Outsourced and unaccountable: this is the future of local government

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/15/local-services-barnet-council-town-hall

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Ignore the economists quibbling whether public spending is returning to the era of George Orwell. If you want to see the future of your local public services, it’s already here: in the north London suburb of Barnet. I visited last week – and it’s not pretty.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the area. I’ve known Barnet forever; it has provided me with countless walks, and the odd Saturday job. It remains the home of Jewish grandmothers holding forth on both Keynesianism and why you haven’t finished your supper, and second-hand record shops run by greying Don Quixotes.

But what’s fast changing in Barnet is how residents access their local services – everything from parking tickets to paying council tax to how their corpses are disposed of. In the past few years, the Tory-run council has taken almost every public service it can lay its hands on – and outsourced it.

Between January 2012 and October 2013, Barnet farmed out its care for people with disabilities, legal services, cemeteries and crematoriums, IT, finance, HR, planning and regeneration, trading standards and licensing, management of council housing, environmental health, procurement, parking, and the highways department.

This evening, a full council meeting will vote on whether to consider cuts and “alternative delivery models” for another tranche of services, including libraries, rubbish collection, street gritters and children’s speech therapy, among others. Should they go the way of the rest and be outsourced, the local Unison branch calculates that Barnet council will shrink from having 3,200 staff in September 2012 to just 332.

That is one hell of a municipal disappearing act. Residents now find it easier to list what their council doesn’t directly provide than what it does. Which means that if you want to see what the next five years of cuts hold for your local services – whether David Cameron or Ed Miliband get in will make little odds for town halls – you’d best pay close attention to what Barnet is doing.

And a tour of the neighbourhood teaches you that when cuts reach a certain magnitude, it’s not just services you lose; it’s an entire democratic institution. Residents can show you lots of missing services: the borough is right now consulting on plans to squeeze the vast majority of libraries to around 540 sq ft, or the size of a Hampstead Garden Suburb living room.

But the really big change is that the new-model commissioning council is no longer a local arm of government but an agglomeration of mostly privately provided services. And the two biggest contracts, worth around £500m and lasting 10 years apiece, have gone to Capita. The £7bn FTSE 100 giant now handles everything from council tax collection to new roads.

For those who live and work in Barnet, their local affairs are now handled remotely by people hundreds of miles away, who know nothing about them or the area. Payroll for what remains of council staff is done in Belfast, while for schools it’s Carlisle. Pension queries go to Darlington. Benefits end up in Blackburn. Parking notices come from Croydon. Calls to the local library are first directed to Coventry. Even births, deaths and marriages are managed in Brent.

Got a complaint? Then you have speak to someone you’ll never see – that is, if you can speak to them at all. Capita has admitted previously “capping” phone calls: throwing callers off the line when things get too busy. So rather than rely on their local institutions, residents increasingly depend on their councillors to intercede.

A Labour councillor, Paul Edwards, has just finished a case for a woman who wanted to pay for a bench to be installed on a local hill in her parents’ name: what should have been an easy bequest ran aground on the confusion of a call centre employee who knew nothing about either the hill or how to handle such gifts. Edwards also recalls the sick woman whose council tax arrears had been overestimated by thousands – but whose outsourced case worker wasn’t interested in discussing the issue. It went to court, and the woman won, at a huge cost both to her own mental health and the council.

This is what happens when you lose locally accountable public servants. It’s also the cost of losing local expertise. Take the legal department, now run out of Harrow. The result was that in early summer, Barnet councillors were given the wrong reports to vote on. The resulting mockery led to the commissioning of an independent report that stated on its first page: “There is no one who understands local government law in depth at Barnet. Barnet employs no lawyers.”

Yet, however broken their new structures, Barnet residents are stuck with them. Those two Capita deals, for instance, will carry on for at least the next decade, with many of their details shrouded in “commercial sensitivity”. Whoever locals vote for in the next two council elections, they will get Capita. And given that the local authority is now shedding its own staff, winding down its own IT systems and moving out of its offices, it’s hard to see how any new administration could take back control even if it wanted to.

The rationale for all this outsourcing is to save money – a million pounds a month, claims council leader Richard Cornelius. He rightly points out that lots of other authorities are now following Barnet’s lead: just last month, Tory-run Northamptonshire declared it would outsource 95% of its work and go down to a skeleton staff.

So, a case of cutting coats according to cloth? Two snags with that argument. First, the outsourcing proposals were first floated by local Tories even before Lehman Brothers collapsed and Britain’s crisis began. Second, these deals are always touted as saving money, and they rarely do.

Dexter Whitfield, an economist, points to Sefton, in Merseyside, which launched an outsourcing deal with Capita in 2008. It was meant to deliver £70m savings and 100 new jobs. When neither unicorn materialised, the contract was transferred back to the council last year.

Meanwhile, the costs of the outsourcing are already being felt by the likes of Tony and Janet Solomons. Their son, Benjy, has severe learning disabilities and can neither walk nor talk. He attends a local day centre, where he gets close personal attention from “excellent, remarkable” staff. But the service was outsourced a couple of years ago, with some fantasy business model.

When it promptly collapsed, careworkers were hit with a near-10% pay cut. Employees I spoke to reported “morale on the floor”; one former care assistant admitted to taking on two more jobs to make up the shortfall. As the Solomons point out, such cuts in service, and employees under stress, are bound to affect Benjy’s level of care.

“How will a new agency worker understand his routines, or when he wants to go to the toilet?” asks Janet. Yet Benjy can’t report back, and his parents will never know for sure what’s happened. Unknowable, unaccountable and potentially costly: a stark metaphor for Barnet’s outsourcing regime.