Wednesday 14 May 2025 – Corporate Directive 6.1

I have to procure something so that means I have to interact with a corporate service, in this case Procurement.  I am exhausted before I even start.  Just the thought of the unnecessary and unidentifiable exoplasm I have to wade through has exhausted me.  I try to cheer myself up by turning it into a game: can I predict what pettifogging nonsense they will throw back at me once I have invoked them?  But this doesn’t work because emailing procurement@barnet.gov.uk is a bit like saying Hail Mary backwards into a mirror in the dark: you never know what you’re gonna get but you can guess it’s not going to be good, defy the senses and generally mess with your soul.

But, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I go in prepared.  I email the corporate inbox with the decision paper signed by the Executive Director, my written specification of the service that relates to the executive decision and has Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in it, a draft contract using a template downloaded from Procurement’s own intranet pages, the successful bidder’s proposal including budget, the scoring, that I insisted my boss did independently of me and our scores moderated, and forewarning that the bidder has never been a supplier to the council before so needs to be set up on the council’s payment system.  The service is £60k and so the lowest value contract that needs to go through Corporate Procurement in the first place (anything below £25k doesn’t have to go through them at all) and so the least scrutinised in terms of legally-required process.

This is all of it.  There is nothing else to come back at me on.  I end the email with “I’ve not done this before [which is true for my employment at Barnet Council], so not sure what to do next.  Can you advise on my next steps?”  How can they possibly reply to this diligence and deference other than that they will issue a contract and pay the new supplier?

Yesterday, a Procurement officer replied to me,

“Hi Paul,

“I have received guidance and been advised to forwarded [sic] this on to allow this to be looked at to review steps/see what can/can’t be done subsequently.

“Barnet Procurement”

 

Seriously?  They are trying so hard to find some fault that he had to refer it on to his manager to look because he couldn’t find a reason to not do it?  I know they try to make corporate services as inaccessible to officers as they can but, they surely have to put their hands up this time and admit that I have bested them.  And is a £60k contract award really a big enough deal to go looking for fault, especially when there isn’t any?  Whether or not it is, it feels personal.

The Head of Procurement no less emailed me the following day.  What could she possibly have to say to what is an insignificant and simple process with every box ticked?  I tried to enjoy it again by making a game of it, trying to predict what she would say.  But it’s usually so random, there’s no fun in it; it’s just exhausting.

“Hi Paul,

I have reviewed and you do need a specific contract to be in place in part because the initial engagement value is in excess of £25k and [the Corporate Legal team] are to conclude contracts of this value with suppliers; and also to update with the KPI/performance targets that need to be within the contract arrangement.”

 

Ok, this is not so bad.  I know it needs a specific contract which is why I downloaded a specific contract template from her intranet pages and filled in the blanks and sent it back to her team.  And I know Legal has to finalise the contract, but that’s a different corporate service and not hers, and I was prepared to do that next.  And the spec and bid have KPIs in them.  Can I just reply and say, “Good to know.  Get on with it then!”?  No, there’s more…

“Can I please highlight at this time that the OD report template for contract award does not confirm concurrence in accordance with Contract Procedures Rules 6.1 (applicable at the time of the award)…”

 

Huh?  “OD report” stands for Officer Decision report, a reference to the decision report to procure this service signed by the Executive Director.  Is she saying that he filled out the wrong report template and so she can’t formally concur that he actually made this decision?  Or is she saying he filled out the right template at the time, but is now out-of-date and so his decision is now null and void?  Does he know this?  If not, do the Executive Directors of the council know that she is voiding their decisions by updating Contract Procedures Rules 6.1?  Has anyone ever seen this corporate rules manual?

The decision report template itself has the subject title at the top, a space to write in what service he wants and his decision to spend money from his specified budget, and a box for him to sign and date it.  What is there to go out of date, if that is what she is referencing here?  If the Procedures Rules manual does exist and corporate directive 6.1 does actually say that the Head of Procurement can choose to void an Executive Director’s executive decision because she doesn’t like the bland template he wrote it on, then that’s up to her to tell him that he doesn’t get to make those decisions, not me.  I don’t care if she voids his decisions and we don’t have this service.  This isn’t her being vindictive against me because she must know I don’t care enough; I’ve got Netflix series lined up to watch.

