Week 35.10 31st August 2010

Tendring Topics………on Line

An Expensive Mistake

I always felt that Tendring District Council’s previous Tendring First administration performed pretty well on the whole. I have no doubt that its members had the well-being of the district and its inhabitants as their first concern. They were acknowledged by the Government’s Audit Commission to be ‘the best’ local authority in Essex, far outshining the County Council despite the latter’s constant self-congratulation.

They made one or two silly mistakes though. One of the most disastrous was
INTEND, the private company set up to perform the miracle of ‘regenerating’ the Tendring District. I imagine that its name was considered to be clever play on words. All it did for me was to remind me that ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. The sole reason for its existence was the idea that, as a private company, it would have access to funds that were not available to a public authority. Why should it? I can’t think of any grants that a private company could apply for to which a public authority has no access.

Nor, I think, are there any such loans. I would have expected a private company to have more, not less, difficulty in raising loans at a reasonable interest rate. If I were in the money-lending business I’d certainly prefer to lend to a public authority. The directors of limited liability companies can declare themselves bankrupt and walk away from their debts. With a local council there might be bureaucratic delays, but payment will always be made in the end. Since INTEND has been established, it has identified areas of the Tendring District where regeneration is badly needed and suggested how this might be done – and that’s about it. Lots of local residents could have done that for free. It cost the Council £1.26 million!

Now, it seems, even Councillor David Lines, leader of Tendring First and former director and chairman of the company, has conceded that the whole enterprise may have been an expensive mistake. We all make mistakes but it is refreshing to hear someone prominent in public life admit that he may have been wrong! I don’t believe that there is anything that INTEND has done, or indeed could have done, that couldn’t be done at least as efficiently and cost effectively by the Council itself and its own staff.

There is an ingrained popular belief, fostered by the popular press, that ‘the private sector’ is always more go-ahead, more efficient and more cost-effective than the public sector. The public sector is populated by desk-bound bureaucrats, swathed in red tape, who spend their days sending each other memoranda suggesting ways in which enterprise can be frustrated and hopes dashed. The private sector on the other hand comprises groundbreaking scientists, thrusting entrepreneurs and eager hard-working factory workers all intent on making us wealthier, and the world a happier place to live in.

I have worked in both the public and the private sectors and I know that this simply isn’t true. Where public sector work is farmed out to the private sector (marking national school examinations and paying student grants come instantly to my mind) it has, as often as not, failed dismally. The public sector, providing schools, hospitals, emergency services, the highways, street lighting, law and order, parks and gardens, cemeteries and crematoria, public health, housing standards, clean air, safe food and drink, is responsible for all the services that make for civilised life. The private and the public sectors both have an important role in modern society. It is, I believe, a serious mistake to suggest that one is more important than the other or that one should be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

I told you so!

When the terms of the Coalition Government’s Emergency Budget were first announced my immediate reaction was that, as usual, the really poor, dependent on Government services, would be hardest hit. The comfortable off and the wealthy would suffer less and the seriously rich wouldn’t experience the least inconvenience. This, I thought, would become even more obvious in the autumn when the cuts would really begin to bite.

The prestigious Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is Britain’s leading impartial authority on financial matters. It has no association with any political party or movement. I was glad to discover that its professional assessment of the Budget and its likely effects is much the same as my thoroughly inexpert one. The poor will pay a higher proportion of their income than the wealthy toward reducing the deficit, and the lower the income the higher that proportion will be.

Needless to say the Government doesn’t agree. As David Cameron was on holiday in Cornwall it was left to his deputy, Nick Clegg to refute the IFS assessment. I can’t believe that he enjoyed doing so and his argument certainly failed to impress. He claimed that the IFS gave a one-sided assessment of the situation. They didn’t take into account the effect that the Budget would have on getting people off benefit and into paid work, and therefore improving their situation. I suppose that that argument might have had a little validity if there were work waiting for those who came off benefit. But there isn’t – and the employment situation is destined to worsen as the cuts in public services really come into effect. A news bulletin recently reported that 5,000 small private enterprises were already failing because they relied for their survival on contracts with local authorities.

The hope that the private sector will be able to offer employment to the thousands likely to lose their jobs in the public sector is a vain one. Cut public sector finance to the bone and the first to suffer will be their private sector contractors. Public and private sectors are inextricably linked. They are like conjoined twins? Anything, positive or negative, that you do to one will inevitably affect the other.

What is going on at County Hall?

