Entries Tagged 'Suffolk County Council' ↓

I’ve been looking into the company documents around the BT Customer Services Direct fiasco and something seems to have come out that seems to border on negligence, Suffolk County councillors for the first crucial year was not represented on the board of Customer Services Direct, the ten year multi-multi-million biggest public-private partnership in Suffolk County Council to date.

There were two company secretaries appointed Newgate Street Secretaries Limited, a City outfit and Philip Richard Willis, who although he has an address in Wickham Market I can find no other trace of him.  The directors include Stuart Gemmil, a Mid Suffolk District councillor (but not Suffolk County Council) and Michael More, the then chief executive of Suffolk County Council.

There are four other names, Peter Carruthers, Stephen Crabbe, Andrew Peach and Michael Reynolds.  They all have addresses that are out of the county, but to make sure I’ve looked for them on Google, checked their names with two County councils and checked their name against the 2001 County Council election results and I can’t find a single County Councillor there.

So it seems that in the first crucial year there was not a single County Councillor on the board of Customer Services Direct.

I’ve gone to the current appointments and both Jeremy Pembroke and Andrea Hill are listed as directors.  Jeremy Pembroke joined the board on 15th September 2005.  Mid Suffolk are still represented, this time by the council leader Tim Passmore.

So what on earth is going on?  Why did the electorate of Mid Suffolk have a voice on the board of Suffolk County Council’s biggest public-private partnership and Suffolk County Council did not?

There clearly was not a problem later.  Did Bryony Rudkin’s prejudicial interest in the matter mean that there was no one to speak out for the council tax payers?  If so, why couldn’t she delegate the task to another elected member?

PS.  I’ve got another Freedom of Information request to ensure that I’m not missing anything out.

One aspect of the customer services direct fiasco that has not been explored very much has been the unenthusiastic response of the district councils.  This has been pointed out to me by a number of people who see this as the dog that didn’t bark.

As Mid Suffolk was involved then it clearly was designed to get the other councils on board.  But to date Mid Suffolk is the only district council on board.  Was the design of the system predicated on the majority of district councils coming on board, and the councillors in charge too proud or too inflexible to change the structure of the deal when it was clear that they could not come on board?

There may have been a suspicion of the Labour run Suffolk council in this, but Mid Suffolk was a Tory council, Ipswich had a Liberal presence in the administration and Suffolk became Tory a year and a bit later – so the district councils could have got on board then.

I’ve a report from St Edmundsbury borough council (2006, so two years after) which say that CSD wasn’t customer focussed enough and that the promised savings were “aspirational” (a polite way of saying piffle). I’ve also got some minutes from Suffolk Coastal where it’s quite clear that both they and Waveney did not think CSD was up to the job, although it’s not clear why.  I’ve put in a freedom of information request for the reasons from Ipswich, and hopefully this will beef up some of the things I’ve been hearing off the record.

If it was predicated on economies of scale, this does not seem to be clear from any of the public documents that I’ve seen so far – understandably- although it stretches credulity that CSD was only expected to run with Mid Suffolk.

This dog really seems like she was born without enough legs to run.

UPDATE:  Looking for something else, I came across this “When the joint venture company is up and running, the partners expect more organisations to become involved as the project develops to meet the needs of the county”

Kevan Lim once (rightly) commented that the Conservatives on Suffolk Council were stricken with amnesia as to who, exactly, hired Andrea Hill.

It’s not only the Conservatives.  Labour thinks that the Customer Services Direct contract has absolutely nothing to do with them, as shown by the purple prose apologia from a Labour supporting writer in Ipswich Spy.

Naturally the tin foil hat brigade lapped it up with Ken Bates and Alasdair Ross retweeting the Labour defence.

The current administration have serious questions to answer on the conduct of this, and at least in Jeremy Pembroke’s case there is also the question of what role did he play during the contract negotiations and whether this blunted the opposition scrutiny that this deal clearly needed.  But this does not mean that the Liberal-Labour administration should be beyond scrutiny.

