Wednesday 9 April 2025 – Gaslighting

“Hi Paul,

“Do we need to use our time in the diary to meet today?

“I am working with colleagues on the ESAP so will happily take the time back.  I will cancel but keep the time open if you wish to re-establish.

“Thanks,

“[Social Value Manager],

“Related Argent”

  

But we don’t have a meeting in the diary today!?

“Gaslighting” is when you subject a person to an alternative reality to that which they can perceive with their own senses.  If someone, or people around you, consistently and confidently make reference to experiences that never happened and things that don’t exist, despite they contradicting what you can see with your own eyes, it can be disorientating that those around you seem to be seeing something different to what you perceive.  A grip on actual reality is a mindset one must struggle to retain when you have a junior role in governing big business.

Gaslight (1944): Ingrid Bergman is driven to insanity by Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury constantly depicting an different reality to that which Bergman is seeing with her own eyes, eventually becoming convinced that the dimming light from the gaslights (the film is set in Victorian London) is a figment of her imagination.

What is the Social Value Manager at Related Argent, who, as his job title suggests, is supposed to be leading on writing the employment and skills delivery plan (“ESAP”) for the enormous development at Brent Cross but, in reality, isn’t doing anything, trying to convince me of here?  Is he trying to depict that he is working on something when he isn’t?  If so, that is more lying than gaslighting.  Just say, “I’m doing it” when you’re not; plenty of employees do this.  He could have emailed me and said, “Phew, I am hard at work!”  What’s with the reference to a meeting that we don’t have arranged and is clearly not in Outlook Calendar, the calendar of meetings we all share?  

We used to have weekly meetings every Wednesday because, when I started at the council, I was told by my predecessor handing her work over to me that Brent Cross Town was a big deal and that I would be working closely with the lead developer, Related Argent’s, Social Value Manager to ensure local residents benefit from the economic development effect of all the capital development by contractors by training local residents and employing them in the many jobs being created in their own neighbourhood.  That was the planning contribution required by the Local Planning Authority put on the planning applicant/owner.  The planning applicant happens to be a “joint venture” between the developer, Related Argent, and the landowner, the Council.  Barnet Council put in a planning application to the Local Planning Authority which, for anywhere in Barnet, is Barnet Council.  Now, this may seem like a conflict of interest but strict governance regulations allow the duties of the LPA to remain independent from the interests of the Council, so long as those regulations are adhered to.  In fact, given that councils are one of the biggest landowners in their own boroughs, and developing the prosperity of the borough and, therefore, the residents they represent, is part of their raison d’etre, so it is not unusual for a council to develop their own land.  And, as with any landowner, they have to submit a planning application first which, as with any planning application and, according to the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, must be objectively appraised by the Local Planning Authority.

But, although councils might be big landowners, they are not developers: they do not have the financial wherewithal to build big things.  That’s where a joint venture partner comes in.  The landowner does a deal with the developer that, in return for putting up the money, will hand over the land to the developer to build flats and office space and sell and rent it in return for a percentage of those sales and rent returns.

The only way that this mechanism can work is to maintain a separation between its roles of local planning authority (with statutory planning duties as well as the authority to grant planning permission) and local authority (with statutory duties to house residents and meet Government homes-building targets as well as commercialise their assets to remain financially afloat to deliver other statutory duties such as adult and children’s social care which is becoming increasingly expensive). 

But that’s not the duty of the joint venture partner and not in their interest.  Their only interest is to pay themselves as much as they can.  So, just as logically as it is for Barnet Council to create separations between its own duties, so it is the duty of Related Argent to blur the lines between the interests of the local authority to make money and the local planning authority to objectively assess, place and enforce planning obligations and conditions on the landowner.  Add to this dynamic, Barnet Council is not very competent at exercising its duties and Related Argent is damn good at exercising theirs.  As part of this competence, the “Social Value Manager” is selected for his talents to blur.

