Friday 5 April – If you’re going to do something wrong, do it right!

“I’m working on the Mund Street [social housing construction development]”, a Development Manager in the Housing Team emailed me last month, “and we joined the project late 2023 so I was hoping to get an update on the latest position on social value commitments from our consultants.

“We have LDS [Lifschutz Davidson Sanderson] as the design team and Arcadis as our control team.

“…I’m conscious that we’re nearing the end of RIBA Stage 2 and have paid out a significant proportion of fees so want to make sure they’re meeting the SV [Social Value] as agreed in their tender.”

 

No, neither have, I replied.  “LDS hasn’t reported delivering any social value on their Mund Street Design Team contract.”

“I recently spoke to the consultants and they seem to think that they have achieved some of the SV commitments…”, she replied.  “Can I please check, have both consultants completed their SV commitments for Farm Lane and Lillie Road [social housing developments]?  All three projects were tendered together so don’t know if there was an overlap of SV outcomes etc…”

Rude!  Is she asking me if I am fundamentally not doing my job?  How do I reply to this?  What few frontline services a council still has do an admirable job working with little resources to support some residents in precarious situations in their lives.  Otherwise, the only expertise officers need across the myriad grades and seniority so minutely appraised and remunerated by senior management, is to specify contracts needed, commission them, contract-manage them and pay suppliers.  And, in her defence, boy, can we not even get that right.  Nonetheless it still seems jarring that the Development Manager here assumes that because the suppliers, the consultants in this case, “seem to think that they have achieved some of” their contracted commitments, then that could be good enough because, what do we council officers know about contract management?  I replied today,

“I’ve been basing what SV suppliers have delivered on what evidence of contributions they have reported and I have verified.  Because of the way the council measures SV proposed in bids and, subsequently, delivered (using the TOMs), there’s no ambiguity in what social value measures relate to what contract and what has been verified as delivered.”…

…but thanks for starting off on the presumption that the council, I, have no method of monitoring social value even though it’s my job, and that your consultants simply seeming “to think” that they have achieved more is enough to not ask them any more probing questions but, instead, challenge me on my monitored findings.  It does rather demonstrate the culture of the council that it is expected no-one is really contract-managing anything even though that is all we basically have to do.

I know what the council officer was thinking because that we do nothing as a matter of course is what a council officer does so it was not a great leap by her to assume I would have no idea.  Exceptionally, I did.  But, more intriguingly, what were the consultants thinking?  They’re not so in tune with the council’s do-nothing, whose-feet-are-they culture.  How did they prepare for their conversation with their council contract manager, their client?

“We haven’t delivered the KPIs in our contract!  What do we say?”

“Tell her we think we’ve delivered more.”

“What if she asks to see it?”

“That’s why we only say we think we have delivered it.  Plausible deniability.  Maybe she’ll stop asking after that because she pays us to do her thinking for her.  Otherwise, council officers don’t do anything.  It might just work.”

Fr Jack, overstimulated by being on holidays in a caravan, wants to explore and starts by questioning whose feet are they he can see.  Suppliers assume council officers are often less stimulated, curious and questioning.

But it didn’t work.  LDS and Arcadis are being held to account, at least by my efforts, and you’ve got to wonder what their long-term plan here is with this.  Construction consultants, particularly control teams, are largely dependent on public sector contracts.  Private construction companies and property developers tend to have their own in-house expertise.  Local government, which owns lots of land, buy in these services.  Central Government departments are now starting adopt social value in their procurements.  Social Value is the law: it is something we public authorities must do.  Forevermore contractors that don’t deliver social value are going to be excluded from their own clients and markets.  Yes, we at Hammersmith & Fulham Council are a bit rubbish at it, and senior officers actively try to subvert our own procurement policy (see Why Do Officers Do It?) and , right now, not many other local or regional authorities are much better at it (breaking public procurement regulations) but, as more and more public authorities start to adopt a social value policy, if for no other reason than they have to, and employ scores of well-paid corporate procurement managers and consultants at great expense to the public purse who are supposed to know and implement this stuff (and it’s not complicated), then why can’t LDS and Arcadis see the way the tide is moving and get ahead of it?  Not engaging in social value will eventually catch up with them and completely put them out of business.

