Wednesday 24 December 2025 – The Hornbill Incident and Hopelessness: A Review of 2025
Planning never sent the demand notice to Hill Group for financial remedies for the 13 apprenticeships they never provided including the six residents they abused on the journey to giving none of them an apprenticeship (see The Five Stages of Grief). I suppose that was too much to hope for. And, at this time of year, it is warranted to be sentimental and remind ourselves that hope for our fellow man, especially those less fortunate than us, should be at the forefront of our minds. Sure, didn’t Jacob Marley’s ghost tell Scrooge, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were all my business”?
I raised this with my line manager, the Head of Service, yesterday in our fortnightly supervision meeting under the unspoken heading of an existential crisis of my job: what’s the point of my monitoring developers if, when we have such an egregious case of one not making their planning contributions, Planning don’t do anything with my findings? Paralysed by actually having to manage something that actually affects something we actually do, he stalled by asking me for a written exposition on what had happened so far that he could raise this with his line manager, the Director. After all, he, the Head of Service, can’t be expected to take the lead on delivering this service. I started from the beginning:
“Barnet Council has entered into a joint venture with Sage Homes housing association to build 217 new affordable homes on the site of the old Fosters Estate owned by Barnet Council. Sage Homes put up the development money with a further affordable housing grant from the GLA. Barnet Group [of Barnet Council and Barnet Homes] will manage the homes. The joint venture between the Barnet Group and Sage Homes is the planning applicant.
“Amongst other planning obligations, it was determined by Planning Committee that the development had to provide reasonable endeavours to employ 13 residents to complete an apprenticeship. Failing that, they had to make a financial contribution to remedy these planning mitigations deemed by Planning Committee needed. The S106 contract was agreed 28/1/21.
“Barnet Group appointed contractor Hill Group to construct the development. Construction commenced Jan-22 and completed, reported to me by Hill Group, 30/8/25. I haven’t seen Hill Group’s contract but they were aware of the S106 agreement and their obligation around apprenticeships. There seems to be no argument from either the project manager at Barnet Homes or Planning that Hill Group didn’t make reasonable endeavours (or any endeavours) and the financial contribution is due. Hill Group continues to contend it by simply saying that they made them rather than providing any coherent explanation, never mind evidence, of what they were. I have seen no evidence that these S106 obligations KPIs were contract-managed by Barnet Group.
“Based on this S106 monitoring by the Economy & Skills Team and in agreement with both Barnet Homes and the CIL/S106 Team in Planning, including the CIL/S106 Planning Manager, it was agreed that the financial remedies were due. These were calculated by the CIL/S106 Officer including indexation [to calculate the sum that includes interest due] and a demand notice generated on Exacom [the Council’s planning database].
“Then I was notified by [the CIL/S106 Officer in Planning] that [the CIL/S106 Manager] had asked her to not send the demand notice. When I asked why, she said that [the manager] in the Strategic Housing Team, essentially the planning applicant, asked [the CIL/S106 Manager] not to send her a demand notice for the required S106 contributions and that it related to this contribution affecting the viability of building the affordable homes. When I pointed out that Hill Group had already reported to me that they had reached practical completion of construction, which is only when the financial remedies become due, so all the homes had already been built, all of them affordable, so how could it affect the viability of their construction? She said, “good point”. Since then [the CIL/S106 Officer] has not replied to my emails or messages either at all, or in answering my queries.
“There is a viability review in the S106 agreement that relates to [any] offsite Affordable Housing contribution due. And there is provision in the S106 contract to appoint an external consultant to appraise viability at a late stage of development but this relates to the cost of development, not the S106 contributions already deemed required and assessed as viable at the Development Viability assessment prior to commencement. If S106 already assessed as viable was in scope, which it isn’t, the planning applicant can’t assess viability at a late stage themselves – it must be done independently by an external expert.