From when I started at the Council, Related Argent’s Social Value Manager put in regular meetings with me each Wednesday afternoon to regularly catch up on progress of employment and skills delivery on the construction sites of the various plots continuously under construction and will be for the next couple of decades.  In those meetings, we were to discuss the progress of delivery as well as the design of the ESAP for the next phase of development, “Phase 5E”.  The reason he took such interest in it is that it is contained in the S106 contract that an ESAP must be agreed by the LPA before planning permission can be granted to commence construction of each phase.  I am the S106 Officer for Employment & Skills, so it is in his interest to include me in the design of the ESAP so that I can agree it.  I am interested in Barnet residents benefitting from the jobs being created (see Introduction) and so it is in my interest to be involved in the delivery plan’s design.  To add my expertise to the plan is not a conflict of interest to then approving the plan if I objectively know what makes a good delivery plan for Employment & Skills.  But it’s not in Related Argent’s Social Value Manager’s interest to design and agree a good delivery plan because training and employing previously unemployed residents and giving them a start in a career is expensive; a contribution they would rather avoid if they can.  So our initial meetings were reduced to my enquiring of him what had been delivered to date at all and he saying he didn’t know as he was also new to the role (he has been in post for years).  He also said that he had no role in drafting the next-phase ESAP but that RA’s Planning Team had retained Quod, a planning agency, to draft it.  Added to this narrative, he was saccharine-sweet and said we could review the plan and have an input when the first draft was eventually produced by Quod, which, in each progressive weekly meeting, was increasingly imminent.

I questioned regularly what Quod, a planning agency, could and might know about employment and skills delivery and, as it became increasingly clear over the weeks that nothing happening was “imminent”, increasingly asserted that he and I, supposedly employed specifically for our expertise in employment and skills delivery, and is clearly our role and our role alone as representatives each of the two parties of the Joint Venture, just simply to write it ourselves and stop waiting for Quod.  But, with each passing week, he persuaded me that we will have the opportunity to dive into what he agreed was bound to be an inexpert and, therefore, bad delivery plan and, in the meantime, humoured me as I went off to speak to delivery partners and drafted their potential contributions to be inserted into the plan.  Still nothing was produced by Quod to insert them into.

The Quarter 2 monitoring returns of local residents employed on the current phase of development was a jumbled mess that bore little relation to the S106-contracted targets.  The Social Value Manager blamed the impenetrable reports on the individual contractors and promised to have clarity for the next report for Q3, due in January.

By Christmas, I realised that nothing was happening in our weekly meetings and my patience was nearing an end.  I insisted that we make a start on the ESAP and use the input I already had from partners and that this wasn’t a difficult task, and remarked that that Quod could take so many months over it was unreal.  Alas, our perceptions of reality clashed, at least as he described his.  So, I suggested that, in the meantime, could he not push back to his Planning team to insist that he, the Social Value Manager, lead on the ESAP given that they hadn’t produced anything yet and unlikely would produce anything of worth because, why would they be able to?  He replied that it would be more than his job’s worth as Social Value Manager to challenge their authority on leading on Social Value and that he would probably be sacked if he tried to.  Was I supposed to accept this unreal version of reality?  I didn’t really see I had a choice but to because what else could I do?  However, he conceded that he was going on holidays abroad for three weeks after Christmas and, when he returned, and with the good grace of God he had a job to return to with all the upset he had described to me he had caused his superiors/Planning team (he didn’t really differentiate between them in the dread with which he spoke), the planners would have their first draft and we could then meet to review it and take it apart and add what we felt was needed before presenting it to the Joint Venture’s steering group: the Employment and Skills Steering Group (ESSG).  With the first indication of a hard deadline and with no-one going to be around for Christmas anyway, including me, I relented to wait until then.

Waiting longer than I first thought, on 5 February, addressed to the Council’s lead planner for Brent Cross Town and copying me in, a Related Argent Planning Manager eventually emailed the draft ESAP.  Now the Social Value Manager and I could dig in and start creating a proper one.