Yet, ignoring this immovable obstacle she seemingly invented, she went on:

“You will need to set up a system contract for [the new supplier] with an Oracle BPA.  The authorised contract award report [which she says I now don’t have] together with completed BPA contract form accessed from Oracle [the council’s corporate services electronic portal] intranet pages [link to an online spreadsheet].  This will need to be forwarded to purchasing.admin@barnet.gov.uk and once a BPA is created you will need to raise requisitions against the BPA to provide visibility of contract spend.”

 

I thought I was being such a nerd pre-empting everything that Procurement could possibly need so they couldn’t bounce it back to me to avoid actually doing the work, but the Force is strong in this one.  Or else she’s barking mad.  What’s a BPA?  Has she differentiated between “procurement”, “purchasing” and “requisitions”?  Causing me to doubt my grasp on what I thought I understood reality to be again (see Gaslighting), I Googled “requisition”.  It defines it as “an official order laying claim to the use of property or materials”.  Isn’t that just a formal way of saying “purchasing” and “procuring”?  I mean, if she didn’t mean “requisition” in some feudal, overlord way but that we intend to pay for the “property or materials”, which I did mean to, it is the same thing.  And I didn’t mean to procure this service in some kind of informal way because I filled out loads of forms.  So what is the difference and, therefore, where did I go wrong in not raising a requisition or emailing “Procurement” instead of Purchasing Admin”?  That’s not clear in her email.

The spreadsheet she sent me to create a contract has a field asking for the “BPA Contract Number”.  So, I have to fill out a form to create a “system contract” and, in so doing, enter that contract’s contract number.  I have to enter the number of something I haven’t created yet in order to create it?  Does she think that makes sense?

Kryten: Sir, might I remind you: Space Corp Directive 169 quite clearly states…

Rimmer [in an exhausted tone]: Holly, prepare an escape pod.  Anything to save me from another Space Corp Directive.

K: Sir, the Space Corp Directives are there to protect us.  They’re not a set of vindictive pronouncements directed against any one person.

R: Has anyone, ever, seen this legendary Space Corp Directive manual?

Lister: Well, no.

R: He’s making it up, isn’t he?  The bloody book doesn’t exist!

K: Sir, I assure you…

R: Why does he only ever use them against me?  Why are they never against Lister?  Why do we never hear him quoting Space Corp Directives that clearly state, “No crew member should floss his teeth with the E string of his guitar after spraying the entire contents of a Sugar Puff sandwich all over his superior’s bunk”?  We never hear that one, do we?

K: Holly, kindly furnish Mr Rimmer with a hologrammatic copy of the Space Corp Directive Manual.

R: Come on, where is it?  [Manual appears in his open hand].  That’s it?

K: Hmm.  You should be able to study it at your leisure on your trip back to Red Dwarf, sir.

R: You’ve changed, you know that? 

K: Changed?

R: They might not see it but I do.  I know what’s going on.  You’ve become a really nasty piece of work. 

K: Sir, I was merely…

R: You’re merely a mechanoid.  That’s all you’re merely.  Don’t ever forget it. 

Coincidentally, I had my one-to-one supervision meeting with my manager today and I told him about the Head of Corporate Procurement’s pronouncement that he wasn’t getting the service he asked me to procure.  I showed him the email and, keeping in mind she’s not merely a mechanoid but nonetheless there to help us with procuring something, I asked him, “Is she crazy?”

“No, she’s actually very nice.” He replied, seemingly not reacting to my entirely inappropriate diagnosis/slur; he genuinely took it as a reasonable question.

“So, how does this explain this email?”, I replied.  “It’s nonsense.  I can’t make head nor tail of it.  Can you?”

 

“She’s bad at explaining things.”  He replied.  “If you just reply to her and explain that you don’t understand the terminology she has used and to explain it in plain English, then I’m sure that she will be able to help you procure this.”

 

“You want me to reply to her and ask her to send me another email, this time “in plain English”?”