“Now I don’t know why the demand notice hasn’t been sent, and you said today that you don’t know why the demand notice due has not been sent, the CIL/S106 Team has stopped all communication with the Economy & Skills Team to which this contribution pertains, and instead is talking to the Strategic Housing Team who is the landowner and essentially the planning applicant about the Employment & Skills contribution.
“The financial contribution was due from the date of Practical Completion and is now four months overdue with no advice from the CIL/S106 Team about what they are doing about it, or when, other than they will be discussing it with the planning applicant in “January”.”
That Planning has seemingly agreed with the planning applicant not to ask for S106 planning contributions and is studiously ignoring the S106 monitoring officer saying they are due and can they be demanded, one would think that would be a red flag that something untoward is going on. If what was being discussed, agreed and arranged between these two heads of service in the Council were in anyway innocent, then why not have the courtesy to let another head of service, my manager, the only head of service who should have an interest, and certainly not the Strategic Housing Manager who represents the landowner and planning applicant, and therefore Planning colluding with them would be a conflict of interest, know? Well, the CIL/S106 Officer, new to the role and, until now, untarnished by Barnet Council’s tendency towards intrigue rather than objective integrity of regulation and policy obligations, and so promising to finally holding developers to account, is now no longer following any rules, guidance, policy or regulations and no longer talking to me simply because her line manager told her not to. That hope didn’t last very long. For the six poor Barnet residents abused and abandoned, the housing and planning officers are colluding to not impact Hill Group’s profit margin despite Christmas normally being the only time when people “think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures.”
We have been
able to raise some money from developers this year who acknowledge that they should
make their contributions without my having to resort to enforcement and interact
with the CIL/S106 team in Planning. These
funds have been earmarked for commissioning the employment support and job
brokerage service from Barnet Homes’ service: BOOST, plus £60,000 earmarked to
fund a project to provide employment and skills support to residents of the
Dollis Valley Estate in Barnet, to be delivered from the new community centre there:
Hope Corner.
You will remember that the Corporate Procurement Team decided that the decision paper signed by the then Director in 2023 was annulled for reasons they never went into and proceeded to propose an alternative bureaucracy to get a decision and raise a new contract request that was simply gibberish and seemingly made up on the spot with no reference to any actual manual or templates on the council’s intranet (see Corporate Directive 6.1). It certainly didn’t make any sense.
In the first place, I filled in a new decision paper with what we wanted to procure, why and where the budget was coming from (because it was agreed in a legal contract with the developer and they had paid the money specifically for us to spend on this, specifically at our request). This was to be signed by the current Director so I emailed it to my line manager to take to the Director to sign because I couldn’t email it to the Director directly because he wouldn’t know what it was he was signing without someone verbally explaining it to him and my manager would do this in one of his regular one-to-one meetings with him. Presumably this is because the Director can’t read because the explanation is right there in the form and why we write it in the form so that he can see what it is he is agreeing to by reading it, and everyone else, such as Procurement and Finance, can see what he has agreed to by reading it. Which is why we write things down because we can then keep a track of what we are doing and we have a record of why decisions about public money are made. Essentially, a council is a bureaucracy. No surprise there. But it is to my boss and his boss so I emailed the former the decision paper which he got the Director to sign in his next one-to-one. But this turned out to be insufficient for Planning to release the funds: since I started this new process to get authorisation from the current Director to spend the money because the process followed to get the authorisation we had already got in 2023 from the previous Director had expired, a new governance process was being set up by the new Executive Director for Growth; a directorate that includes the current Director’s directorate of Housing, Economy and Skills, but also Planning. Keep up!
Just in case you thought that a council doesn’t have too many chiefs and not enough indians, the new governance board, overseen by the Executive Director, would have to approve the Director’s approval. For reasons way beyond my understanding or with no seeming relation to the council’s written governance procedures, Planning was responsible for taking this approved-but-not-approved-despite-having-a-legal-contract-already-committing-us-to-what-the-money-must-be-spent-on decision paper to the new spend governance board to approve. Since 1 September this year, my manager asked Planning’s finance manager in our fortnightly meetings with her and her team if the new governance board had yet been formed, and every fortnight she would garble some incoherent excuse why it hasn’t been yet. “What about other decisions to spend S106 money?” my manager would ask her. “That must be delayed too” she supposed unconvincingly.