There is also a genuine concern about the general role that BT seems to play in local politics, in 2004 both the Labour leader of Suffolk Council and the MP very well disposed towards them due to personal links (not helped by an uncritical attitude from Jeremy Pembroke and supine Liberal Democrats).  This soft cross-party corporatism is never going to turn out well.  Why are Labour supporting websites such as Ipswich Spy so keen to shout down such concerns by alluding to a “right wing blogosphere”?

So what was Bryony Rudkin’s prejudicial interest in the BT contract scandal?  I’m afraid that it’s actually rather pedestrian, and not sinister in the slightest.  You see, she’s married into the BT family.

Her husband, Steve Rudkin, is a scientist, a rather senior and succesful one, at BT.  Obviously she can’t have anything to do with BT and at least in the decisive meeting this seems to have been the case, at least according to Ipswich Spy.

However that does lead to another question, why on earth was it considered at all appropriate to comment on it in such gushing terms?  Who advised that this could be ever seen as appropriate?  Was advice even requested? Another freedom of information request has been sent.

From Private Eye (pdf):

Pembroke has been waffling since 2005 about becoming an “enabling” council and the huge savings to be achieved by outsourcing on a grand scale.  A year earlier Suffolk embarked on a 10 year “partnership” with BT.

The fact that the leader of Suffolk Council a year earlier had not been Pembroke and that it had been run by a Liberal-Labour coalition may be important.  Perhaps not to the source of the story…

There’s a useful summary of the Look East interview with Michael Gower, the whistle blower on the BT overcharging scandal (although I apologise for the offensive language in the side bars).  It has a rather worrying point:

Michael Gower says that BT have done nothing wrong. “They were being extremely commercial and the council were being rather naive. The contract wasn’t set up properly at the outset and that lead to us paying for a lot of services – or some services – which should have been included in the original contract. It led to ambiguity over what was in the contract and what was out of the contract.”

There is much breast beating now about how the Conservative councl in Suffolk managed to get stuck with a contract.  Of course argue the Guardian and Private Eye, this is the Tories fault (rather than Jeremy Pembroke’s fault – who does seem to deserve a lot of the blame).

Perhaps the Tories could have opposed it, and perhaps Jeremy Pembroke himself should not have been so gung ho for this classic corporatist scheme.  And a good point is that it does not help to make the case for the admittedly necessary outsourcing that we will need to do to preserve services – whatever the unions think.  But the real blame lies with the administration that signed the deal.

I said before that the Bryony Rudkin quote was used in marketing copy, by which I meant a press release.

But there is real marketing copy, on one of the provider’s websites

We chose CGI for its excellent track record in innovative working with government agencies in North America, where it has successfully pioneered its single-window government approach. Having adopted this approach in Suffolk, we are now able to put the priorities of our citizens first and organize the way we deliver council services to meet their needs.

Bryony Rudkin, Leader of Suffolk County Council

And this, where the Labour government puts its seal of approval on the deal, and we have this quote:

Councillor Bryony Rudkin, Leader of Suffolk County Council, said the centre’s success in just four months speaks for itself.

She said: “People expect higher levels of service in all aspects of their lives. Longer, more convenient opening hours, 24 hour web access and help on the end of a phone are commonplace in everything from retailing to banking. In Suffolk we said – why not in public services?”

This is not a pro-Tory point.  The Tories on the County essentially failed as an opposition, which is why they still didn’t control Suffolk when less Tory counties such as Essex and Norfolk went blue.  Jeremy Pembroke is very vulnerable.

Ipswich Spy has a rather turgid account of Suffolk’s BT difficulty, which lights up with an obviously well informed postscript which is worth reproducing in full:

UPDATE: This decision to set up the joint venture was taken behind closed doors in a meeting of county councillors not open to the public on 22nd April 2004. The then leader of the council, Bryony Rudkin, declared a prejudicial interest and so left the meeting during the discussions, but we wonder if she had been involved in negotiating the contract. If she had such a personal conflict of interest that she couldn’t even be in the room when a behind closed doors meeting took a decision, surely her conflict was so great as to taint the negotiating process.