A few weeks ago I commented in this blog about the County Council’s plan to make £300 million of efficiency savings by 2013. This was to be achieved by ‘buying better’ (£150 million), by ‘working with partners’ (£25 million), ‘sharing and trading services (£10 million), ‘working smarter’ (£85 million) and 'thinking ahead on IT '(£40 million).

Crucial to this ambitious programme (which seemed to me more like a wish list than a plan of action) was a multi-million pound deal with international computer and software giant IBM, with its headquarters in the USA and its tentacles worldwide. Lord Hanningfield who, a few weeks earlier had been demanding that Essex jobs should go to Essex men and women, announced this deal for which he claimed personal credit, not long before his retirement from the Leadership of the County Council.

Effects so far have been the axing of 275 line manager posts at County Hall and a rise in the sum paid out to 'outside consultancies’ from £14.4 million in 2005/6 to £25.3 million in 2008/9. I look forward to learning how much the County Council paid out for these consultancies in 2009/10 – and how much saving has so far been accomplished to justify this outlay.

In charge of the transformation scheme, and on a six figure salary, has been Chief Information Officer Mark Briggs, an IT whiz kid who is claimed to have had experience in updating software at 300 council sites and in the USA, his wife Victoria, also an IT expert, was Project Manager, Solutions Development Executive and Senior Programme Officer. (Isn’t it just a little unusual for a wife to hold a senior position – or is it three senior positions? - in a local government department of which her husband is head?) Another senior member of the team was Gareth Allen, Chief Software Architect.

Now it seems that the whole programme – and the County Council’s hopes of saving £300 million – may be in jeopardy. Mrs Briggs resigned her post (or posts) in July after only two years service, and both Mark Briggs and Gareth Allen are believed to have been relieved of their duties and are on indefinite leave. An anonymous inside source is reported to have told the Coastal Daily Gazette that Mr Briggs ‘was escorted out of County Hall last month’.

A County Council spokesman said, ‘Essex County Council does not comment on individual staffing matters. In line with best practice guidelines, we use a leave of absence as part of our resolution procedures’.

No doubt all will ultimately be revealed. In the meantime I shall be ruefully reflecting on the fact that it is that lot at the County Hall who receive by far the greatest share of the Council Tax we pay each year. What a pity all this didn’t emerge before the County Council elections.

An ‘insider’s’ knowledge

Unlike the Gazette, I don’t have an anonymous source within the County Hall. I do though have a very knowledgeable and experienced inside source of information about local authority ‘outsourcing’ IT services.

He says that typically the Managers and Councillors of an authority are approached by the ‘outsourcers’ salesmen and, ‘are first wound up over the cost of the impending need ‘to refresh’ all their PCs, Servers and Software. Then they are offered a deal that really only spreads the cost of this over the full period of the contract, instead of as a one-off expense. Under the deal offered by the ‘outsourcer’ the Council has to define all its IT needs at the start. The answer to these is priced very competitively, probably at less than the running cost of the existing in-house team.

However the contract, which typically is quite long (seven years for instance) specifies that all additional IT needs must be met by the contractor at an additional price. Because of the speed of progress in IT development, it is a very safe bet that over a seven year period lots of new IT needs will surface, and will be charged at a premium rate in a non-competitive way. This means that the outsourcer makes a huge profit from the additional hardware and systems.

Users also discover that while their previous IT department was flexible and tried to be helpful, the new company (which may be operating a help desk from a call centre in Scotland or the like) will do exactly what is in the contract. Anything else is chargeable. The new supplier is likely to be totally rule-bound (often by the ‘good practice’ that the Council thought was a good thing to build into the contract!) and as a result quite unhelpful, whereas the previous in-house team will have been pragmatic, putting the needs of the council and its staff first.

Strategically, Councils who outsource in this way lose completely their own IT expertise and have no choice but to renew the contract when it ends. There may be a rollover clause to re-award it or it may have to go out to tender again. If it does the incumbent will be at a huge advantage and very likely to get it again.

Of course, the County Council's outsourcer may not be like that at all. Let’s hope that its quite different from some of its competitors, because the funds that the County Council is using for this experiment in outsourcing came from our pockets, handbags and bank accounts.

It is beginning to look though Lord Hanningfield’s coup may not have beensuch a triumph after all. The saved £300 million seems to be receding further and further into the distance!

Week 24.09

Tendring Topics…..on Line

A 'Change of Horses'


'Never change horses in mid-stream', insists the proverb. But that is precisely what Tendring Council has done. Circumstances having little or nothing to do with democratic choice have resulted in a tiny majority in the Council Chamber of the 'Tendring First' Coalition (Labour, Lib.Dems and others) councillors being replaced by an equally tiny majority of Conservatives. The next 'general election' of Tendring District councillors will be early in May 2011, so we are almost exactly in mid-stream.