Then in our one-to-one yesterday my manager announced to me that she has informed him that the Executive Director as approved the payment to Hope Corner.
Curious. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that with all the nonsense explanations pieced together over the weeks in our meetings with her. I asked him, “Can I ask about the approval to spend the S106 funds on Dollis Valley just so that I can learn how the Council works? In the end, all that was needed was the Executive Director sign it off despite [the Director] already having signed it off, and [the Director] before him, and otherwise there is no governance process?”
“It is my understanding”, he explained to me rather formally, “that following the disbanding of CSB, a DPR was created that was then signed off at ED level to release funds. I can only imagine that this superseded all previous processes, sign-offs and the CODs. I need to find out exactly what the process was and is because I will need to submit the second BOOST request in January and I don’t currently know what paperwork is needed or the approval route it needs to take. I would imagine that some kind of standard form will need to be completed and submitted for review and approval but what, when and by whom is yet to be disclosed.”
“Disclosed”? He means the Finance and Procurement managers won’t tell him. And I imagine the reason they won’t tell him is because there isn’t anything to tell him; they’re making this up as they go along. Translating the jargon, “CSB” is a reference to a governance board of directors of the Council, and possibly councillors. They ensure that the decision of how to spend the public money has been based on the council’s legal obligations holding them responsible for public money and, in this case, the developer’s money, as well as complying with the Council’s policy decisions about how to use the Council’s money to award contracts. For those reasons, I am guessing that CSB stands for something like “Contracts Scrutiny Board”. CSB having been disbanded for reasons not explained, my manager has been given to understand, I assume by Planning’s finance manager, that a DPR was signed off by the Executive Director (“ED”) to allow my boss to spend it (that is, award the contract to Hope Corner). For that reason, I am guessing that the “D” in DPR stands for Delegated, as in, he is given the power to award the contract to Hope Corner in that it has been delegated to him by the Executive Director who made that executive decision. And this has replaced the previous governance process that decisions were recorded on Chief Officer Decision (“COD”) papers. Basically, the Executive Director has agreed my boss can spend the money without her decision being scrutinised by any governance board.
So why have we got rid of CSB? Why do we not have any governance anymore? And, given it has been so simplified, only requiring the decision of the Executive Director which wasn’t really a decision in the first place because we’ve already entered into a contract with the funder about what we spend the money on, what took so long?
We, and by “we” I mean the Council, I mean, fundamentally, at a corporate level, don’t know what we’re doing, do we? The tough issues we are tackling should be that residents of the Dollis Valley Estate are living in a pocket of deprivation in the otherwise affluent town of Barnet. This is due to multiple factors of deprivation that includes poor housing and unemployment. The hundreds of millions of pounds now being spent on knocking down unfit flats on the estate and pumping private money into valuable land development and all we got from the developer to mitigate the impact of their homes being demolished, many of them decamped and rehoused miles away, was £60k to spend on a project on the estate to provide some skills development and employment advice from the community centre. But we’re not tackling that problem because, instead, we spend all our time firefighting the Council’s corporate decision-making because the Finance and Procurement managers have no processes and our executive directors aren’t directing us in any particular direction and so failing to make decisions and, when eventually one is made, it ends up being with no governance and no-one has any way of telling if it was a compliant or not.
State
of the Union: “Plaster Cast” (2022)
“Kenyan
must feel like the bloody Prime Minister: there’s a plan and a goal, but she’s
firefighting all the time. You’ve run
away, you’ve fallen over, you pretend your arm is broken when it isn’t. I mean, we never get anywhere near the actual
marital problems.”