I have put in a freedom of information request for that meeting as well as details of any prejudicial interests that were announced by Bryony Rudkin.

Ipswich Spy raises the role that Bryony Rudkin may have played in the negotiations, and I don’t have that inside knowledge to comment one way or another except to say that I strongly doubt that anything improper – rather than simply stupid – was done in the negotiations or for that matter the winnowing out of competitors to BT.

Talking about the simply stupid, as Bryony Rudkin apparently had a prejudicial interest in the decision why on earth did she make such a glowing tribute to BT after the decision was made?  Unlike the decisions before this is in the public domain.  To repeat:

Bryony Rudkin, Leader of Suffolk County Council, said: “We put BT through an exacting procurement process to ensure they were up to the job. As a result we have confidence our partnership with them will be good for the people of Suffolk, offering the highest quality services and technology at a price which gives our taxpayers excellent value.

Considering the prejudicial interest, why on earth didn’t she get another senior Labour or Liberal councillor to make a statement so gushing that it was used in marketing copy?

There has been quite a lot of news about the Suffolk Care homes going out of the control of Suffolk County Council.  Of course in these hard times you would expect our Labour councillors to be even handed and put the care of the elderly above the entrenched employment privileges of the Unison members.  You’d be wrong.  It may have something to do with the fact that Unison is one of the four unions who keep Labour financially afloat and choose the leader.

Anyway on Suffolk County Council’s website there are three care homes in Ipswich, Crabbe Street, Hawthorn Drive and Sidegate Lane.  Hawthorn Drive is the closest to Bridge.

For reference the care homes in Bridge Ward, together with who run them are:

Prince of Wales Drive Residential Care Home (The Partnership in Care Limited)

Peppercorn House (Riverside ECHG)

Montgomery Court (BUPA)

Gwent House, Pembroke Close (Ipswich Borough Council)

Pauls Flats, Rectory Road (Ipswich Borough Council)

Felaw Street (Hanover Housing Association)

Now I know that our absentee Labour Councillors are decent, well meaning types, but the thing that gets me up in the morning is their patronising attitude that they know best and we, mere residents, know least.  And that we should be grateful for their concern.

The Labour Party conference showed another example of this paternalistic attitude.  Bryony Rudkin attacked the Suffolk County Council divestment plans.  There’s a lot of questions to ask about this, and there is a job of opposition that needs to be done to keep a place healthy.

But what really stuck in my craw, and those who know me can imagine the violent revulsion that I had to this, was this little point:

At the council meeting last Thursday, one Conservative said his village had come together to build a new doctor’s surgery.

“That might be fine in the nice comfortable villages but who’s going to come together to build the doctor’s surgery in my area of Ipswich where there are some quite serious deprivation issues?”

Now, please tell me that was a clap line for a Neanderthal audience smarting from defeat, and that she didn’t think that it was a serious point.  There may be a more complete speech, which I will be glad to publish.

Bridge has the Wherstead Road Residents Association, still going strong after forty years and the longest continuously functioning residents’ association in Ipswich.  It has the Maidenhall Residents Association that keeps a presence and a community together.  The port noise was stopped largely by a concerted action from residents across Bridge and Stoke Park, spontaneously organising.  There is the Stoke Green Baptist church and Saint Mary Stoke which have great outreach services to people more deprived than you would find on Corder Road, which if we are going to get picky about this is closer to the area which Dame Bryony represents.  And this is not to mention such groups from allotment holders, social clubs, Pentecostal churches and Neighbourhood watch groups that do a great deal of good in Bridge.

These groups are ignored by that sort of dismissal.  Now building a doctor’s surgery may be a stretch but just because we do not have the most expensive houses in Ipswich does not mean that we are incapable of organising ourselves.  We need help, not direction.

If you want to insult us go and do it to our faces and in your leaflets, not to a hall of useless, overpaid, overpromoted and spendthrift public sector middle managers up in Manchester who got us in this mess in the first place.