Coincidentally, we both attended the Construction Industry Training Board’s annual conference in Earls Court the following day and, over lunch, we planned to meet in Related Argent’s newly-built office on the Brent Cross Town development (on which no local residents had been employed on building) the following Wednesday the 12^th to make a start on it.  But, then, on Monday the 10^th, the Social Value Manager, chair of the ESSG, sent an invite for the ESSG to meet in their same office at the same time as our arranged meeting to review the ESAP with the agenda objective of adopting it. 

But we haven’t reviewed it yet, I replied to him.  What happened to our meeting we agreed to over lunch?  I thought we agreed to do this before it went to ESSG?  Ok, he replied, we’ll spend tomorrow afternoon reviewing it so that it can be presented to the ESSG the following morning as was now scheduled.

What did this mean?  It had taken a whole team at Quod 13 months to produce this version.  How were we going to produce a version in an afternoon?  I read it and it was garbled nonsense with no commitments to delivering employment and skills services to residents and, at best, if I was willing to be very generous, some vague promises that they might try to do some undetermined things sometime in the undetermined future so long as that didn’t mean committing to targets or spending any of the £1.7m budget assigned by both the Council and RA but inexplicably in the bank account of RA, or explaining to anyone when the phase would start or finish.  I accepted the meeting because, in the first place, I wanted to know what was going on given everything that, at least, I had perceived that we had agreed.

Two minutes to the meeting arranged for 2pm that Tuesday, the Social Value Manager sent a cancellation without explanation.  In return, I declined my invitation to the ESSG meeting on the following day explaining to him that it was not my duty to discuss the merits of an ESAP on behalf of the Joint Venture and its ESSG given that it didn’t have any, but that I had a duty to objectively review the submission from the planning applicant on behalf of the Local Planning Authority.  And that that was to say that it isn’t compliant with the S106-contracted obligations.  It is not a discussion: I alone, as the S106 Officer representing the LPA in separation from the JV and its ESSG to retain integrity in the planning process, decide.  In return, the same RA Planning Manager who sent the draft ESAP sent an email to the members of the ESSG asking that it be postponed because I am not, now, available tomorrow.

Huh?  Yes I am, I’m just not coming because I have nothing to discuss.  I made that clear.  But that reality didn’t suit them.  In the confusion they created, the Council’s Planning Manager called me to find out what was going on.  I explained to him everything that had gone on, so he asked me to come to the ESSG to simply feed back to its members why the current draft was unacceptable in planning terms, which I agreed to do.

In the meeting the following morning, which, in the late notice of my now agreeing to attend, I logged in remotely on Teams with my colleague Planning manager, with everyone else present in the office on site including the Social Value Manager chairing the meeting, two RA Planning Managers and the Council’s new Assistant Director for Brent Cross Town.  I was invited to kick off by dutifully, and at very short notice to prepare, cross-referencing the S106 obligations to what was included and omitted from the draft ESAP describing how, therefore, it was non-compliant on many, many factors.  I didn’t pass judgement that, in terms of a delivery plan for an employment and skills service relating to a specific development, it was just plain rubbish, because that is not my role as a S106 monitoring officer representing the Local Planning Authority, so I just stuck to the issues of bland planning non-compliance.

As I went through my list, the Social Value Manager, who was supposed to be chairing the meeting, and who had for all these months been agreeing with me that planners shouldn’t be allowed to write an ESAP and that he should lead on it but it was inexplicably more than his job’s worth to challenge them on that point, and agreed that it would be rubbish, heckled me on my points saying that that was not what the 33-page document said and that I clearly hadn’t read it and therefore, I “couldn’t be trusted.”  He said it over and over again interrupting me as I spoke.

Wow!  The meeting ended without resolution except it seemed to be accepted, including by the council’s AD, that my monitored evidence was to be dismissed.