In the 'bad old days' when, at least in most provincial authorities, political party labels meant no more than an indication of councillors' general political philosophy, this would have made very little difference. The composition of the committees and their chairmen might have changed but there would have been a general continuity of Council policy. Members would have been horrified at the thought of being required to vote at all times in accordance with local party policy rather than as common sense and conscience dictated.

All that has, of course, changed with the introduction of parliamentary style party politics into the Council Chamber. Now we have a local 'government' and 'opposition'. There is a 'cabinet' consisting of members of the majority party. These are each given responsibility for various aspects of the Council' functions. ''Cabinet Ministers' would be just a little too pretentious a designation even for 2009 AD, so they are called 'Portfolio Holders'. Needless to say, 'the Opposition' then has to have 'Shadow Portfolio Holders'. What pretentious nonsense it all is!
It is in the meetings of this 'cabinet' (a small minority of the full council whom we vote into office) that real decisions are taken. Party members on the Council are expected to support them loyally. Those who fail to do so 'have the party whip withdrawn'. This has, in fact, happened to members of both main parties.

Authority is thus concentrated in the hands of a very small group. This makes for efficiency and speed in decision-making, which was presumably the purpose of the change. It doesn't make it any more likely that the right decisions will be made. It also means that a tiny change in the Council's composition can result in an immediate reversal of policy.

Tendring Council's new administration can hardly have anticipated and made plans for their future in power. For the first time ever, I feel quite relieved that since World War II successive governments have progressively limited the scope of local authorities' freedom of action!

The Best of Intentions

Our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, once commented that the out-going Tendring District Administration, 'couldn't run a bath'. It was an effective and memorable sound-bite, but it came ill from a member of an organisation so badly run it that has proved to be incapable of preventing many of its members from feathering their own nests at our expense*.

Tendring Council did and does, in fact, run a number of public services extremely efficiently. Its once-weekly refuse and recyclables collection, for instance, sets an example for other authorities to follow. There have been a few very serious mistakes and misjudgements though.

There was a bad slip-up over the ill-fated water feature in the town square. I still haven't heard an explanation of how it is that our water feature is a danger to health, while those (apparently identical) in other towns are considered to be safe. There's no sign as yet of that protective fence that was supposed to be erected round it. Could that be an idea that has been dropped by the new administration?

I think though that the very worst decision that the 'Tendring First' Council made was in creating a separate, privately-run regeneration company InTend, financing it with thousands of pounds of our money, and eventually seconding to it the Council's own regeneration staff. A recent issue of the Daily Gazette succinctly defines what was considered to be InTend's purpose; It would access grants the council could not, would be far removed from the humdrum business of emptying bins and other menial matters, and would recruit specialised staff.

It is a definition that underlines InTend's pointlessness. Councils have always employed highly professional specialised staff. When I was employed by the Tendring Council there was a barrister, two solicitors, an engineer and surveyor, accountants, environmental health experts, planning experts and, of course, one journalist (myself!). How many of those were ever required to concern themselves with the humdrum business of emptying bins and other menial matters? As for accessing grants that are not available to local authorities, I don't believe that there are any such grants. We know that InTend has made a number of applications but we haven't yet heard of any being successful.

I think that in deciding to create InTend the Council had simply swallowed whole the idea, taken by some politicians to be a universally acknowledged fact, that anything a public body can do, a private firm can do better and more economically. This simply isn't true, as the expensive failure of many put-out-to-tender services has amply demonstrated.

InTend's 'specialist staff' may not have been very good at raising money…..but they have been very good at raising expectations. While some of them were seeking funding, so far in vain, others were busying themselves working on ways in which, once the money was available, it could be spent on bringing currently dormant parts of our district back to a new life, regenerated in fact. £7 million would be spent in Brightlingsea, giving the Cinque Port town a revamped western promenade, converting the open-air swimming pool into a 'children's water park', providing a new sea water pool near Bateman's Tower, building a town museum and so on! Harwich's master-plan included pedestrianising the quayside, redeveloping Navyyard Wharf to include flats, and bringing the town's railway station up to date.

It now seems possible that the days of InTend, the author of these utopian visions, are numbered. Four of its nine directors have been removed from their posts by Tendring Council's new bosses, who have made it clear that they believe that InTend is a waste of tax-payers' money. If InTend is wound up what, ask the citizens of Harwich and Brightlingsea, is to come of those plans that offered their towns such a dazzling future?
The Daily Gazette thinks it has the answer. 'InTend may end, but work cannot', urges its headline. 'We don't care who regenerates the area. We just want someone to ensure urgent projects, such as the regeneration of Jaywick, Harwich and Brightlingsea, take place'. And so say all of us.

