Friday 28 April 2023 – Back to Basics
On Wednesday, the Head of Contract Governance for the Housing and Regeneration Team emailed me another contract award report for “General Building Works” to a company, MCP, for £4.5m. This is to carry out maintenance and repairs on our council housing. Along with the award report for me to add my comments that social value contributions have been committed, attached were MCP’s commitments.
As I have made clear in these pages, I don’t think the officers have their heart in making demands of its housing repairs providers for various reasons. However, its senior leadership team still employs me to govern our policy to demand social value from them. It is a thin line I must tread and I have defaulted this line to be that commitments must be at least desultory. Anything less and I am in danger of being accused of doing no kind of job at all and making my own job redundant. Anything more and CAB has demonstrated that they will delete my comments anyway (see RIP Social Value) and I am at risk of making my own job redundant.
“Desultory”, the line I have drawn in the sand, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “lacking a plan, purpose or enthusiasm”. By this standard, the supplier doesn’t have to show any interest or sense of purpose, and they don’t even have to produce a plan of delivery for me to comment on as part of the governance process. But they do have to say how they came to the number of units of the measure they have chosen and give some basic info, if just one sentence, to acknowledge they understand what that measure they have supposedly committed to even is. And, therefore, they, at least, have to write something.
The Head of Contract Governance, responsible for governing the commissioning of these housing repair contracts (to be clear: not responsible for commissioning them or ensuring they are delivered, but just governing policy is being followed and, to be clear: not just governing policy is being followed because he has a team of officers to do this for him because the council has determined that it would otherwise be too much for just one person, but merely ensuring, through his management of his team, that policy is being followed) feels that “desultory” is too high a standard to demand of the council’s housing and maintenance contractors. Not wanting to get into another internecine battle (see Why Do People Lie?), I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he and his team hadn’t read the proposal before sending it to me to comment that it is complete, so I replied:
“Hi [Head of Contract Governance],
“Do you want to have a look at what the supplier has proposed first? I can’t comment on the social value proposal in the report until the proposal has been made.
“To verify the proposal has been completed, there should be a method statement made… for each measure proposed. And that this method statement addresses the number proposed and gives a brief indication of how that measure will be delivered (that is not completely unrealistic). And, lastly, all measures should be proposed to be delivered to Hammersmith & Fulham residents or businesses.”
He replied,
“Good morning Paul, I am slightly confused as the provided TOMs [social value measures] (attached again for reference) does contain method statement descriptions… Please can you advise?”
Ok, this is going to be exhausting. Is he slightly confused or is he diplomatically telling me he disagrees with me? I think I have already set a low standard and some of the measures proposed have nothing written in the method statement section at all; they are totally blank. It doesn’t seem that this can be confusing. But it also doesn’t feel that the standard of work expected could be lower than mine. I can’t tell where this person has set the bar for managing our housing maintenance and repairs contractors if asking them to do anything is a confusingly high expectation of them. What is confusing is, how do I reply to tell him that my desultory-will-do bar is set slightly higher than his doing-nothing-is-satisfactory standard?
Whether he is being obtuse or actually is confused, I’m just not going to help him; either way, it is his problem:
“Hi [Head of Contract Governance],
“Sorry, no I can’t; I don’t know how to give clearer advice than I have here.”
He replied,
“Apologies Paul I am not asking you for advice rather asking that you re-review the submitted spreadsheet as you have advised that [it] is not complete, when it is. […] Please see attached again.
“Therefore I am unsure what the issue is?”
Er, yes you did ask for advice! You asked, “Please can you advise?” I don’t need to re-review the spreadsheet: it has got a ridiculously wide range of different measures proposed with no explanation of why or how they might do them (or why they are even qualified to offer this “expertise”), from employing unemployed local residents as engineers (does that sound realistic?), creating an apprenticeship, arranging work experience placements, arranging careers education talks in schools, providing employability skills workshops for unemployed residents, including small businesses in the supply chain of this contract, volunteering on community projects and delivering equality, diversity and inclusion training to its own staff who, one would expect are probably mostly not local residents, three measures of which I would concede, if I was being lacksidasical about my role as a council officer, as desultory, the rest either only address how the number of units of the measure proposed have been calculated and, even then, the number in the explanation is different to the number proposed, otherwise provide no acknowledgement whatsoever that they even know what it is they have proposed, never mind a plan to deliver it. And two are actually blank! Yet the Head of Contract Governance no less asserts that I “have advised that [it] is not complete, when it is” and asks me to re-review it. In answer to his question, no. If, given all of this, he is unsure what the issue is, this is a mystery he must solve without my further assistance.