The Council’s Planning Manager emailed me after to apologise how “aggressive” RA had been towards me in the meeting and that he was taken aback by it.  Yeah, me too!  In return, I sent him the excerpts from the draft ESAP and S106 contract that I had referred to in the meeting so he could see that I hadn’t been making it up, that they were a part of a reality we could perceive, and I could be trusted with it.  Although, like Bergman with the flickering lights, I had started to doubt what I had read in the preceding week a little bit myself, so I did it half to persuade myself as well.

The following week, out of curiosity to see what would happen next, I logged into my regularly scheduled Wednesday afternoon meeting with the Social Value Manager and, to my surprise, he logged in, saccharine-sweet as usual.  How am I he asked.  What do you mean how am I?  I’m confused is how I am.  You denied all reality, publicly berating me for hanging on to it.  There’s surely nothing more to be discussed because I only work in reality.  What did he say that was wrong, he asked me.  Everything.  We went through the points point by point as I had done with my Planning Manager.

“What do you want me to say?” he concluded.

“You could apologise?”, I suggested.

Which, to my surprise, he did.  If this was gaslighting, I had no idea where he was going with it.  I suppose Related Argent expected this to have worked by now but my sanity was surprisingly still intact.  This was mundane, droll details I had read and retained from reading mundane and droll documents, intelligence they were trying to persuade me I didn’t have.  It should have worked by now but why would it?  Why would they think it might?  I can only suppose it usually does.  So they continue with the gaslighting.  I cancelled the regular Wednesday meetings after that one because there was nothing to discuss with someone who had no intention of delivering employment and skills services and instead was just trying to, and clearly employed for the sole purpose (because he is clearly very good at it), mess with with people’s heads.  And he continues to this day, I receiving a further bending of reality with his email at the top of this entry.  We don’t have a meeting.  Go away!  If only Ingrid Bergman had the cynicism to say the same to Charles Boyer.

Procurement’s Social Value policy is even more nebulous than that of planning regs.  But Barnet Council’s Social Value lead produced a “Social Investment Impact Report” for 2023/24 detailing specific infographics of the quantities and themes of social value delivered, along with heartwarming case studies, including skills training and employment outcomes for some of our most economically-excluded residents.  This was not nebulous stuff.  But, on closer inspection, all the jobs cited were from developers with S106 obligations that our team had produced and none were trained and employed by businesses in the Council’s supply chain to which Social Value relates.  But, look closer again: it doesn’t say “Social Value”, it says “Social Impact”.  Does “Social Impact” refer to S106 as opposed to “Social Value”?  Obviously not.  S106 refers to S106, outcomes which for 2023/24 had already been reported by my boss to the Corporate Performance Team as S106 outcomes.

The Foreword in the report “by” the Councillor with the Cabinet portfolio for Community Wealth Building says,

“Our efforts have led to remarkable outcomes in Barnet, with 845 residents securing employment opportunities, injecting £14.1 million into the local economy in wages.”

What is more remarkable is that 845 is the exact same number as S106 jobs reported that year.  So, what is going on here?  The introduction says,

“This report covers investments tied to our traditional levers, including reinvestment from suppliers and developers through Social Value and Section 106 requirements, as well as our grant schemes and other investments generating social, economic, and environmental benefits in the borough.”

So, “Social Value” means… everything?  All services councils deliver create social value by that definition.  So this is a report on the impact from everything the council has done in the year?  Is that even possible to be digested by one person?  The intro goes on:

“We highlight some of our services and initiatives that have improved infrastructure, stimulated the economy and contributed to our goal of achieving net-zero carbon status by 2042.”

So, this is a highlight reel, a bit like Match of The Day.  Rather than showing every minute of the day’s games, it’s just an edited few.  But, scanning through the report, the highlights of everything the council has achieved seems to be boiled down to just what has been achieved through S106 and nothing from the Social Value contributed from the council’s procured suppliers of services and works and nothing about environmental contributions.  Why is this?

