Tuesday 6 June 2023 – Redundant, Incompetent or Criminal?
“As a local authority”, our Social Value Strategy goes, “we want to ensure that the companies and businesses we do business with share our commitment to support our local community and help us address local challenges.” The Leader’s forward in the Strategy goes on to claim, “To help us achieve our aims, we’re determined to achieve additional community benefit – or “social value” – from the £270 million we spend each year on buying goods and services for residents. We will be more demanding of the organisations we contract with to maximise the positive impact they have on our community.”
The implication here is that, by being such a big spender in the borough, we have monopoly buying power to affect the market. If suppliers want to do business with us and earn some of that £270 million, then they must do what we say. But the truth is, some of our suppliers have equal or more monopoly selling power than the council can impose. For example, Microsoft is based in San Francisco. They don’t care if we buy from them or not and have probably never heard of Hammersmith and Fulham never mind care about their contributions to its community’s benefit. What are we supposed to do if they don’t play ball, not use Microsoft? I suppose, in theory, we could switch to Apple iOS, but I don’t think Apple is going to give our residents jobs in their Chinese sweatshop factories either even if they wanted them.
Take lift maintenance in West London. We have specific German-made motors in many of the lifts in our housing estates. There are not many local engineering companies mothballed waiting to pick up the contract to maintain our lifts should the incumbent supplier decide they don’t “share our commitment”. There are other councils in West London who are more relaxed about social value should we try to impose any buyer influence on the market and decide to demolish all of our housing estates and start from scratch with a new type of lift motor and set of (temporarily) influencable local lift maintenance companies that we have no reason to think exist.
And so to public health commissioning. We learned from Why Do People Lie? that
there are few organisations that will provide a tolerable, or even humane,
service to our most vulnerable residents, such as those that need help
recovering from substance misuse or those with mental health conditions who
need to be supported to live semi-independently. These charities have their hands already full
with doing good to worry about providing additional and disparate support to
the community than they already do. We
can commission alternative, slum provision from profit-making companies who
will cynically “commit” to additional social value contributions to win a slice
of the £270 million and go and buy a Lamborghini (see Why Do Officers Do It?)
but the Director of Public Health knows better than to go near them with a
barge pole. And this is the dilemma with
which she is faced: comply with the Leader’s hubris or say she did. The obvious answer is the latter but, by her
own admission to me, she cannot manage her staff to do a very good job of lying
about it. The truth is, in some cases, we have very
little monopoly power or influence over the market and the Senior Leadership Team
doesn’t have the backbone to tell the Leader.
In the meantime, commissioning managers and their contract managers
fudge it. The problem with fudging is
they are not really clever enough to do it particularly well. What am I supposed to write in the contract
award reports for CAB about social value; say “Don’t worry about it”?
Yesterday, the Health & Social Care Programme Lead emailed me a contract award report for CAB to renew the contracts of four long-standing mental health living accommodation services with their social value proposals, asking for me to write my comments on the implications of the awards for social value delivery. These are the same suppliers whose contracts were extended for a year in February last year and about which the rather obnoxious, angry and entitled Programme Lead wouldn’t co-operate with me when I asked her about their social value delivery last year. I replied,
“Hi [Programme Lead],
“[These suppliers] proposed social value on previous contracts awarded. I can’t see anything reported on Social Value Portal. Do you know did they deliver their social value? This has implications for the social value on these awards.
“Thanks,
“Paul.”
She replied,
“Hi Paul,
“These are contracts from 2013 originally. They have never been involved with SVP [Social Value Portal: the council’s social value reporting portal for suppliers].
“[My staff member] is the contract monitoring officer. [Contract Monitoring Officer], they have all met their SV commitments for 22-23 is my understanding?”
Ignoring the non-sequitur about when the suppliers were first contracted, she did understand that I was referring to last year’s contract extensions on which social value contributions were committed. Why she was of the “understanding” that they had been delivered when nothing was reported, she didn’t say, but she has deferred to her Contract Monitoring Officer for confirmation, so I left it at that until she did. Then, this morning, she replied to her manager, copying me in:
“Hi [Programme Lead]. Yes. That is also my understanding.
“Kind regards
“[Contract Monitoring Officer]”
What gives her to understand this she also didn’t say. Her role is to monitor and verify that the KPIs in her service’s commissioned contracts have been delivered so she should give others to understand that they have met their commitments, and more: confirm it with a professional conviction. But she doesn’t seem to know this is her role. So, without meaning to show my lack of trust in her seemingly qualified assurance, to be convinced so that I could pass on my conviction to CAB (as is my role), I replied,
“Hi [Contract Monitoring Officer],
“Could you send me the evidence for their social value contributions?
“Thanks,
“Paul.”
Later this morning, she replied,
“Hi Paul,
“I have requested this from the providers and can send you what I have received so far.
“I will follow up with them today and request the evidence to be sent to me by the end of this week. Does that suit you?”
Right, where do I start with this? Firstly, the tenses she uses in her first sentence are somewhat garbled. No evidence was attached to her email and she hasn’t subsequently sent me anything so far. And I assume the pronoun “this” refers to the evidence, so I’m not sure what she is referring to that she might have received so far that she didn’t send me that she said she would even though she could have sent it in this email and didn’t, and hasn’t since. But, in any case, she said she will follow up with them and get the evidence by the end of the week which would resolve the matter.
What might suit me, though, seems an odd concern. It’s they who are asking me to complete their award report. I don’t care. In fact, I'm confident there is no evidence because they haven't delivered anything. It is not as if I think these suppliers have made their contracted social value contributions but decided, in their business development exercise, to hide these from their client. That would be a bizarre thing to think. And suggest. Yet, here she suggests it. I replied,
“It is whatever suits you for the award report. Happy to look at the [evidence] as soon as [it is] sent.”
So what just happened here? She “understood” that social value was delivered, the Contract Monitoring Officer told me, with the intention that I make the comments to CAB in my capacity of independently governing social value delivery that these suppliers are a safe set of hands in which to entrust the Leader’s social value policy commitments to his residents. But it is her role to verify delivery of the contract and give others to understand, nee evidenced assurances, that the contracted KPIs have been delivered. She then said that she had not monitored any evidence that they might have delivered. If she is saying that she has not needed to monitor the contracts, her only job, what does she do? Is she suggesting that her job is redundant? Her manager, the Programme Lead, doesn’t seem to think so because she seems to think she employs her in the role of monitoring contracts which is why she asked her to confirm the KPIs in them have been delivered. The Contract Monitoring Officer seems to know she’s employed by her boss because she replied to her, although it was to (eventually) say she had no idea what has been delivered in the contracts. So is she suggesting she is incompetent in doing what is fundamentally all of her only job? That both the Programme Lead’s and the Contract Monitoring Officer’s qualified assurances to me that they “understood” the KPIs had been delivered when, with the slightest of prompting from me, it became obvious that they both have no reason to understand what might or might not have been delivered, suggests they were lying. Lying in order to defraud the council’s governance process to take public money, albeit for a third party, is called embezzlement. That is a criminal offence. I don’t want to disregard both officers’ redundancy and incompetency here, but it seems clear that their admission of criminality is of biggest concern. And this is why their Director of Public Health can’t trust them with fudging; they’re just really bad at it.
What the suppliers are thinking about not having reported the KPIs to which they have committed in a contract in exchange for public money is perhaps more nuanced and cleverer. If CAB decides not to recommission them based on non-delivery of social value, where are our residents with mental health conditions who need help to live independently gonna go, Detroit? I think the suppliers know this so I’m not holding my breath that I will hear from them by the end of the week.
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