Today, Planning’s
finance manager forwarded the decision paper on to my manager (who subsequently
forwarded it to me because I’m the one actually commissioning the project). She wrote,
“Hi both,
“Please note your CIL/S106 funding request(s) have been approved and finance may proceed with their process as and when required.
“Please use the attached form(s) for your reference and narrative in the journal(s).
“Thank you,
“[Senior Delivery
of CIL/s106]”
Who is “both”? She only emailed this to my manager. It’s S106 funds, not CIL. And why are the “s”s in brackets? Is she using a standard template email? It’s two lines long and all it says is that the spend has been approved. Does she need a template to remind her what to say? If so, she still got it wrong because the attached form(s) have not been signed by the Executive Director, that bit is blank, but only signed by my manager when he filled it out on 1 September. Therefore I can’t refer this(these) form(s) to Finance to demonstrate release of the funds because it(they) is(are) no indication that anything has been approved. I suppose we can’t expect to have this done so easily without firefighting our senior corporate officer(s) some more.
Even the more mundane aspects of corporate existence at Barnet Council are not straight forward. They can require memorising opaque processes, examination, challenge and requests to officers for correction. For example, I raised a request on the intranet for a day’s annual leave in February. The way you do it is that you go onto the Intranet and select the staff app for requesting leave. This is not as straight forward as it sounds. There is an app to report IT issues and requests called “IT portal”, a Facilities Management reporting app called “Fix My”, a staff directory called “Staff Directory – Who’s Who”, an internal job vacancies app called “Internal Vacancies” and the learning and development app to learn how to lift heavy objects should one be so inclined called “The POD – Learning and Development portal”. But the app for anything related to HR is called “Oracle”. That’s because that is the name of the app provider and so what HR called their portal for staff to use. It’s like saving your CV as “CV” and sending it to an employer expecting them to be able to tell that that CV relates to you. In our meeting yesterday, my manager told me that he will approve my request, that’s no problem, but asked how many days of annual leave I had left. I told him I wasn’t sure because Oracle counts leave in hours rather than days and the number of hours recorded in the portal as remaining is not divisible by the number of hours in a day’s annual leave. He didn’t understand what I meant so I went into the portal and told him that I had 91.7 hours of annual leave remaining and each time I booked annual leave it deducted 8.5 hours for each day. That means, according to HR’s records, I have 10.788235294 days or 10 days, 6 hours and 42 minutes of annual leave remaining. “That can’t be right.”
“No” he replied, “a day is 7.2 hours.” He logged on to his own Oracle account and started to book a day off and, sure enough, it came up with 7.2 hours for one day’s annual leave. “Why didn’t you report this before?” he asked me.
“To whom?” And this is where it started to get even more complicated.
“On Hornbill. Go into the support app called Oracle Support”, he showed me scrolling through the Intranet looking for how to do it and, eventually finding it at the bottom of the page, he explained, “and select “Raise a ticket in Hornbill”.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” I asked rhetorically. If I had known that 8.5 hours was wrong in and of itself rather than the hours annual leave allocated not being divisible by the hours in a day which could have just as easily been the mistake as far as I knew, how would I know I could report it as an issue? And, should I have assumed it, on idly exploring random links on the Intranet and guessed “Oracle Support” might be where I raise issues, I would be wrong. Instead, within this link, there is one of many links to apps, one of which called “Hornbill”. How could I have known, should I have assumed that there was an error specific to me and no-one else, there was a means to do it in the first place, and where to look was Hornbill? But I didn’t assume the issue was specific to me because, how could it be? How are there 7.2 hours in a day’s annual leave for every employee in the Council as default except for me so I have to raise an incident because no-one ever has before because no-one has ever had this issue before? Does that mean someone from HR went into my account and changed the default 7.2 hours to 8.5? Is that a thing? Assuming it could be, then if the erroneous number was, say 23.6 hours instead of 8.5, it could be a random error made by an HR officer. But 8.5 hours in a working day is plausible (if not divisible). It seems deliberate. But someone only erroneously changed my hours? It seems implausible but let’s assume I did come to that conclusion on my own after giving it that much thought. How, then, would I know to go searching for an app called “Hornbill” within an app called “Oracle Support” to raise the incident with HR?