Being overly led by greed chasing public money and not contributing to society has led them to doing wrong.  But, if you chose to do something wrong, wouldn't you hope you would do it better than this?  Oscar Wilde said “There is no sin except stupidity”. Phoebe in Friends, a political vegetarian, when pregnant with her brother’s triplets, acquires a craving for meat.  So she starts to make a processed-meat sandwich.  On seeing this, Joey protests; but he’s not so worried about her succumbing to her urges and denying her principles but, rather, if she’s going to drop her principles, then insists she does it properly and proceeds to produce two steaks from the freezer.

Joey: “If you’re going to do something wrong, do it right!”

Yesterday, I had a further meeting with Higgins Construction, the developer for the Hartopp & Lannoy social housing development, about their social value delivery plan (see What If Oil Just Stopped?) and the council’s contract management team.  Since my update in What If Oil Just Stopped, eventually I persuaded everyone that Higgins proposing to employ 100.5% of the staff to construct the development from long-term unemployed residents of the borough was beyond stupid.  In a testy meeting on 29 February, Higgins’s Director of Environment, Social and Governance asked me, then  what social value should they deliver if not over 100% of the jobs going to the unemployed because, like, why would she have any idea about her company directing and governing environmental and social contributions?  Surprised yet energised by being delegated this decision, I reverted to my original idea agreed with the Regeneration Manager when the project was originally specified, that they refurbish the Caretakers Lodge into keyworkers accommodation for teachers (see Culture and Technology Lock).  After the meeting, I spoke to the project’s Regeneration Manager about the plan, and he agreed to provide her with the specifications and offer her and her surveyors a tour of the site.  I emailed all the details to the council’s appointed contract management agent at AtkinsRealis (we have even outsourced the expertise to contract-managing this project and to lead these meetings) to send to Higgins’s ESG Director along with an e-introduction to the Regen Manager who could help her create and cost the plan.

In yesterday's follow-up meeting, our agent asked Higgins’s Director what progress she had made on the social value delivery plan since our last meeting in February.  “What plan?”, she replied with an enigmatic half-smile like the Mona Lisa giving away no emotion, whether surprise, subterfuge, irritation or embarrassment.  She was playing it cool.

“I sent you the details of the Regeneration Manager to follow up with after our last meeting”, she replied.

“I don’t remember seeing any email.”

“I emailed it to you 1 March at 3:56pm.”

“I didn’t receive anything”, she replied blankly showing no sign that she cared or she had any intention of doing anything about it.

The agent paused while, in stark contrast to the Higgins Director’s robotic indifference, looked like she was chewing a wasp before summarising that it has been over a year now since this contract started and Higgins still hadn’t provided a delivery plan.

The Director remained unmoved, the half-smile stuck in place.  This summary was having no impact on her.  As the group paused, everyone must have been asking, what was her long-term plan here?  She clearly intends to do wrong.  But is this the best she could do it; just sit there grinning like a moron at everyone in the meeting denying the most apparent facts?  “Deny everything Baldrick”, Captain Blackadder told him when called as a witness to his murdering of General Melchett’s prize pigeon to be questioned in the witness stand by defence counsel, Lieutenant George.

Lt George: Are you Private Baldrick?

Pvt Baldrick: No!

G: Erm, but you are Captain Blackadder’s batman?

B: No!

G: Come on Baldrick, be a bit more helpful, it’s me.

B: No it isn’t!

Cpt Darling (prosecution counsel addressing the judge): Sir, I must protest.

Judge Lord Gen Melchett: Quite right, we don’t need your kind here, Private.  Get out!

Alas, I can’t announce that we don’t need the Director’s kind here and bark at her to get out; the Housing Team, in their wisdom, has already procured her.  So I simply explained to her again, and the group, that I had spoken to the Hartopp & Lannoy Regen Manager about my proposed plan and that he was expecting her email.  She emailed him that afternoon.

As far as doing something wrong goes, she was doing a bizarre job of it so far and it will be interesting to see what happens in the next meeting that our agent is paid to and bound to arrange and review the minutes of this meeting and challenge her on if she has a better excuse as to why she doesn’t have a plan yet, or indeed, is on the path to building the teachers’ new homes.

In another example of “How Badly Is Your Plan Going To Avoid Making Your Social Value Contributions”, IT’s supplier, ANS, need to have their contract extended because they didn’t finish the job they were paid for in the first place (connecting the newly rebuilt Hammersmith Town Hall’s internet).  This means awarding more money and, therefore, a new contract.  On Wednesday, their contract manager emailed me the award report asking for my comments on the implications for Social Value.  I replied warning him:

“The implications for social value are that ANS has refused to deliver them.  [Your colleague, also a Contract Manager] has been in contact with me to rectify this and get contributions owing and commitments for a new contract.