At least, that’s what I promised myself, but it never turns out that way. Later that morning, he chased me up by Teams Messenger this time,
“Hi Paul.”
“i hope you are well.”
“I just want to confirm that you have seen my return email and whether there is any other information needed?”
“thanks”
What other information? I don’t want anything. He wants to procure something. I have been employed by the council to govern procurements in terms of compliance with the council’s social value standards. Recently he has introduced me to two new members of his team that I am “on the team”. I want to tell him I’m not on his team and it is not my responsibility to make sure he gets things procured. Quite the opposite; I am independent to his attempts to procure something. I make judgement on his attempts. He doesn’t get to argue with my judgement; it’s not a discussion. And I have no interest in whether he procures this thing. That is rather the point of my independent role in governance: I am disinterested. I replied,
“Sorry, I don’t know what more I can say in reply. [It] hasn’t been completed but that was only a small part of the advice I gave in my reply. I can’t comment in the report that the minimum requirements of the social value proposal have been made.”
Clearly tone-deaf to my independence in relation to his objective, he replied,
“are we looking at the same spreadsheet as the one i have sent, [it] has been completed?”
“sorry, i think there may have been a mix up somewhere! or am i missing something?”
And he wants to start the argument again. Go away! I don’t care if you’re missing something! It is my job not to care. It is your job not to miss something. It is then my job to independently assess, and then comment to senior leaders responsible for public money, that you have missed something or not. I don’t report to you. Nonetheless, I have given you advice at your request and then you told me you didn’t want my advice because you haven’t missed something. But it’s not your job to govern yourself, but mine. And wanting to pander to your suppliers and apply even lower standards than even the council’s senior leadership team will tolerate has been managed out of the corporate process, so you can’t. But that doesn’t mean you get to harass me! But, then again, I didn’t actually say all this to him so what’s stopping him? And here we are.
So I called him. We went through each measure proposed and, childlike, one by one, he dutifully listened to my explanations for each omission such as why committing to employ 9 local residents and explaining that they will employ 3 local long-term unemployed residents into engineer roles, despite providing no explanation whatsoever of how they will do this, is not an explanation of how these 3 equate to the 9 proposed (I even told him, lest he continue to beg for an explanation by email and Messenger after this call, that 3 is, in fact, less than and, therefore, not equal, to 9), why the numbers for other measures proposed also don’t add up, that none have any explanation of how they will be delivered, and the field for two measures proposed are completely blank. I emphasised that the inclusion of blank fields was a part of what I was referring to when I said in my first email that “the proposal hasn’t been made” and asked him if this has now allayed his confusion that he articulated in his many follow-up messages to me. He diffidently said that he did.
I was accused once by my manager at Haringey Council of being “brutally logical”. This was meant as a bad thing. I know it is true, but I don’t mean to be. Sometimes I get exasperated and I feel that there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of logic I need apply and the eventual brutality of my application of it. But that’s when they chase and harass me. I don’t go looking for someone to brutalise. Someone at the council needs to be proactive and to step up to lead and set higher standards for officers. On 11 April, the Executive Director for Economy emailed an “urgent” and long missive to his directorate about the outcome from an investigation by the Housing Ombudsman into numerous complaints about Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s housing maintenance and our legal responsibilities as a landlord. He told us that,
“In common with many other local authorities, the council has faced an unprecedented level of complaints from residents… due to unacceptable levels of repairs not being completed…”
What he then tells us that we don’t have in common with many
other local authorities is that complaints to LBHF “have resulted in the
Council now receiving its 5th “severe maladministration” case… and
one of the highest numbers of maladministration findings of any London Borough,
despite the relatively small size of our housing stock…”
I don’t know why he added the quote marks around “severe maladministration”. It’s not really jargon for which interpretation and context may be needed to understand its meaning; the condemnation is pretty much what it says on the tin as he goes on to elaborate. He tells us that “these Ombudsman judgements against the council have been deserved.”