 

“Yes.  She’s nice, you’ll see.”

 

So I did.  And I will see.  In the meantime, here’s fun, if I were to play a game and guess her response, I'm guessing I am invoking indescribable horror on myself from the depths of Hell.

In another case of me not knowing what people are going on about when defying an Executive Director’s executive decision, my manager decided to ignore the Executive Director’s, his line manager’s, decision to “draw a line under” sending our employment and skills outputs, including S106, to the Social Value officer to report them as Procurement’s achievements instead (see Gaslighting).  But he insisted that I send them anyway.  I protested numerous times, reminding him of his Director’s instruction but he replied to me saying he didn’t want to “create friction” with a corporate service, that he also wanted his Executive Director to see the outputs we had achieved, and said he would ensure that the Social Value officer would differentiate between our outputs and Procurement’s Social Value outputs in the report to achieve this.  Doesn’t he already report his outputs to his line manager?  Why does he need another service to do it for him?  Curious, but that’s beside the point …

“But the council’s suppliers haven’t delivered any outputs and last year the report only included outputs from S106 and Barnet’s Education and Learning Service (BELS) progressing care-leavers into jobs.” I warned him.  “There is nothing to differentiate.  If they publish a report headed “Social Value Outputs” that reports outputs, then that implies they are Procurement’s outputs and, therefore, not ours.  That, in last year’s report, he explicitly stated they were their outputs means no inferring was necessary.  He can’t differentiate between Procurement’s outputs and our outputs delivered if Procurement hasn’t delivered any.”

 

I didn’t add that, given that the Head of Procurement is crazy, she couldn’t deliver a cup of tea, but I only got that emboldened after being exhausted by her first.

“Just ask him to differentiate between our services.”, he said again.

 

What does he think “differentiate” means?  You need to have two things to differentiate one from the other.

Yesterday, the Social Value officer sent his first draft of “his” annual report of outputs to my manager for review.  He replied copying me in, “Paul will respond…”

Great.  This was his dumb idea but I’m the one who has to read it and respond.  But do I have to read it?  Haven’t I already predicted that it will just be mine and BELS’ report of outputs and nothing to add from Procurement?  “Yes” was the answer on scanning it.  There are no Social Value outputs from Procurement from 2024/25 to differentiate our outputs from.  I replied to my boss,

“Hi [Head of Economy & Skills],

“I’m not sure what you want me to reply to this.  As I said before I sent the S106 returns, no social value has been delivered so there is nothing to differentiate in the report.  The outcomes delivered by Economy & Skills [including BELS] have been reported here as a “social impact” and related back to the council’s Social Value policy, which [the Social Value officer, author of the report] has already told us, has never been effected by Procurement [see Gaslighting].”

 

He replied,

“Thanks Paul,

“If you wouldn’t mind checking for accuracy for our numbers and confirming to [the Social Value officer], plus ensuring our numbers were generated outside of SV through Procurement.”

 

Aaarrggghhh!  They’re all our numbers!  None were generated by Procurement!  Our numbers have been reported by Procurement in their end-of-year report of outputs.  They have not delivered, and therefore not reported, any outputs to differentiate from ours!  If they were to “confirm” that the numbers in this report were “generated” wholly by a completely different service, then I would have to “ensure” that the Social Value officer “confirmed” to me he had done this by calling the report, “Someone Else’s Work They Have Done and Nothing To Do With Us Report”.  But the only way I can think of “confirming” that is to tie the report author to a chair and put matchsticks under his toenails.  As usual, I don’t know what to do with my superiors’ directives.

Monty Burns: Mattingly!  Get rid of those sideburns.

Don Mattingly:  What sideburns?

Burns: You heard me hippy!

B [later]: Mattingly, for the last time, get rid of those sideburns!

Mattingly: Look Mr Burns, I don’t know what you think sideburns are but…

B: Don’t argue with me, just get rid of them!

B: [Later again and with Mattingly’s sides of his head shaved]:  Mattingly!  I thought I told you to trim those sideburns!  Go Home!  You’re off the team!  For good!