In another discussion in our one-to-one yesterday, Brent Cross came up. A contractor, Midgard, has been appointed by developer Related Argent to construct plot 25 which has now commenced construction, and RA want me to support them monitoring, reviewing and supporting Midgard on their progress on economic development obligations and attend contractor forums to hold them all to account generally.
“Hold them to account for what?” I asked. “Do the contractors have S106 obligations in their contracts with Related Argent? Are they working to an agreed action plan?” He didn’t think so on any of these things. He didn’t know what they wanted my role to be. Related Argent has been staunchly anti-commitment on making S106 contributions and certainly don’t want to commit their contractors to making contributions because that can put the cost of contracts up. It seems unlikely that those contractors have a plan to deliver those contributions when they don’t know that they’re supposed to be delivering any because they are not in their contracts. How would they know? I’m not sure how those review meetings led by me would go.
“Shouldn’t we agree an ESAP [Employment and Skills Action Plan] with Related Argent first including how contractors will be contracted to deliver those actions?”, I asked him.
“Yes, of course” he replied, “I was just telling you that that is what they have requested and Midgard is aware of your role [albeit not that they have a role]. I wasn’t suggesting you do anything yet because I have escalated it and we are still waiting on directors to agree an ESAP with RA first, which they will. This is just a heads-up.”
I think I will keep my head down for now because there seems little sign that the Council’s directors want to spend extra money on contractors to ensure local residents benefit from the Council’s regeneration of their land. And, until there is an action plan and/or contracts to manage, there’s not a lot I can say to, or do with, contractors. I can’t do it through sheer force of personality alone. I’m no Mandela or Gandhi, able to lead an entire culture to do the right thing: I’m a S106 officer at the council and I need the council to enforce planning obligations first. But that seems increasingly unlikely because it would mean the Council enforcing its own senior officers and if that hasn’t happened up until now, six years into development, it seems unlikely to ever happen. I have learned in 2025 to forget about Brent Cross as anything more than a personal money-grab by individual officers and councillors and Related Argent, and good luck to them if it means I can bow out of the whole thing for ever more.
Edgware Town regeneration I might be able to do something with because, unlike Brent Cross in 2013, I am in post now to agree the S106 contract. “How is this going?”, my boss asked me yesterday. “Well they’re in no hurry.” I replied and my boss’s face scrunched up at this perceived criticism of him.
Ballymore has entered into a joint venture with Transport for London to put up £1.3bn for building new homes and commercial buildings on their land around Edgware tube and bus stations. When the lead planner for Ballymore told me this figure in November, upon which the number of required apprenticeships is calculated, I had to pause to think how many millions was in a billion because I’ve never had to think of a billion in terms of being an actual number before. Suffice to say, the number of apprenticeships required by council policy is a lot. A ridiculous amount in fact. I agreed to propose alternative contributions to a lot of the apprenticeships to make the S106 agreement more realistic. Ballymore’s planner said he wanted to have the S106 agreement signed in January so that development could commence soon after.
Well perhaps he should have had this conversation with me before November, then, if he was in such a hurry. Nonetheless, I started talking to different partners about what we could ask for and took less than three weeks to put together a draft proposal with S106 contract clauses drafted to accommodate them. In the meantime, Ballymore’s planner chased me up asking when I would have it done, copying in my boss. I was familiar with the tactic of a developer putting pressure on me when negotiating contributions. But my boss has a supranatural inclination to ask how high when a developer says jump, I don’t know why, and he put a rush on me too. I replied to my boss then, still in November, saying that I was close to completion but that I didn’t think Ballymore was in a rush, but this was just a superficial and transparent tactic, and their planner didn’t really mean it, so there was no rush and it was important that I not let such a huge proposal be half-arsed like Brent Cross was due to undoubted pressure from developer, Related Argent.
