Sorry to go on about this but the Customer Service Direct contract is looking more expensive every time it gets revisited.  Just to put it in context the overspend is more than two times this year’s savings.  Some of that overspend may genuinely be extra services that weren’t envisioned at the time that the council signed it, but few people who were not tied to it think it makes up the majority of the overspend.

As Ipswich Spy have proved the remnants of the Suffolk Labour led regime are remarkably complacent about this.  Paraphrasing former senior comrade Julian Swainson, Ipswich Spy said “As our eagle eyed reader from up Norfolk way pointed out, the big problem with the CSD contract is the lack of scrutiny of the contract since 2005.”  Even as partisan sniping that fails, as a Labour opposition would be a crucial part of that scrutiny.

And that’s before pointing out that despite Jeremy Pembroke’s other failings, at least he made sure a County Councillor was named to the board, something that doesn’t seem to have been a priority when the red flag was flying over County Hall.

I was going to upload the Companies House documents I recovered on the Customer Services Direct fiasco, but they’ll take a lot out of the hosting account, so I’ll send them to you if you ask nicely at james@bridgeward.org.uk

You can get other company documents on Customer Services Direct at this address:

http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/f8dfbde3dc2fd06e06f904bd449563bb/wcprodorder?ft=1

…if you feel like crowd sourcing this effort.   It costs £1 per document, although you can get them all for free if you already have the £60 per annum Companies House account.

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.