Friday 25 July – How to Save Money

This year, several London boroughs sought Exceptional Financial Support (EFS) from the Government to fill budget shortfalls, particularly in services like temporary accommodation and special educational needs.  Seven London boroughs are relying on this emergency borrowing scheme including Croydon, Enfield, Haringey, Havering, Newham, Lambeth and Barnet.

Barnet Council’s spending on care packages for vulnerable adults has risen by 58% (£68m) in five years.  It called for more support from Government in the Spending Review on 11 June.  The Leader of the Council was interviewed by BBC News at Chipping Barnet Library on 4 June.  He told them “the Government needed to allocate more funding for councils to enable them to focus on prevention.  Helping people have work, be independent, live in their own homes, hopefully, will save money, but you need to be able to have that ability to invest in prevention.”

Barnet secured £55.7m of EFS but it still must find savings of £23m for this financial year.

The Leader of the Council being interviewed by the BBC at Chipping Barnet Library on 4 June.

How are we going to invest in “helping people have work, be independent…”?  Isn’t that what my team does?  My team is only partly paid for by the council’s core funding, but, instead, by S106 financial contributions from major developers in the borough with planning permission.  Our planning policy says that they must make a contribution to Employment & Skills provision in the borough, either in kind by training and employing our residents in the construction of these developments and in the end use of commercial sites built or make a financial contribution to the council to deliver these services.  The biggest developments should contribute both.

The budget I must raise from S106 for our team this year is £804,640.80; £138,000 of which goes towards 50% of the team’s salaries (the other 50% paid for by council core funding), £60,000 to a project on the Dollis Valley Estate in Barnet, £34,000 to a commissioned team to support local Small to Medium Enterprises apply for contracts in the supply chain of construction developments and £572,640.80 to the employment support service called BOOST delivered by Barnet Homes.

We got a further £51,315 this year from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.  UKSPF replaced the European Social Fund.  Between 2014 and 2020, London boroughs received £471m of ESF funding, used largely towards employment and skills and business support provision.  This equates to c£2.4m per London borough per year, but we chose to give that up because, the argument went, we would save money by not paying into the European Union and have more money for these services, this year £51k.  Not sure who did the maths on that one but I think it was written up on the side of a bus so it must be correct.

Our team will spend £20,000 of the UKSPF allocation on commissioning a small business support programme, £3,415 on advertising our draft Economic Development Framework to residents to encourage them to comment on it, £5,000 given to Middlesex University for the prize to the best student in an entrepreneurial competition, another £1,400 to the University towards their new Film and TV Skills Studio built, £4,000 to “staff training”, £500 on a Christmas “Discover Barnet” marketing campaign to promote local high street shops and a £17,000 slush fund.  It’s all rather random and piddling stuff and £500 is probably less than Greggs on Barnet High Street will spend on one poster in their shop window for their famous vegan sausage roll, but it keeps our business support officer occupied and in “gainful” employment.

The big money is being handed over to Barnet Homes for the employment support service; the main focus for the Leader to help residents “have work, be independent”.  Of the £572,640.80 allocation for 2025/26, six Employment Advisers and a team administrator are to be employed at £290,143 on-cost (that is, including Employer National Insurance Contributions and pension contributions) and, to manage these seven members of staff are four managers paid £53,867, £55,171, £70,860 and £82,000.  In addition, they get an expense account of £3,000 for the year.  And, to pay the rent, another £27,570.

There is no scrutiny on what BOOST does with this money; they told us what money they wanted and the council handed it over.  That 46% of the budget is spent on managers makes no sense but no-one questioned it.  According to public procurement legislation, we are legally obliged to competitively tender this service, but we didn’t, so we have no contract with them to manage the service.  In the meantime, the manager paid £82k brought into his organisation £572,640.80 (the 80p is unaccounted for in their budget but included in their invoice to us) with almost no conditions attached to it, so he’s not going to be further scrutinised by his employers at Barnet Homes because he’s reached his targets for the year, and why he commands an £82k salary.  If this were an internal service, I could manage the Employment Advisers.  But there is no management or scrutiny of the service by the council and it is very unclear to me and my manager what it is this employment support service does.