That, now three weeks later and having no response from Ballymore to my proposal submitted on 3 December, I was rather having a dig at my boss again that he was being naïve when he believed them when they said they were in a rush and I was right all along. No-one likes to be told “I told you so”.
Austin
Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
The last
item on the agenda was BOOST. BOOST is a
service within Barnet Homes which, in turn, is part of the Barnet Group of
Barnet Council and Barnet Homes. Barnet
Homes is an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) set up to manage the
council’s social housing stock as a separate, independent organisation to the
Council. They have their own budget from
which they can use rent paid for the housing to fund their activities which is
to own and manage the properties and their land, support the tenants, collect
the rent and build more social housing. Unlike
councils, ALMOs are non-political organisations. What they do is based on corporate objectives
to manage housing services and not based on political decisions by elected councillors
or through democracy. Instead, they have
simplified, not-for-profit, functional objectives independent of political
decisions, a bit like the Bank of England.
What Barnet Group is supposed to be is less clear. It is a private limited company in its own right. The shareholders are a mixture of seemingly random council officers and councillors. It also includes private companies Your Choice Barnet providing social care services for adults with learning and physical disabilities, presumably its income from the care budgets devolved by the Government to individuals to spend on support services they choose and no longer beholden to a local council to decide upon and the justify care for them, Opendoor Homes, owner of another 500 social housing homes, and Bumblebee Property, a money-making estate agent for these homes. In the last submitted accounts, it had an annual revenue of £137.4m and property assets of £243.3m. It also had “Employee benefits expense” of £41.3m in the year. I don’t know what belongs to Barnet Homes and Barnet Council or who is employed by them as opposed to by Barnet Homes, which is already at arms-length to the Council, or the Council, and whether these employees know who they are employed by, but, seemingly, a lot is in the ownership of a private management company, particularly where an income is generated from those assets. And the shareholders are nominally entitled to the profits generated from them. What governance is in place in Barnet Council for allocating those profits out of Barnet Group Ltd into, say, Barnet Council, Barnet Homes, the other public frontline services or the shareholders, is not in the public realm other than “The Barnet Group’s Strategic Plan for 2024-29 sets out its five-year vision and objectives, ensuring that the profits are allocated in a way that aligns with the Council’s goals and the needs of its residents.” The operating profit for 2024/25 was £3.6m.
Either way, Barnet Group and Barnet Homes are separate entities to Barnet Council, the former a private, limited, profit-making company and the latter a non-political organisation. Yet my boss says the Leader, a democratically-elected councillor, has directed him to award money from his Council service to Barnet Homes to run the Council’s employment support service.
That can’t be right, can it? We never tendered this service as we have a legal requirement to do so when spending large amounts of public money. A competitive tender is the only mechanism that a public authority has for ensuring value for money including assessing that a service provider knows how to deliver that service. But we didn’t do that with Barnet Homes. Instead, objectively-speaking, we broke that law when a councillor directed public funds to a private, profit-making company owned by councillors without challenge from the officer, whose office it is to be responsible for that service’s budget, the “budget holder”.
Now, one might argue that this is all a pragmatic arrangement; in effect, the service has been internalised within the Council and we are delivering it directly ourselves rather commissioning it to an external company. It’s a bit like the Government nationalising the railways but being run by a Government-appointed quango. But the team, BOOST, is owned by Barnet Homes, a non-political organisation and therefore not subject to scrutiny by councillors, one of the pillars of robust government in the UK. And we already have an employment and skills team in the Council – my team. Why is the employment support service a completely separate team to the Council’s employment and skills service? We have no management control over it. There is a complete separation of duties and management of employment support to residents provided for the jobs created by the Council, me, and our responsibility to employers. We don’t even have a contract with Barnet Homes to contract-manage them. Just to lay it on more thickly, Barnet Council’s motto is Unitas efficit ministerium: “Unity accomplishes service”. We seem to be going out of our way to have our employment and skills service disjointed.
