Bloody red Tories

The Tories are decimating local services, even as David Cameron tells us he's a great fan of local power: here's more on local Tories who are using the public spending squeeze as a justification to keep flogging public services off to the voracious private sector:
 
Another windy night in the Tory borough of Barnet, and your reporter is snuggled in with the crowd at yet another Barnet council cabinet meeting, watching and listening as this council's rightist zealots pour forth another torrent of pro-privatisation, efficiencies horseshit.   
 
As many good burghers of Barnet already know, Barnet Tories are working up a mad, massive and massively unpopular scheme (tweely dubbed Future Shape) for future public service delivery in lucky North London.

The council's aim is to turn itself into a focal point called a strategic commissioning hub. Heaps of councils have fantasised about turning themselves into strategic commissioning hubs over the years - setting themselves up as organisations (sometimes as joint ventures with private companies) that commission public services such as care services, housing maintenance, school dinners, building works, IT, etc) from private companies, rather than provide those services themselves. In the modern council management mind, hubs are, if you will, places where great local government brains meet and think from time to time, breaking occasionally to dole large cheques out to the likes of Capita, BT, BUPA and the rest.

Some, like Barnet, also fondly imagine that their hub might ultimately manage services across a range of public sector organisations - for example, run HR, finance and IT for the local council, police and PCT, etc.

The problem is that this concept has yielded fairly thin results elsewhere in the country (and indeed the world), particularly when councils have tried to form service-providing companies with the private sector: in recent times, for instance, dreadful results saw Bedfordshire county council and West Berkshire pull out of shared services partnerships (at quite a cost, I gather), and Redcar and Cleveland council and Swansea city council reduced the scope of theirs. Perhaps aware of this dubious history, Barnet is shying away from the single joint venture company idea, but remains keen for private partners to either provide or help manage swathes of council work.*

Barnet also plans to stop providing some services altogether ('scaling down to a size which would mean delivering only what the local authority must deliver to achieve efficiencies' as the cabinet's originating Future Shape report has it) and to outsource whatever's left to external providers.

It claims that the squeeze on public spending makes this approach necessary: 'a Times article noted that any public servant not preparing for smaller budgets is living in cloud cuckoo land,' one officer intones darkly at this evening's cabinet meeting. 'That's clearly a call to arms for public servants to readdress the nature of their provision...' No other options are presented: no there's talk of keeping services in house, or of finding out more from councils that have successfully done so. There is only one show in town as far as these Tories are concerned, and it is thus that they'll keep lining private sector pockets with public funds during the recession.

You'll be seeing plenty more of this: rightwingers making evidence-free claims that the public spending squeeze requires further radical privatisation of public services - 'using the fiscal crisis to further an outsourcing and privatisation agenda,' as a July 2009 union response to the council's Future Shape agenda aptly puts it.

Under pressure from furious members of the public at recent meetings, cabinet members have bleated that the council's proposal is about 'partnering', rather than outsourcing, but let me promise before you all, people: I'll blow Iain Dale and Tweet with my feet if Barnet council isn't astroturfing for private companies with its Future Shape proposal.

They've installed a senior BT consultant called Max Wide as the council's executive director for organisational development to, as the council's website says, 'ensure the implementation of the Future Shape' programme - 'does Max Wide speak on behalf of citizens, or on behalf of BT?' a Mr Silverman in the audience asks early on. The crowd laughs and the cabinet frowns: the private sector has nearly destroyed the economy and fragged the public sector already, but the Tories insist we believe.

Which everyone knows and everyone hates: every seat in the public gallery at this evening's meeting is occupied, and cries of 'rubbish' and 'you're going to privatise' and 'let's have a referendum on this' regularly issue from the audience.

The public hates seeing the private sector in public service delivery, and knows all too well stories of failed private provision of public services. They know particularly well stories of Barnet's failed relationships with the private sector. This is the council that piddled £27m round the u-bend in Iceland banks (despite warnings), has overseen an £11m costs overrun its Aerodrome bridge replacement project, been forced to seek arbitration in an £8m extra-claims dispute with carehomes provider Catalyst Housing, and watched as a two-year industrial dispute between outsourced careworkers and external care management provider Fremantle Trust threatened to derail carehome provision in the borough.

There's plenty more, but the cabinet is unmoved by it. Council leader Mike Freer - the Thatcherite android whose startling disdain for the concerns of users of public services has warranted our attention in the past - tries to tell the masses that in many ways, they asked for it: he says that the Future Shape programme was a 'direct response to [public] issues and concerns' about council service delivery - 'we know, for example, that residents dislike having to tell the same story time and again to different departments... it is the responsibility of officers to work with partners and industry experts to develop responses...'  
 
Neither unions, staff, nor residents are opposed to the idea of the council improving processes - of the council taking advantage, as it says in reports, 'of economies of scope and scale, cutting out duplication and taking decisions based on a deeper understanding of need...'

They are opposed to wild, unsubstantiated council claims that relationships with the private sector achieve those results by default. A recent joint Unison, GMB and NUT analysis of Barnet's proposal highlighted a worrying lack of evidence for the savings the council claims that its proposal will deliver: the £2.5m and £4.9m per annum savings it says it'll deliver in property by 'partnering' with the private sector, and the £4.4m it'll find through partnership and potentially more through trading,' all the while admitting that it is impossible to 'estimate the exact impact' of its partnering proposals and that business cases will be required before it is.  

The other part of the picture that people resent is having no say in it - particularly at a time when people need, and are using, public services more than ever. Barnet resident and care campaigner Vicky Morris sets off a brawl with the charming Freer this evening when she asks Freer if he'd consider a referendum on Future Shape... 'on issues like privatisation, and whether they (Barnet residents) think outsourcing is a good way to get better value for money and better services?'

'I think it is rather strange that we've found a love of referendum,' Freer says. 'I don't remember any cries for referendum when our previous (Labour) administration sold off our carehomes...'

'I just want to ask your opinion about a speech by David Cameron,' Morris says, clearly wanting, as people tend to, to draw attention to the yawning gap between Cameron's red Tory rhetoric about community and local power, and the realities of his party on the ground. 'He's promising to decentralise, to change power relations between central and local government... to give local people more power. Right now, those people feel totally insignificant in the political process, and frankly, that's because they ARE insignificant in the political process. You seem to be directly contradicting what David Cameron says.'
 
'Mr Cameron,' Freer says, 'is entitled to his opinion.'

'...answer the question! Answer her question!' the crowd shouts at Freer.

And on, and on, and on, it goes.

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*Next article will look at shared services projects in more detail, and at councils that are finding that keeping services in house is cheaper, more effective, and much easier to manage. There are a few of them around now, and the left ought to back them. They're quite revolutionary in their way.