To me, there seems to be four and a half employment advisers working on the project and what they do seems not to be managed by anyone, never mind four titans of the profession that the scale of their remuneration would suggest, managing them on an almost one-to-one ratio.  Construction developers complain to me that the CVs they receive from the Employment Advisers are not related to construction; most refer to wanting to “work in admin” or retail.  I read one CV an employer forwarded to me in application to a General Labourer role and it droned on for three semi-literate pages about abstract computer programming skills and his passion for working in the IT industry.  When they do get invited to interview (because the developers have targets to employ some of them), I’m told that many don’t know why they are there, what the job is and shocked to hear that they would start work on site at 8am.  One employer told me that one young man she invited to interview didn’t show up and, worried about his welfare, walked out onto the street to see if she could see him and found him sat at the bus stop where he was told to get off and not sure what to do next so just sat on the bench.  These young people are not being prepared for work and to live independently to relieve pressure on the welfare state.  The Leader needing more financial resources is not the problem: the management of Barnet Homes stealing the money for themselves and councillors not scrutinising their council officers for handing over that money to them for very questionable budgets without question and then not scrutinising or managing that service, and breaking public procurement law to do it, may be the problem.  My boss told me that the reason we don’t tender the service competitively is because the Leader himself wanted his chums in charge at Barnet Homes to keep the money.  The service to residents seemed to come a distant second in his priorities which seems to jar with what he told the BBC.

Battle Bus of the Leave campaign led by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and a referendum decision since endorsed by the current Government, to save money paid to the EU towards economic development in deprived neighbourhoods across Europe so that we would have more to spend in those neighbourhoods if focussed in the UK alone.  Independence from the EU has not led to independence for many of our vulnerable residents in Chipping Barnet according to the Leader of the Council with a fall in budget of 98% and wasting money by paying for external services without contracts, management or scrutiny.

Another £158,447.71, an Employment and Skills contribution owed by developer Arish Living that would have gone towards this year’s budget, was written off by my boss because he preferred to be nice to them instead of holding them to account for their planning obligations; the sole duty of a Local Planning Authority (see Anarchy, Lawlessness and Being Nice) and Planning wrote off a £450,000 contribution from developer Fairview Homes for reasons that may have been agreed down the pub but illogically blamed on my predecessor (see How to Corrupt your Local Planning Officer).

In the meantime, Related Argent, the investors in the £8bn Brent Cross Town development in partnership with the council, today reduced their estimated budget for the fit-out of one of their buildings to be taken out of the Employment and Skills budget from £500,000 to £330,000 (see Liberty and the Existential Crisis of a Government Officer).  They still haven’t provided an Employment and Skills Action Plan to explain why spending £330k on the construction of one of their own buildings will give local residents the construction skills needed to access the new jobs over the next two decades but, if the Leader is not persuaded that it is, then that’s another £330,000 he can put towards the savings his council needs to find.

If we can just get to grips with corporate procurement and contract management, and planning enforcement and contract-writing, simple tasks that the Leader should expect his expensively-assembled team of senior officers to lead on, that’s £572,640 + £158,447.71 + £450,000 + £330,000 = £1,511,087.71 in savings I have identified without even trying that he can put towards the £23m the council needs to find this year, that can be spent directly on “Helping people have work, be independent” without further funding needed from the Government.  And, if we can get Finance to account for all the 80p’s added to budgets, according to the plot of Superman III (and lifted by Office Space), that counts for an awful lot more money.

Superman III (1983): If Richard Pryor can siphon off all the half-cent amounts rounded down in his employer’s payroll account, then he can embezzle that money without fear of detection because Finance doesn’t account for those individually small amounts.  He raises so much money he even impresses billionaire criminal, Lex Luther.