Now, this might all still be forgivable if there was any indication BOOST knew anything about employment and skills. Last financial year, we paid them £751,801 for the employment advice service, including the S106 job brokerage service. I know they achieved nine job starts on the S106 job brokerage service, a ridiculously low number, because I was monitoring it. Because I was already monitoring them on S106, I asked my boss if he wanted me to monitor the outcomes for the whole service. “No” he said, he was already doing this. The Head of Service is monitoring a service? That’s a first. For comparison to the contract I was monitoring and because it was so poor, I asked him if he could share his monitored job outcomes with me, just to give me some idea of what they were doing generally given that my role was so dependent on them being remotely competent. “No” he said. And why not? “Er, I deleted all the outcomes after I verified them… for data protection reasons.”
What data protection reasons? He has never asked me to delete my list of job outcomes because I am an officer of the Council and need to demonstrate, should we be scrutinised or audited, of what we have done with public money and the Council’s policy. It’s not a breach of data protection for Councils to keep details of the residents we deliver services to. But, suffice to say by my manager, BOOST have done fantastically. He therefore couldn’t explain why they were completely useless when the jobs were committed to Barnet residents by employers under planning obligations, making it even easier for them. And, as well as no explanation, he could offer no evidence of their achievements or offer any sense of curiosity about what they did with our money for brokering S106 jobs when they were otherwise brilliant and dependable and so trustworthy we didn’t need to enter into a written contract with them when giving them £751,081. It’s that confidence he has which is why he is the Head of Service.
This year, they have been given £572,641, a reduced amount reflecting the fact that Barnet Council is nearly broke (see How to Save Money), not tendered and no contract for what they will do with public money. So far this year, they have delivered five S106 jobs.
However, perhaps down to my constant questioning, my boss did ask for a budget for the year: how would the money be allocated? From their submitted budget for the year, £280,173 (49%) would be allocated to service delivery staff (basically, Employment Advisers), £261,898 (46%) on managers of those EAs, £27,570 (4.5%) on central costs (basically to pay the rent) and £3,000 (0.5%) allocated to help participants overcome barriers to working such as training, travel, work tools, lunch for unpaid work placements etc. Despite asking for this budget, it wasn’t scrutinised or the ridiculous management-heavy allocations challenged in any way.
“Are we really going to re-commission a service next year that delivers five job starts in nine months?”, I asked my boss. Can we not, now, put this out to competitive tender? We can do a lot better for our residents than BOOST.
He agreed we could separately commission the S106 job brokerage service but not the overall employment advice service. This is because the Leader wanted to keep the service in-house.
“But they’re not in-house, are they? You’re the Head of Service but you have no management control over them. Instead, we’re more than duplicating the management costs when nearly half the budget is spent on managers, and the service is still simply not being delivered. Barnet Homes isn’t an internal service, it has specifically been set up as a legally independent, arms-length organisation for good reason, whatever that is, so that it is specifically not an internal service either legally or in practice. And, therefore, legally and in principle, a councillor can decide what services to pay for but not who to give the money to; that is the literal definition of corruption.”
This observation might have sounded accusatory and aggressive but he knew I was just logically pointing out our legal responsibility in lieu of the Council having any governance processes, and his personal legal responsibilities as an officer of the council responsible for the budget: legally he has no choice but to competitively tender the service and not unilaterally award it to an external, private limited company lest that arrangement be abused. How does he know it isn’t being abused? How does an auditor know why he gave them £1,323,722 in two years with little to show for it and no paperwork on how that decision was entered into. On the face of it, their budget makes no sense and we have next to nothing to show for the service, possibly, if you were to believe my boss, because he deleted all the evidence of the service they delivered for data protection reasons. He can’t say the Leader told him to commission them because the Leader knows he is not allowed to and will almost certainly deny it and might say, even if he did suggest it, he knows that a senior officer is not allowed to consider such a suggestion and didn’t think it would be taken seriously. My boss needs to cover his back and make decisions based on public procurement regulations, objectivity and integrity, not in an attempt to curry favour with the Leader even if that is how senior officers get to be senior officers in the first place and why councils are fundamentally corrupt because the corrupt are rewarded, end up running the council and instil a culture of corruption until it is normalised so much so that they get surprised and irritated by the odd voice in their staff questioning their decisions. In the meantime, I need a S106 job brokerage service or there is little point in me enforcing and managing that developers to advertise their jobs with our jobs brokerage service if they then don’t have the capability or motivation to do anything with them.
