As more of Barnet Council's services are withdrawn from outsourcing contractors Capita, New Barnet community activist John Dix feels increasingly vindicated that his "sniff test" was correct: that the Capita deal was a costly mistake for the council taxpayers of Barnet. 

Many of the services contracted out to Capita are due to have been taken back in house by Barnet Council by September 2023 – fulfilling a pledge given by the Labour group that now controls the authority.

Mr Dix – above – has earned widespread publicity on social media scrutinising the cost effectiveness of Barnet’s contract with Capita.

His blog – under the name Mr Reasonable – is one of several that harried the previous Conservative administration for claiming that outsourcing to Capita has saved money.

Another prominent online critic of Barnet Council is Theresa Musgrove, who writes a blog called Broken Barnet under the pseudonym Mrs Angry.

Her long-standing campaign has been highlighted recently in The Guardian (10.11.2022) by feature writer John Harris who interviewed the council’s Labour leader Barry Rawlings on the termination of the Capita contract.

Over the coming months, as Barnet pays its outstanding bills to Capita, there is every likelihood of an embarrassing and potentially divisive inquest into Conservatives’ claim that outsourcing was a money saver.

Barnet Council signed a ten-year contract with Capita and a joint venture, Regional Enterprise Ltd (Re) which the council claimed would save Barnet taxpayers £165 million over ten years.

This contract ends next September. Planning, environmental health, trading standards, licensing, highways, estates, and procurement are all in the process of being returned to council supervision.

But Capita has secured an extension of the contract to continue to deliver human resources and accounts payable services until August 2024, which could be worth £57 million to Capita, and customer services and revenues and benefits until March 2026.

When the council first proposed outsourcing services to Capita in 2013, John Dix – then a leading member of the Save New Barnet Campaign – was determined to test the accuracy of the council’s claim that this would save money.

His 18 years’ experience as a management consultant with accountants Deloitte had left him with a keen sense of smell when it came to checking out the validity of claims and counter claims about competing contracts.

“My sniff test on Capita proved correct. We were told the contract would be financially advantageous to Barnet – but a decade later we are still waiting for the evidence.”

A group of like-minded activists challenged the council’s decision from the start and secured a judicial review on the grounds there had been no proper consultation.

“We didn’t win but lost on a technicality and then the review was ruled out of time.

“But that experience in 2013 set me off on the next challenge of trying to force the council to release financial documents relating to the Capita agreement. Some were only obtained after Freedom of Information requests.

“My searches began to show how costly the deal was for council taxpayers. Outsourcing was highly political, ideologically driven.

“I couldn’t find where it was saving any money at all and many of the contracted-out services were of very poor quality.”

Over the nine years that he has been monitoring the Capita contract John says he has reviewed every single invoice Capita has submitted to the council – and he regularly publishes updates of his work on his Mr Reasonable blog www.reasonablenewbarnet.blogspot.com

At the most recent count John says the running total for the amount Barnet has paid Capita is £607.7 million -- £246.8 million more than the contracted sum.

In his feature in The Guardian, John Harris investigates how Barnet’s Conservative-led council went on “a disastrous ideological outsourcing spending spree”, a project dubbed “easyCouncil”, that handed an “astonishing” array of local services to Capita.

The savings that were promised did not materialise and complaints about how residents were being treated piled up.

When the Conservatives lost power in the May council elections, the Labour group began to undo its predecessors’ work and return services in house.

Harris pays tribute to the handful of bloggers who “forensically exposed” the project’s failures and the dire failings of accountability and democracy at its heart.

He praised Mrs Angry for her dogged monitoring of Capita and for explaining a clear conflict of interest in the contract under which Capita was responsible for both regeneration and planning with the same company planning development and then recommending what went ahead.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/10/they-allowed-us-to-be-a-guinea-pig-and-the-guinea-pig-is-dead-the-sorry-saga-of-barnets-easycouncil