Tag Archives: consultants

Cabinet, Council spending, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized

Where has all that money gone? To consultants, everyone!

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It was only couple of weeks back  I reminded you of SCC’s extraordinary and unspecified spend on consultants which was decided unilaterally by Suffolk’s Conservatives back in May. £122,000 of public money ( 16p from every single Suffolk resident) was to be spent without oversight on unspecified but terribly, terribly important  ‘services’ from three consultancy companies : Fields of Learning, Scintillate and DNA.  This decision (to allow Chief Executive Andrea Hill to spend this money without further reference to the Council) was voted through by the Tory majority at full council despite the best endeavours of my party.

We Lib Dems had previously prevented this significant spending decision being slid in via the Cabinet back door without ever reaching the ears of full council (see below*) by ‘calling in’ the Cabinet decision. I will remind you again that deputy leader Jane Storey said at the time that £122,000  ‘ is a tiny proportion of the county council’s budget!” Her implication was that no oversight should be  required in the spending of such a itsy bitsy teeny weeny sum of money by such an intelligent and serious bunch as the administration, and that it was damn nice of them even to have mentioned it!

Today the Evening Star reveals that  the DNA  in ‘DNA’ stands for Davidson Nicklen and Associates . And that the ‘Davidson’ in question is that very selfsame Sol Davidson whose coaching of the Chief Executive Andrea Hill, Council Leader Jeremy Pembroke,  and other senior executives apparently cost us people of Suffolk an itsy bitsy teeny weeny  £583 per 60 – 90 min session!  Or, as was minuted in the original Cabinet papers,  a price that was ‘competitive with market rates’.

Competitive? Do me a favour! Do you suppose for a single moment that any one of the beneficiaries would have put their hands in their own pockets and paid out that kind of money themselves?

No wonder the administration  – puffed up with delusions of grandeur and selfimportance though they are – were reluctant to specify this expenditure too exactly. We – the people of Suffolk – might have thought more oversight was required than they clearly wished to us to have!

The Conservatives voted to spend the remainder of this money on further  equally unspecified services from another couple of  consultancy companies (Fields of Learning and Scintillate).

So the next question must be, what exactly have the people of Suffolk been spending that remaining £92,000 on?

*That infamous Cabinet decision in full (from the Minutes of SCC Cabinet  Meeting 30 March 2010)

….the Chief Executive invited the Cabinet to agree exemptions from the Council’s Procurement Regulations so that contracts for Organisational Development (OD) services may be let without a competitive process.

Decision: The Cabinet:   i)     agreed exemptions from the Council’s Procurement Regulations so that contracts for Organisational Development (OD) services may be let without a competitive process; and ii)    delegated to the Chief Executive’s authority to agree these contracts.

Reason for Decision: The Cabinet recognised that due to the enormous scale of change which faced the Council, the Council needed to get experienced Organisational Development service providers in post as soon as possible.  The Cabinet considered that the day rates proposed were competitive with market rates and that the cost of getting any other provider ‘up to speed’ would be disproportionate.

So there’s the truth bald and unadorned for all to see  – the Cabinet  really DO consider paying £583 per 60-90 min coaching session is ‘competitive with market rates’.  Market rates for what?  The Emperor’s tailoring???

Buses, Council spending, cuts, eXplore card, Libraries, Lollipop patrols, New Strategic direction, Suffolk County Council, Your councillor

Why MY mailbox is full while YOUR councillor’s mailbox is empty

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One  peculiar side-effect of the disgraceful democratic deficit that’s occurring in Suffolk is that we 11 solitary Lib Dems – the official opposition – are daily being asked for support, information, and advice  from residents from all over Suffolk.    That is, not only from our constituents, and from people who are affected by affairs within our districts, but from people who are supposedly being represented by the 54 Conservative councillors in other Suffolk council districts.

Why? Well, we are getting a lot of mails and phone calls  from people who have despaired of getting any contentful explanation from their own elected councillor  about these cuts to frontline services by the SCC Tory leadership. A leadership that is insisting on making 30% cuts over three years although even they are finally admitting  that national cuts amount to  no more 19.5% over the same time.  (And we Lib Dems think it is actually less.).

In other words these are mails and phone calls from people suffering from the effects of seemingly  unnecessary cuts of over 10% without any reasonable explanation (except for those three fateful letters N S D). Cuts aimed at libraries, school crossing patrols, eXplore cards, local buses, yet not at the pay of senior executives or the cost of contracts or consultants nor in gagging clause payments to senior staff who have been ‘let go’ (£500,000 last year alone).