So he did concede that BOOST must submit a recovery plan if they want to keep the S106 jobs brokerage element of the contract.
How can it be a “recovery plan” if there was no plan in the first place to recover? We never asked them to submit a proposal or even a plan; all we have is a budget that makes no sense. BOOST has never been working to a plan that can be recovered. And there is no indication that Barnet Homes has any clue how to deliver an employment support service in the first place.
Still, it’s a gesture. This month, my boss has given BOOST three months to do a lot better or else we will be competitively tendering the S106 jobs brokerage service for the next financial year. If so, let’s see if I can persuade him to do it for the whole service out of sheer laziness rather than have to split up and specify two different services by not helping him with it: it’s not my job. Relying on senior officers’ laziness has proved a useful tactic in the past.
In response to the notes of our one-to-one he sent me after our meeting, I replied,
“Thanks [Head of Service].
“I’ve raised the Hornbill incident.
“Re the point on the BXT ESAP [Brent Cross Town Employment and Skills Action Plan], I presume I will be asked to approve (or not) the ESAP and that the landowner won’t be approving it themselves? And that how we monitor and/or manage the contractors, directly or via RA, will depend on what is agreed in the ESAP?
“Can I ask about the approval to spend the S106 funds on Dollis Valley just so that I can learn how the Council works: in the end, all that was needed was the Executive Director sign it off despite [the Director] already having signed it off, and [the previous Director] before him, and otherwise there is no governance process?
“Paul.”
He replied with some attempted explanations but it’s hard to do that when there aren’t any. He concluded with, “I hope this fills you with confidence as we approach the new year.”
I honestly can’t tell if he is being sarcastic or serious. I replied with what would give me some confidence in the Council:
“I think what Barnet Council needs is some kind of written constitution. That Procurement was able to articulate how they do things would help too.
“TBH I’m not that confident in Barnet Council’s decision-making at a senior level, either its objectivity, transparency or governance, even to meet its minimum legal obligations never mind any policy decisions made by Cabinet/Full Council/Planning Committee.”
Being confident there will not be another Hornbill Incident would help too.
My reflections on 2025 are, then, as follows
That directors at local authorities are terrorised by developers who raise the cash to develop public land and bully them mercilessly until the council has nothing to show for the joint venture (perhaps apart from the odd bribe of a free flat here and there) and the developer has profiteered on what was public land. There’s little point in me challenging them on we having received nothing from them because directors are impotent and unable to direct something they have no idea how to control. And developers are so much in control, not because we don’t have planning powers, but because they are bullies, and we don’t use the powers we have.
That Barnet Council has no governance procedures and directors cannot make a decision, even authorising a small project that we have no choice but to spend the money on, because no-one knows what the process is for making a decision or having any confidence their officers can and will scrutinise any services that are commissioned.
Individuals in the council have created a spiderweb of arms-length organisations and private companies holding substantial public assets for which is it is, at best, murky how they are accountable for tax-payers’ money and land.
All of our corporate services are broken and officers spend most of their time firefighting them to the point that managing one’s annual leave can be a full-time job in itself, never mind trying to procure something or waiting interminably on a decision for a budget allocation to deliver the services our residents need.
So, with that message of hope in our hearts, I look forward to all the Christmas presents I deserve and a successful and prosperous New Year.
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