“Do you want me to wait for [him] to get back to me before I add my comments?”

 

He replied yesterday morning,

“Yes, please hold this until you hear from [him].

However, by the afternoon, he had changed his mind and emailed me back again,

“Hi Paul,

“We are awaiting confirmation from ANS regarding the social value payments for the current contract.  We would not agree that ‘ANS has refused to deliver them’ but there has clearly been some misunderstanding on the requirements.

“To clarify the background, the contract was originally awarded as a call off from the CCS G Cloud 12 framework.  This included ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ but recent advice from Legal regarding an identically worded clause in another CCS Framework (RM 6175 Records Information Management, Digital Solutions and Associated Services) was that it did not constitute a requirement to make a social value contribution, and we have proceeded with that procurement on that basis.

“However, ANS had proposed to make a social value contribution (totalling £20,700) as part of their tender, which now forms part of the contract, and this is what we are currently holding them to.  We are negotiating for an additional contribution for the extension but this would be voluntary on their part.

“Yours

“Contract monitoring office [sic]”

Right, well none of that is true, is it?  Unlike Baldrick, he is not denying who he is, but the rest is firmly planted in denial.  I had the conversation with ANS in July when we discussed to where they could make their social value donations to charity of £20,700, yet, in a follow-up meeting, ANS flatly told me they simply weren’t going to make the payments now.  There was not a lot more I could add to that, and our relationship ended, at least I not losing much sleep over it.  The contract manager, whose job it is to manage that his suppliers do actually deliver the KPIs in their contract with the council, was a no-show in these meetings and no further action was taken against ANS, but now that he needs another contract award, he needs to consider my comments because, unlike anyone managing he actually does his job properly, public spending, even wild, uncontrolled IT projects like this one and the IT project that purportedly bankrupted Birmingham City Council (see The Little Things) is supposed to be subject to an independent governance process.  As part of that independence, why he thinks I might care if he agrees that “ANS has refused to deliver them” when he wasn’t in those meetings with us, I don’t know nor care.

Additionally, Crown Commercial Service procurement frameworks (CCS) to aid source major suppliers in the UK (think Checkatrade for the public sector) does specifically require its recommended suppliers comply with public authorities’ social value policies.  He says here Legal advised him that CCS doesn’t accommodate it, so Legal advises, he claims, that we must breach our own constitution, as well as UK public procurement legislation, rather than use a compliant framework?  But Legal didn’t actually write these rather bizarre comments into the report which they are obliged to do, they being very serious legal implications.  I don’t think I believe him, not that I should and why comments are written into reports rather than passed on as second-hand gossip as the Contract Monitoring Officer suggests.

And there is no holding anyone to anything anymore; the contract has finished.  That’s why he is trying to award them another one because, notwithstanding the social value KPIs, they haven’t installed the internet yet.  At this stage, with the award report primed to go to CAB, ANS has either made the charitable payments committed in the original contract, or they haven’t.  This is what he is asking me to comment on.

And negotiating a voluntary contribution on the new contract award (2% was negotiated apparently) is just a policy plucked from outer space.  IT, no matter how loose and fast they tend to play with public money, can’t just invent their own policies because, even if the financial and policy controls failed for Birmingham, IT is going to run head long into a procurement governance process eventually, and maybe one day an ombudsman or the police (see For the Betterment of the People).  I replied,

“Hi [Contract Manager],

It is the £20,700 Social Value contributions and the CCS contract which requires this to which I am referring.  They did flatly refuse to make the contributions in a meeting with me.  I did not misunderstand this.

If a voluntary contribution were sought on another contract award over £100k, this would be in breach of the council’s Social Value policy which requires a contribution of at least 10%.  These would be my comments in the report.

Paul.

He took this advice as a lesson learned albeit reluctantly.  “Interesting”, he replied, “that was not my understanding.  Things seem to have moved on since that conversation.”  Well this is why CAB isn’t asking for his understanding and my conversation with ANS never moved on reflected in the fact that they haven’t made any contributions.

