Thursday 2 May 2024 – The Ultimate Test

“In my job I help people.”  These are the words with which I started this diary back in 2021.  They have led my thoughts to seemingly being a little gauche and crude and, therefore, thoughts I have certainly not shared with my colleagues.  But, nonetheless, in my time at Hammersmith & Fulham Council, I have talked at length about examples of, and concluded that, with the exception of those good workers on the frontline delivering services to residents, council officers, where they have that management authority, are only here to serve themselves and by proxy, businesses doing business with them.

Drilling down into these examples to understand the context has given me to use technical language.  Having tried to put this into a real context but, nonetheless, may be heavy going for the casual reader, it portrays a complexity of duties and balancing competing priorities that, those officers at least, might use to choose to justify their otherwise seemingly selfish actions.   But, to conclude this diary, I have been given the opportunity to give the Economy Directorate’s procurement governance manager for housing and regeneration, the Head of Contract Governance, arguably the representative protagonist of the council in this diary, the ultimate test without complexity, to finally learn whether his allegiance is to the businesses to which I have described how he siphons public money, or to the residents who we are all employed to serve and who pay us to serve them.

On Monday, he and I received an email from the officer responsible for the accommodation, the four large houses, for women survivors of domestic abuse: the women’s refuges.  She “wondered whether any of [the council’s construction and property maintenance] contractors could support with some of the… works [needed on the properties such as] bathroom renovations, kitchens, internal decoration and external fabric repairs.”  She wants the properties to be not just semi-derelict houses, but a liveable refuge and afford families some dignity and space to gather their lives and move on to live independently.  It encapsulates well the safety net that any government, the collection of people in a society that has evolved from the primordial socio-psychological dilemma of “Me versus Us”, to collectively provide for anyone of us to overcome temporary adversity, which can affect anyone of us in one way or another, to prosper and continue to be able to contribute.  Even if this evident truth were not true, our representatives in the council, councillors, dictate that, not that we should ask our suppliers to contribute, but that we must insist upon it as a matter of policy, supposedly independently governed, and applying these diktats is the only reason we officers have a job in the first place.  Add to this, this is a simple request which is bread and butter for many of our suppliers and to which Kier, Mulalley and Travis Perkins have already un-fussily contributed.  She is simply asking are there any more suppliers who we know of that the Head of Contract Governance responsible for Housing and Regen could direct to which to make their social value contributions.

It is the ultimate test for the Head of Contract Governance.  Unsullied by nuance, will he govern that the council’s procurement policy is followed by his supply chain and direct any one or more of them to make this simple contribution to which they are contractually bound?  Or will he ignore his duty, and his colleague’s plea, and leave the women and families to live in squalor or cause them to choose to remain living with their abusers?  The message from the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Team has been this plain in the past few months and the reason why Mulalley, Kier and Travis Perkins have volunteered, not just out of contractual duty but, as is my understanding from the conversations I have had with their social value leads, mostly out of a sense of humanity and that they simply are able to help because, I personally can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t if they could, without any word from their council contract managers.

Because I have been excluded from the governance process by Assistant Directors because I was doing too good a job of extracting contributions from their friends (see What are you Gonna Do Today?), I have been taken out of the loop on any new contract awards that should have social value commitments in them.  However, I know the Housing and Regen Team has procured new contracts so I replied, hashtagging the Head of Contract Governance to highlight he is being addressed directly:

“Hi [VAWG Team Manager],

“I haven’t had a new contract with social value commitments for a few months but I’ll keep an eye out for these.

“I understand Kier, Mulalley and Travis Perkins are already contributing to this and Higgins isn’t.  Is that correct?

“@[Head of Contract Governance]: H&F – Is Cablesheer’s contract up for renewal and are they looking for support on how to direct their SV contributions?  Also, I note Core Projects and MCP haven’t delivered anything yet?

“Paul.”

 

No reply from the Head of Contract Governance.  He is uncomplicatedly not working at the council to govern contracts to serve residents in temporary need of society’s collective support; our reason for being.  He is simply not government.  And he is brazen about it by grievously (and clearly unprofessionally in any other business) ignoring his workmates simply doing our jobs of which he is supposed to be a colleague.  The test unequivocally proves he is a gangster who has infiltrated this council that, every year, spends £650m.