Somewhere randomly further down the document, in addition to the definition of Social Impact provided in the Introduction is a page entitled “How we define social investment and social value?” (that question mark included despite it not being a question).  It defines it thus:

“To Barnet Council, social investment means deliberately allocating resources to create a positive societal impact, whereas social value is the positive impact that is generated by investments, initiatives, or organisations.”

Are those clear definitions?  Does it explain why the author is making a distinction between “social investment” and “social value” when someone asked him to write a report on the impact of Corporate Procurement’s Social Value Policy?  What seems deliberate is that the author is trying to gaslight whoever might be interested.  That includes the Cabinet Member for Community Wealth Building who is happy with this explanation and added her own interpretation that this report isn’t double-counting the 845 S106 jobs already reported by the Council as 845 S106 jobs as opposed to 845 additional jobs in this report as a result of the the Social Value Policy.  Some clarification is clearly still needed.  The definition statement/question goes on…

“Since the implementation of the Public Services (Social Value) Act in 2012, the term “social value” has become widely used in the UK to describe the social, economic and environmental benefits generated by procurement activities.

“However, it is important to clarify a common misconception: while the Act does emphasise incorporating social value considerations in public procurement processes, it does not limit the concept of social value solely to procurement as the term predates the Act.”

What?  If this is supposedly a report on the impact of the Council’s Social Value Policy, the Social Value Act doesn’t “emphasise” considering social value in public procurements because that is all it is about.  That he has determined that the term predating the Act is pertinent here and so he reports S106 job outcomes as well as being fair game seems a bit random but we must go to Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner to find out if and how we used the term pre-2012.  Except he doesn’t.  In fact, there are no references here to justify any of the assertions he has made anywhere in this report.  The councillor just has to take his word for it.

Except, actually, she doesn’t.  Social Value as a concept is conceptualised in the Council’s written and published Social Value Policy that the Cabinet, of which she is a member and portfolio lead for this adopted policy, came up with.  As a concept, it is quite clear and it would be hard to imagine how it could be misconceived at all and misconceived as to meet this definition.  The published Social Value Policy 2023-2026 refers specifically and wholly to the Council’s procurement processes and governance of its supply chain of suppliers.  It contains actual numbers.  It requires a 20% weighting of social value in its scoring of bids from suppliers and a minimum 5% proxy value of social value contributions for all contracts with a value of £214,904 or more based on the Council’s adopted “Social Value Matrix” of Social Value Measures (basically the National TOMs adapted by Barnet Council for its own use).

These are all quite specific and measurable measurements, specifically of social value impact.  There has been no misconception, common or otherwise, by anyone who thinks the Council’s Social Value Policy relates to the Social Value Act 2012 and exclusively its procurement of suppliers.  It has nothing to do with S106 planning obligations, all the other services a council delivers or an arcane etymological definition of the term “social value”.

Fine if the council hasn’t implemented its Social Value policy and there is nothing to report.  But, if there is nothing to report, why write a report?

They write a report because they want to change reality that one can observe with one’s own senses, including common sense, to an alternative reality they want you to perceive.  The gaslight isn’t flickering; it’s all in your mind.  It has certainly worked on this Cabinet member who has been persuaded to think that her democratic policy is being implemented by her employed officers.