Although the Exec Director makes reference to the aging and neglected housing stock, the investigation report by the Ombudsman he attached to the email focusses on tenants trying to report and arrange repairs and the council’s handling of complaints when they find they cannot. It gives a case study of one tenant who was repeatedly promised repairs to his leaking roof, continually ruining his kitchen (and replacement kitchens) over years because appointments were not made, appointments were broken constantly by the contractor, the contractor continually lied to the council that the repairs had been done (and presumably the council paid them for the work), condemnation of council records audited by the Ombudsman that recorded that repairs were done when they weren’t or, more often, that there were no records kept at all.
The Exec Director concluded that the findings “shines a light on our too frequent failure” to handle complaints (primarily about our repairs contractors) and, instead, pay them. “This situation needs resolving” he tells us. Fat chance! Our standards of managing our contractors to deliver even a desultory service to our residents are too low. Our contractors have mesmerised council officers.
The standards by which officers must manage repairs, customer service and complaints for council tenants were published in the council’s Housing Strategy in April 2015, the year after the council’s administration changed from Tory to Labour. The new Cabinet Member for Housing wrote the forward. In it, she declared that,
“It is very clear that when it comes to housing, residents in Hammersmith & Fulham need the council’s support…
“In our 2014 manifesto, The Change We Need, we made more than 40 commitments designed to fundamentally change the Council’s approach to housing.”
As well as creating a compassionate council for existing tenants, commitments include improving council homes, building new social housing and affecting the private rental market. These are ambitious goals. Although, and because, we have made very little progress on these commitments on the eight-year anniversary of the publication of this policy, we are a long way from these heady ambitions and all we officers mostly do every day in executing her policy is fight with each other to see who can set the bar the lowest, hand all our money over to contractors and don’t expect any work or standards from them. We can’t even record the complaints we then get about them. Today I have spent mostly writing a DIY contract for a new supplier which, scarily, most officers have to do because there is no process in the council to procure low- or mid-value contracts, yet Corporate Procurement published their highly ambitious Sourcing Strategy this month. The rest of the last three weeks I have been “tasked” by my Assistant Director to digest all planning contributions that the council can use towards economic development because the Chief Executive told him, he name-dropped in the Economic Development Management Team Meeting last month, that “we must be ambitious”. We can’t even enforce the S106 Economic Development contributions the council’s planners already spend so much time and effort negotiating because their colleagues in the Infrastructure Development team don’t like to bother rich developers, and we don’t get social value contributions from our £270m annual spend because our very own AD dismissed it as “just a whip-round of our suppliers” and he is a champion member of CAB to delete any comments I make that might look bad in publication rather than address failings in the council’s procurement process (see RIP Social Value).
The Cabinet Member concluded in 2015,
“Because of the scale of change that we are facing, some of the solutions we are proposing are radical and initially may be difficult for people to accept. But we are convinced that to achieve the radical scale of our ambition, we need to adopt radical solutions.”
Councillors, take my advice, forget radical; “ambitious” doesn’t get leaky roofs fixed, remove mold from homes, answer complaints or get local residents employed in the contracts we let. You have to remember we officers lack direction and we are in disarray. Let’s just try and get the basics right. That is the scale of the of the change we are facing.
The then Prime
Minister, John Major, gave a speech in Blackpool in 1993 eschewing Big
Government and a reliance on the Welfare State, putting the focus, instead, back
on the people and traditional behaviour, promising a return to 1950’s-style morality
based on self-reliance, decency, the family and respect for the law. It was considered at the time unambitious.
This morning, the Head of Contract Governance
sent me MCP’s revised social value bid based on my advice that he never asked
for. Whether the more detailed method
statements met at least my lofty standard of “desultory” is marginal, but I
considered that it doesn’t matter too much because no-one is going to expect,
never mind enforce, that they are delivered anyway, so I gave them provisional
benefit of the doubt. The proviso I
added to my comments in the award report to CAB was,
“The method statements for some measures pose a risk that they will not be delivered and it is recommended that a delivery plan is agreed between MCP and the council at the start of the contract.”