Besides council officers’ lack of understanding of what public money is, what is ANS thinking here?  This can’t be a long-term plan.  They were quite nonchalant with me back in July when they declared they weren’t going to make the social value donations now.  I told them then that this would come back and bite them on the backside if they ever wanted to work with the council again but left them to dig their own grave.

Laing O’Rourke’s transparently clumsy attempts at wriggling out of making their planning (S106) contributions on the Olympia development has been a prime example in these pages making a hash of trying not to do good.  Having gone into stealth mode for months now, I eventually chased the landowner, the Director of Olympia, directly, to warn him of the risk his appointed developer was putting on his £570m planning permission.  Simultaneously, I chased Laing O’Rourke again for their report of S106 outputs.

Sure enough, on 16 February, Laing O’Rourke reached out to me.  It was a long email presentation from the Social Value Manager (the original rhino appears to have been put out to grass).  They, he informs me, have been “working closely” with Jobcentre Plus and sub-contractors, blah blah blah, shortly launching a technical apprenticeship programme, blah blah blah, jobs fairs arranged, recently uploaded 89 training and job opportunities ads, and promoted jobs with HS2 to women (I have no idea how that might be relevant), blah blah blah.

“Please let me know if you require any further information at this stage”, he concluded the report.

I don’t want a presentation.  I just want them to report to me what S106 outputs they’ve delivered so far.  Who of our residents have they trained and employed and what sub-contracts have gone to local businesses?  Just fill in the form.  Like CMS’s officer who eventually closed down Theranos’s blood diagnostic laboratory and exposed Silicon Valley’s probably biggest ever tech investor fraud, he didn’t want a presentation from the senior management team, he was just here to inspect the lab; that patients’ blood samples were being sent to for testing weren’t being left in the sun to bake and congeal (they were).  These managers are good at schmoozing senior council officers but it doesn’t really work on us low-level, boring government bureaucrats; we’re only interested in reality.

“I don’t want a presentation, I just want to see the lab.”  The Dropout (2022): CMS US federal laboratory standards regulator, Peter Smith, comes to inspect Theranos’s laboratory but, unlike the board of investors who were taken for millions of dollars by Elizabeth Homes such as Senator George Schultz, General James Mattis and Rupert Murdoch, he’s not self-important enough to be schmoozed by top management.  They didn’t have a plan B and he closed down their lab.

I don’t know what Laing O’Rourke’s, or indeed, Olympia’s plan is here.  Unlike Social Value in procurement, S106 planning obligations are well established and the financial remedies for what they haven’t delivered yet currently stand at £2.8m and construction is due to be completed in September.  I boringly replied to the email with the presentation in it attaching their last report tracker and simply asked them to update it with any more outputs.  Of course, the Rhino password-protected the spreadsheet in Laing O’Rourke’s last ruse to pretend they cared about their employees’ data protection and use that as an excuse, unsuccessfully, to not report the outputs they obviously hadn’t delivered (see I Didn’t Ask You to Break the Law), and the Social Value Manager emailed me back unashamedly asking me to email him their password they had since lost, putting, by their standards, their employees’ personal data, that they were so sanctimonious about, at risk.  That was 18 March and no word yet on the report.  Perhaps he is still trying to find out where he advertised those 89 jobs and apprenticeships that he says he will fill on a construction project that is finishing in five months.  All I can tell him is they weren’t advertised with the council.

My Assistant Director says the contract managers and, by implication, suppliers are running rings around me (see What Is It You Think Bishops Do?) and that is why he is deleting my job, but “running rings” feels far too designed and deliberate to characterise their efforts so far to avoid contributing to social value.  Rather, it is the AD who is running rings around me doing his best to diminish governance of Social Value in major contract awards, including defrauding my comments, and instructing me not to monitor suppliers.  As well as having whistleblown this (and still waiting to hear back), yesterday I emailed the administrator for CAB who checks that all comments have been completed in award reports by named governing officers before being put on CAB’s agenda, asking in passing whether it is normal my comments are edited because I can see that they are and, on one occasion, comments in one report I didn’t write were attributed to me.  “This is really bad”, she replied simply.  “I will raise this issue on my team meeting to see how we can stop this.”  In the meantime, it’s a race to see if I get the AD sacked before he sacks me.  But, if the latter (the more likely) and my job is deleted, then businesses like Higgins Construction, ANS and Laing O’Rourke will have got lucky, at least for now, rather than having done something wrong through any well-laid plans.  No principle-busting steaks were produced here.