But the fulfilment of those more-than-ambitious regeneration plans depended upon InTend obtaining the grants that were claimed to be inaccessible to mere local authorities. So far there has been no sign of them, and I don't think that there ever will be. However, I could be wrong. I hope that before winding InTend down, the new Conservative administration will make absolutely sure that there isn't one or more unexpectedly in the pipeline.

Having done that, they will be in a position to assure the people of Brightlingsea, Harwich and elsewhere that their areas' regeneration plans are at least as likely to come to fruition as a result of direct action by the Council as they would have been by InTend………but that they will have to take their place in the queue of other council commitments funded by grants that are available to local authorities, by ever-more-meagre central government support, and by Council Tax.

'InTend', I have no doubt, was a clever play on words evoking both 'in Tendring' and firm 'Intention'. Perhaps its creators should have remembered that, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'.

*The Pot and the Kettles!

While Mr Douglas Carswell, our MP, has been loud in his denunciations of other Honourable Gentlemen (and Ladies) making hay, at our expense, while the sun shone, it seems that he himself isn't totally beyond question, though I am quite sure that he hasn't stepped a millimetre outside those remarkable rules that our legislators have made for themselves.

Some though may question why, for the performance of his parliamentary duties, he found it necessary to rent a second home in Thorpe-le-Soken at a cost (to us of course) of £1,250 a month. Possibly he needed a home base within his constituency and that was all that was available.

In that case he will have been delighted to read in the Daily Gazette that they have found a recently built vacant apartment that would be eminently suitable for his purpose. It is a two bedroom first-floor flat overlooking the sea in Southcliff Hall, Marine Parade East (definitely an up-market area of Clacton), with a lounge, kitchen, bathroom, gas central heating, double glazing and car parking. The rent is only £535 a month, less than half the rent for his Thorpe home. If he moved there now it would be a pity about the £32,000 that he has spent (and claimed back as expenses) on refurbishing the Thorpe-le-Soken house to make it suitable for him to live in. However he would presumably be able to take with him some of his purchases; the 'love seat' easy-chair (the imagination boggles!) for instance, together with bed, mattress and bedding, chairs, sofa, fridge freezer, washing machine, radio, tv, vacuum cleaner, electric iron and tv set.

Mr Carswell told The Gazette that he doesn't feel the need to pay back any of the money he has claimed. 'Every single time I have claimed for money I always think whether I can justify it to the editor and readers of the Gazette'. It is nice to know that we are in his thoughts on those occasions!

His Lordship is right!

It isn't very often that I find myself in total agreement with Lord Hanningfield, leader of Essex County Council, whose party has just been returned to power at Chelmsford with an increased majority. I do though share his views entirely on the subject of the BNP. The day after the election, the East Anglian Daily Times quoted him as saying, 'The most disturbing thing about this election has been the BNP getting a sizeable percentage of the result. It's very depressing just knowing people vote for them. People who vote for them are not in favour of the value of the individual. The expenses row is one thing, but the BNP is the least genuine of all the parties.

Many people did, in fact, vote for them…..not least within our own Tendring District. In the eight county council wards in our district a total of 3,974 electors put their cross against the names of BNP candidates, 1,883 (almost half) within Clacton's three wards.

I would perhaps be rather less concerned about this had I not just watched the two part drama documentary on tv Channel 4 'The Birth of Evil; Adolf Hitler'. This graphically demonstrated how in Germany in the late 1920s and early '30s, in economic turmoil and disillusion not unlike that which prevails in Britain today, the young Adolf Hitler (a brilliant orator 'with a vision'!) joined a struggling minority political party. In it he managed to supplant its leader, change its policies into something resembling those of the BNP today and eventually bring the whole of Germany under his fanatical rule.

At least the voters did keep the BNP out of the Council Chamber at Chelmsford and increased the number of representatives of the Lib.Dems. for whose party I had voted. They're still a small minority though.

The same cannot be said for the European elections. The BNP has secured representation there for the first time, and UKIP has increased its strength both in Europe and throughout the UK. Britain now has increased the number of its representatives in the European parliament who firmly believe that that parliament should be abolished and that we should leave the EU!

I shall probably return to this matter next week when I have had an opportunity to look at the election results more closely. In the meantime I derive just a little comfort from the fact that the total turn-out was very low and that UKIP achieved its result with only a tiny increase in its share of the national vote.