Update: 13 October 2011: council workers will strike again on 18 October in protest at the council’s mass-privatisation plans. This is the second strike action in a month. The story below explains why staff have been striking.

On 13 September, 400 Barnet council staff plan to strike in protest at Barnet council’s fatally misguided plans to mass-outsource council services to the private sector.

If the council goes ahead with its plans to outsource (and Barnet Unison has reported that people in 24 out of 25 services have been told they will be moving to the private sector), workers stand to lose jobs and/or hard-won conditions of employment. They’ll no longer work in a sector which puts need ahead of profit, either.

Nobody wants it. Nobody ever wants it. Involving private companies in public services yields appalling results. Costs spiral out of control so regularly and so spectacularly that you wonder why nobody involved is in jail. Private companies poke round for contract loopholes which allow them to press councils for extra funds. Staff – especially low-paid staff in services like care – are forced to take appalling salary cuts as their private sector employers shift cash from workers to shareholders. Staff suffer and services suffer. And at Barnet, the council’s internal auditors have raised serious questions about the council’s ability to manage big contracts. The council’s plans, at least as they are outlined in council reports, are incoherent, or even non-existent: teasers like “it is recognised that all activity required to deliver the benefits of the programme cannot be anticipated at this stage” pepper report pages. On the council bullocks, though. Privatisation is the only game around.

Barnet council steams ahead

Some Barnet council departments have been working to rule for months in protest at the council’s plans to mass-outsource services, but people want an all-out fight now. They want that fight because the council has shifted its plans to move services to private companies to high gear.

In June, the council agreed to proceed with a “support and customer services project” – a project which will involve the council engaging a private company to deliver council estates, finance, human resources, information systems, procurement, revenues and benefits and project management services.

This will be a nice little earner for whichever private company wins the contract to deliver those services – the council has set aside £750m for that partner. It won’t be such a laugh for workers on the frontline, though. Unison estimates job losses of between about 190 and 250 as a result of this outsourcing and “efficiency savings.” Unions say workers are stretched to deliver those services as it is: there is simply no room for further cutting.

Clouds gather over other council services, too.

The council is planning to move adult social services (learning disability and physical and sensory impairment services for adults) into a profit-focused, local authority trading company – a company designed to create an annual surplus for the council of 8% by year four – “which is not,” as Unison reports rightly observe, “justifiable in terms of social justice, nor sustainable for the services concerned.”

That’s because the surplus will very likely be achieved through the standard methods of salary and service cuts, once the council shunts responsibility for both to an arms-length LATE company which it does not control. TUPE protection will mean as little for staff as it usually does. When companies take council services over and get control of staff and salaries, they dismantle “protected” salaries and employment conditions whenever that’s viable. Little wonder workers want to strike. There’s not much to lose if they do.

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A history of rubbish

Like many councils, Barnet has played with weird and not-so-wonderful ideas for service provision for years, and paid an awful lot of money for external advice about them.

Its mass-privatisation project began life several years ago as a contorted proposal called Future Shape. I normally wouldn’t bore you with the details, but they could be useful on this occasion, because they’ll give you insight into the sort of ill-thought-out, unproven garbage that council “thinkers” flubber piles of your money away on even as they cry poor and yabber on about reduced local government grants.

The idea behind Future Shape – it’s an idea which has been on the circuit for years and always sounds brilliant in theory – was to set up a sort of council-centred, one-stop-public-services-shop which would give residents a single point of access to different public services.

The idea is usually called something like “One Public Sector” – “proposals to work more closely with other public sector partners to provide residents with a single point of entry to public services in the borough,” was the way Barnet put it at the time. The aim was to involve private companies in this construction (unions felt the council’s aim was to outsource services to private companies and reduce the council to a small base which administered contracts) and to allow residents who wanted to jump the queue for services to pay to do that, as you might on easyJet or RyanAir.

There was also a lot of weird chat about fashioning in-house service “hubs” and “bundles” – or “proposals for more cross-service work with skilled hubs of in-house experts supporting services through the council” and “….services will be presented as “bundles” related to clearer outcomes”, as the council had it then. The idea – as far as anyone could grasp it from the council’s impenetrable language on the topic – seemed to be that knowledgeable council officers could advise the rest from little in-house pods. You’d think that was what they did anyway, but the “hubs” and “bundles” language cast the structure in a new-age light.

Anyway, both ideas proved less than brilliant in reality. It’s easy to understand why when you think it through. To make a one-point-of-entry public services idea work, councils need to convince PCTs (while they exist, that is), schools, the police and other councils and public sector organisations they want involved to abandon their existing locations, IT and HR arrangements and contracts, and hoof staff and even services to mutually agreed territory somewhere.

The thing would be a logistics nightmare. What if, for example, the local police had their own longstanding arrangements for IT provision? What if schools had already signed ten-year contracts with HR companies? What if the thing was simply too expensive to consider? What if democratic representation was lost when services were merged – would the anti-democracy minded argue, for example, that three councils were no longer required if they were all providing services out of one company and one location? What if the idea was patently absurd?

Public sector expert Dexter Whitfield once described this public services hub idea to me as “rubbish” (that was several years ago when I was a trade union activist at then-Labour Hammersmith and Fulham council. H&F councillors had started to yap on about building one of these regional public sector hubs. We brought Dexter in to shoot their plans down, which he duly did. He is good and it wasn’t hard). The hub idea has proved expensive rubbish for some councils, too. Bedfordshire county council, for example, had to pay millions a few years ago to break its partnership with HBS. One of the reasons that relationship bombed was that HBS failed to deliver promised public services hubs, or regional business centres as they were called then.

Barnet council quietly dropped the public services hub/Future Shape/whatever idea last year sometime – having blown £3m or so (estimates vary) on consultants and advice for the project (money is no object in the austerity era – it’s only a problem if you want it for services). The council also took a very public smacking for its failure to produce a business case for Future Shape.

The council was soon back on the horse, though. By the end of 2010, it was championing a loopy proposal called One Barnet, which it continues to plump for today. With One Barnet, the council aims to provide public services by setting up consortia/strategic partnerships with private companies which will, somehow, help do the providing. As we have already observed, the council has agreed a pricey starter in the form of that £750m support and customer services project.

One Barnet will also dole out smaller contracts to other private companies to help deliver…other things. The details can be hard to pick from the council’s own torturous descriptions. “One Barnet is a medium-term transformation programme providing the framework to enable future phases of projects to come forward,” comes one report.

“The council will provide a more sophisticated customer-centred service, will provide information and services in a more convenient manner and will offer residents more choice. In return, we expect residents to do what they can for themselves, their families and the community,” reads another.

Unions are pretty clear about the council’s intentions. Barnet Unison branch secretary John Burgess describes One Barnet as a mass-privatisation and cuts project.

“Their [the council’s] aim is to move services to private companies. They will transfer the cuts work to private companies – private companies will cut services and salaries after they have been transferred.”

Which brings us to the strike action council workers will take next week. That £750m support and customer services project would see a private company take charge of delivering these council services: trading standards and licensing, land charges, planning and development, building control and structures, environmental health, highways strategy, highways network management, highways traffic and development, highways transport and regeneration, strategic planning and regeneration, cemeteries and crematoria, parking services and revenues and benefits. There is good reason to worry.