It’s time for me to test that perception.  Since the Social Investment Officer who wrote this report has since approached my boss for his stats for the 2024/25 Social Investment Impact Report now due to report as his own, I took the opportunity to unmesmirise my boss and question whether he should be double-counting all of his service’s outcomes by letting the Social Investment Manager also report them as his own thus confusing the council’s reported statutory outcomes.  The alternative, I suggested, is that he could allow his service, the Strategy and Engagement Service (seriously, the council pays salaries to a team called “Strategy and Engagement” whose jobs are to pretend they are doing stuff that they are not, and otherwise there is no stated remit for what that team is supposed be doing, and should be mocked just as widely as Windsor and Maidenhead Council employing an officer as a Roller Disco Coach) to claim his outcomes as their own.  I took this opportunity to question why we didn’t have any social value and why our team was missing out on the many jobs created in our own supply chain that potentially could be ringfenced, and arguably that we are legally obligated to ringfence according to the Social Value Act, for our residents.  He raised this matter to the Executive Director (as his own realisations no doubt) who instructed him to “draw a line under” reporting our outcomes to the Strategy and Engagement Team and he would raise the issue of why the council wasn’t implementing its Social Value Policy with the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).  Success!  That is, if one SLT leader would ever actually challenge another and they’re not just all there because it pays well and no-one really wants to rock the boat when no-one really questions what it is they all do because one without sin mustn’t cast the first stone [Ed - apologies for the mixed metaphors].  In the meantime, my boss called a meeting with the Social Investment Officer to explain to him why he will not be able to use our outcomes in his report (my boss is very good at punching down).

And, being included in the invite, this was my opportunity to question his perception of Social Value when there is no seeming room for misconception.  Questions I had included are, is there a governance process, such as a Contracts Assurance Board, to ensure all of the Public Authority’s statutory obligations and policies have been considered and implemented in procurement of public services and works, why don’t we know what major contracts the council has let, why has he redefined “social value” and incorporated S106 into that definition when we have a clear social value policy that clearly only relates to procurement, and where did he get that figure of £14.1m in wages from? 

Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner on Countdown explaining the past meanings and uses of words and phrases: an actual expert on etymology as opposed to Barnet Council’s Social Investment Officer who thinks people should just accept, and use, his unexplained pre-Social Value Act use of the term “social value” and, so, discard the council’s published Social Value Policy adopted by the democratically-elected Cabinet of councillors.

After our meeting yesterday in which I asked the Social Investment Officer all of my questions as to why social value is mostly not a consideration in procurements when it is both a policy and a statutory requirement and the council must have a governance process for these matters when procuring anything using public money, and why he doesn’t know what contracts the council has let at all, I emailed my boss my conclusions based on the (ridiculous) answers he gave us:

“Just to summarise what we learned yesterday, the council does have a Contracts Assurance Board to govern major procurements and it covers all the council’s policies and statutory obligations apart from Social Value (which is both a policy and a statutory obligation).  Instead, Procurement has agreed to notify [the Social Investment Officer] of all contract awards from CAB but that they often “forget”.  The council has an appetite to do Social Value. 

“Procurement, then, doesn’t record those contract awards anywhere despite having a legal obligation to record money it spends and on what since 1965 and the new Procurement Act [2023] makes no reference to Social Value.  However, it [the Procurement Act] will force the council to create a new “repository” for contracts which we’re still waiting on.

“New TOMs have been adopted by the council because, of the 33 contracts [the Social Investment Officer] does have sight of, no jobs, training or supply chain procurement commitments have been made on any.  And… the council has dispensed with measures for carbon emissions “as per request of contract managers, due to it being challenging to prove whether a supplier has reduced emissions or not” despite the council declaring a climate emergency in 2023 and the subsequent BarNET ZERO initiative aimed at businesses and their carbon emissions and the council adopting a carbon emissions measuring tool with a published dashboard: Microsoft Power BI

“Paul.”

The Social Investment Officer has an equivalent rank to mine and he has no power to decide to spin narratives; he has been gaslighted just as much as me.  He, though, has been less resistant than I to the mind games.  It is important to question the reality that people who have some power and authority over you try to feed you.  If not, the cognitive dissonance between your perceived reality and the alternative reality fed to you by those who don’t want you to perceive reality as it is, like with Related Argent’s Social Investment Officer, the council’s Chief Operating Officer ultimately responsible for handing out public contracts, Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury, will drive you to insanity.  And then you become a senior council officer or a well-paid Employment & Skills lead for a private developer.