Barnet in the Press again…..

A victory for transparency…and a warning for public sector procurement

“As the London Borough of Barnet Council recently discovered…when a group of dogged local “citizen” bloggers managed to unearth evidence  – through FOI requests and Companies House searches – of Barnet Council’s rather dodgy “relationship” with a security firm called MetPro (now out of business).  Last week the findings of an internal audit were announced:  including the troubling revelation that the council had spent £1.3 million with MetPro with no tendering exercise, no written contract or SLA, no formal authorisation, no proper invoicing… thus violating just about every CPR that Barnet had.

 

Cue some serious questions about Barnet’s finance, audit and procurement processes, and some serious embarrassment for the cabinet and senior officers of this so-called “flagship council: especially so given Barnet is one of the councils planning mass outsourcing of services imminently.”

 

“Easy council” scandal puts Town Hall outsourcing reforms in the spotlight.

After the demise of Suffolk’s “virtual” council (and the electoral scuppering of Bury’s “enabling” council) it is the turn of the daddy of all Conservative-led, outsourcing-driven council reforms programmes to come under the critical spotlight: Barnet’s Flagship “easy council” project.

A financial scandal has brought the controversial model (known formally as One Barnet) under renewed scrutiny. On Thursday night councillors discussed a report which detailed how the council spent £1.3m on the services of a security firm called MetPro, without carrying out basic financial or security checks or indeed putting the contract out to tender

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Barnet not so fair? – Heather Wakefield

An internal audit report has highlighted concerns over procurement processes at the London Borough of Barnet. This raises questions about the council’s general outsourcing proposals and also the government’s wider privatisation plans

Not a good week for privatisation. First there’s the Health and Social Care Bill – ‘paused’, slightly modified and re-started following public outcry over threatened marketisation of the NHS. Next was the desperate debacle surrounding Southern Cross, filling the parts of the press and media that the bill didn’t occupy.

And just to add insult to privatisation injury, yesterday saw a debate within Barnet council’s Audit Committee about the payment of £1,361,000 to a private security contractor MetPro Rapid Response without a contract

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