revealed that the two banks were on no one’s recommended list – that the taxpayers of the borough had paid good money to a team of financial advisers who did not recommend them but this advice was ignored.
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A sign of things to come? This picture of Barnet Town Hall taken in March shows its historic Town Hall at Hendon ( conveniently in the middle of the borough) boarded up for refurbishment. After the refurbishment the council chamber will become the only part of the building used by the council, as all other council offices at the Town Hall have been leased for Middlesex University staff offices. Most of the remaining council offices have been moved to leased premises in a business park on the extreme east of the borough – a very difficult point to access by public transport. The refurbishment will restore the historic glories of the council chamber – but will the council itself be history by then?
Photo: Workers |
The borough treasurer resigned in a hurry when this all came to light but it is a good illustration of the total ineffectiveness of the supposed “overview and scrutiny” function of a cabinet council. Effectively the treasurer with whichever cabinet member’s blessing had been allowed to play his own stocks and shares game.
So having lost £27.4 million against the advice of its own financial advisers what would be the next step of this council seeking metamorphosis to a “strategic hub”? Of course, a pay rise!
If you have not been studying the progress of your local council you may still believe that local councillors are people who serve out of civic pride and are paid small expenses. The basic allowance of councillors in Barnet is currently £9,735 and this will rise to £9,974 on 1 April.
But the basic allowance is nothing compared with the sums paid to those who chair cabinet committees. The current leader of the council, Mike Frear, has an allowances total of £51,109 and his proposed pay rise was an extra £2,912. Mindful of his other role as prospective parliamentary candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Thatcher’s old constituency, he has decided to decline his rise (presumably out of fear of losing votes).
New model or old idea?
The Barnet proposals are being mirrored across England – Essex County Council is proposing an eight-year £5.4 billion outsourcing contrac, and several councils in the West Country are coming together to share services and outsource them to IBM – owned by the Chinese state. Wandsworth Council in London proposed a similar “enabling” council model 30 years ago with over a third of council staff and services privatised plus a continuing attack on the local trade unions. Westminster Council in London has implemented a 50 per cent outsourcing of services. Education services across many local authorities have been similarly hived off from mainstream local authority control.
The disintegration of local authority service provision, the destruction of democratic control over service provision, the introduction of service by tick box culture and key performance indicators are driven by government and seen as signs of the success of its cultural change for local councils.
The reality is that this strategic approach is simply about the transfer of public sector assets to private sector business. An indicator not promoted by the government is that the average pay of a council chief executive has risen 36 per cent in the past four years.
What next?
When the London Borough of Barnet’s proposals first came out there was a large demonstration of both local authority workers and residents against the proposal, but maintaining the momentum is key. In June 2009 a detailed set of proposals for the “strategic hub” model will be taken to Cabinet. Burt this has not stopped a week-by-week erosion of services and there are some immediate fights which need to be tackled.
One proposal in particular has resulted in local fury, the proposal to cut the post of wardens in sheltered housing and replace them with roving wardens. Barnet already has “roving park keepers” who essentially spend their time in white vans driving between one park and another. The consultation makes no bones about the fact that the proposal to cut the resident wardens is “in order to make savings”. The consultation document states that “The council is responsible for the sound stewardship of its budget, and is obliged to ensure that any expenditure can be funded within the resources available.”
At a recent local meeting a resident who had just heard the news about the Icelandic banks read this sentence out loud and such was his fury and the force of his alliteration when he got to the words “sound stewardship”, that his false teeth jumped out. A literal case of spitting teeth.
A close reading of the December 2008 proposal indicates that June 2009 is the council’s preferred rubber stamping date and gives clear indications of threats to services. The section on Information Technology states that the council will need to decide whether to retain ownership of the IT infrastructure in a future model. It then helpfully points out that the council’s current managed IT service is due to expire in June 2009. So local trade unions not only know the overall aim of the attack but have been given clear warning of the early targets.