These are mails and phone calls from people who have discovered that if they write to their own Tory councillors to express their despair and disbelief , they will get no help, or any adequate representation for their plight. And its a serious plight for most of us – the loss of vital services for which we not only pay, but which we pay SCC executives to run, and for which we elect our local councillor to represent us. Instead, we only get variations of that same old theme:

I hope that my response has gone some way to re-assuring you that we share your passion for the county and the most vulnerable within communities, and that our New Strategic Direction is designed to help precisely these people.
(I hope the writer of this can recognise his style!)

Don’t get me wrong – I am very happy to help anyone who asks me. But there are 54 Tory Councillors who should be asking themselves: “Why is it that our electors do not trust us  to support, inform, and advise them?”

And contrariwise there are many people in Suffolk who should be asking themselves: “Why are we electing people that we cannot trust to to support, inform, and advise us?”

My Chinese  chengyu for this post is:

东风吹马耳 dōngfēng chuī mǎ’ěr: (literally – the east wind blows the horse’s ear)  eg: information falling on deaf ears

Cabinet, Council spending, cuts, Lollipop patrols, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized

Pretzel maths from SCC

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One of the things that is so remarkable about the leadership at Suffolk County Council  is their perverse combination of parsimony and prodigality.

On the parsimony side, they stand up straight, cross their fingers behind their backs  and declare straightfaced that they simply haven’t the money to spend on inessentials like road crossing patrols and libraries.

Yet it was just before Christmas that they spent literally hundreds of thousands of pounds on setting up Suffolk Circle, a membership-based social enterprise that had apparently worked well in Southwark.  (Where, I would suggest,  there is less sense of social cohesion and a greater turnover of population than in Suffolk).

What none of Suffolk’s Cabinet seemed to have asked, of themselves or of anyone else  was “Is this necessary?”

Kathy Pollard’s blog makes clear this is a question that should definitely have been asked:  Suffolk Circle is currently offering services that were already available free in Suffolk!  And, when SCC spent £750,000 on Suffolk Circle, this really means that every man woman and child in Suffolk has been asked to subsidise this social enterprise to the tune of £1. Without consultation. Perhaps they might have decided there were other services they preferred to spend their money on? (Update:  April 2012 we currently believe the  sum spent on Suffolk Circle to be ‘only’ £680,000)

Suffok’s leaders seem genuinely confused about the value of our money, letting it flow through their fingers like water  on inessentials  yet defending core cuts as unavoidable.   “Do as I say not as I do”  is their mantra over and over again.  It’s as if they genuinely cannot tell the difference between right and wrong decisions!

Nine months ago  – just as the cuts began to bite –  our leaders decided to allow the Chief Executive to spend £122,000 of public money (thats sixteen pence from every Suffolk resident)  on unspecified ‘services’  from three consultancy companies : Fields of Learning, Scintillate and DNA.   This decision was voted through at the May 2010 Council meeting, by the Conservative majority  after an earler attempt to to slip the decision through Cabinet without further publicity was called in by the Lib Dems.  We said that this was a grossly inappropriate use of public money at a time of belt-tightening.

Deputy Leader Jane Storey’s response?  “This is a tiny proportion of the county council’s budget!”

I kid you not.  I wrote down these words as they dropped from her mouth.

It is a tragedy that SCC is being run by people who consider £122,000 a small sum of money to spend without further authorisation of disclosure on ‘consultancy’ , £500,000 a sensible amount to ensure closed mouths for former council  employees, £750, 000 a reasonable sum to  set up  ‘pay-for’ friendship groups in a county where  friendship and support groups proliferate and for free – yet think £150,000 a good sum to save by closing the Bury Park and Ride and £174,000 to abolish our School Crossing Patrols.

As many members of Suffolk will remember, one of the above consultants, Bedfordshire-based  Fields of Learning had previously been used by Suffolk County Council – who spent nearly half a million pounds of Suffolk taxpayers money in 2009 on  “neuro-linguistic programming” courses for the deputy leader and her colleagues.  Yet, if you google ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ you will discover it described as one of the 10 most discredited forms of intervention in published research – on a par with ‘equine treatment for eating disorders’ and ‘dolphin assisted therapy’.

What on earth is the Tory leadership  doing spending public money on  such things while insisting  that the rest of us have  to tighten our belts so dreadfully?  Come to that, why do they pay for meeting rooms in Ipswich when Endeavour house echoes with underused space? Why do they get so antsy when we suggest they cut their own  mileage bills by 10%?

Back in November, Colin Noble,  Portfolio holder for Adult and Community Services  disclosed  his difficulties  on his blog when he wrote  “as I get older I realise I know less and less about more and more.”

I think that says it all.

Chinese saying of the day:

朱门 酒 肉 臭， 路 有冻 死 骨 (zhu men jiu rou chou lu you dong si gu)

behind the doors of the rich meat and wine go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of the frozen