I thought that would be the end of it. I have as good as sanctioned the social value bid. CAB is not going to not agree the award based on that warning given the recommendation I have made to mitigate it. And I thought the Head of Contract Governance had been suitably humbled by his first attempt to harass me for my approval. But, despite the method statements still being largely rubbish and one measure proposed with no commitment to actually delivering it, he questioned the need for my recommendation, added with the aim of assuring CAB about awarding his flawed contract. He wrote,
“Hi Paul, thank you for completing this. Although I will submit your comments as-is, regarding [your recommendation for a delivery plan to be agreed once the contract has commenced], please can you advise which measures you are referring to here? And what components are driving the view that there is an inherent risk of non-delivery?”
He will submit my comments as-is? What does that mean? What is the implied alternative; that he will doctor my comments and defraud the council’s governance process to embezzle £4.5m on behalf of MCP? And admit to it? I will, again, give him the benefit of the doubt and assume not but rather he is just that stupid that he doesn’t understand what public money or governance of it is, and not a double-agent for a corrupt private contractor. I can’t actually stop anyone attributing comments to me in a report to CAB and the governance process is based on a trust that council officers will not actually commit a criminal offence for no direct personal financial gain, so I remain zen about the possibility and ignore this comment and replied to the rest:
“Hi Head of Contract Governance,
“As we discussed [on Wednesday], employing [now revised to] 3 engineers from local residents over the three years is somewhat ambitious and requires thought as to who these candidates might be. I take it from this method statement, and that no other training has been proposed in this social value submission, that no support or training will be given to candidates to enter the sector. Therefore, without a plan, it is not immediately clear how these measures might be delivered. I have commented that a plan is needed.
“Also, and not quite the same thing, there is no method statement for [how local Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will be included in the supply chain of the contract], rather a method statement for [a different measure: using any local companies in the supply chain] repeated with a commitment that should any spend happen to be with SMEs, then this will be identified. This is not a method statement to engage and use SMEs in its supply chain and is therefore a high-risk proposal upon which to rely.
“[…]
“Paul.”
Still he replied…
“Hi Paul,
“Construction companies usually mobilize their supply chain locally and given that they are employing general builders, I don’t believe this would be considered as ambitious as it is a very generic skillset in construction. Also a lot of general builders like local work (as they avoid travel time/unproductive costs of travel) and therefore they should have a lot of interest from the labour market.
“The same principle would apply for [procuring their supply chain for this contract]. They cant [sic] issue a method statement at this stage as they have not received work orders and therefore cannot scope out the labour and materials needed to map out exact supply chain approach. General build jobs are bespoke and therefore this level of detail would be needed for them to go into this level of detail.”
General Builders? Where did that come from? Confused, I replied,
“The method statement is for engineers, not general builders. […]
“If, for good reason, they are unable to make a method statement at this stage for local procurement, more the reason to comment that a delivery plan would benefit in lieu of having the [policy-]required method statement.
“Can I also highlight that, with the exception of Kier, many of these contracts have not delivered any social value to date, or begrudgingly delivered some (e.g. AJS [see Rotten Borough] and Arcadis). There does seem to be risk generally and I’m not otherwise clear how this is being managed.”
Then, to my disbelief, despite my having approved his contract numerous emails ago, at the end of the day, with 16 minutes remaining before the bank holiday weekend, he countered with one last jab. After all the rubbish he has thrown at me unsolicited, what could he possibly still have to say? His email read,
“General builders are sometimes called technicians or engineers. In the context of their contract, they will not have any traditionally focussed engineering work and therefore they are using the terms GB and engineers synonymously.”
In their bid, rather than write what their proposal is, your preferred contractor’s chosen business development model to win contracts is to use synonyms? As well as they not being synonyms, even in the parlance of the construction industry, this is the argument you want to make for the governance of multimillion pound, publicly-funded contracts, the particulars of these bids, which are transferred verbatim into the exacting legalese of a binding contract, to be, at least in council policy if not actual practice by officers employed to execute the council’s policies, contract-managed and, should they not be delivered, financially remedied, enforceable in a court of law, that the bid is synonymous?
Thank God it is the bank holiday weekend because I need a break from these chancers! But before I switched off my laptop, I sent him my response which I’m certain will stop him emailing me about this again,
“Happy to have another look at the method statements again if they want to better articulate them.”
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