Barnet Trades Council
Future Shape – Barnet Community Campaign
At last night’s well attended AGM last night, the Trades Council announced their campaign with Barnet residents on Future Shape. They are launching campaign at a meeting on 4 March 2009. If you are a Barnet resident we would encourage you to attend. For details of time and venue of meeting click here
Future Shape – Money in for Dexter Appeal
Adult Social Services Restructure
“To agree or not agree, that is the question…”
The bulk of the role profiles have been agreed. There are a couple of outstanding questions:
1) Should OTs (Occupational Therapists) accept that part of their role is to carry out some tasks completed by social workers?
2) Should social workers accept that part of their role is to carry out some tasks completed by OTs? Should we accept the notion of “trusted assessor” on our role profile?
I believe there is a consensus amongst most staff (if not all) and management we want residents in the Borough to have a service which causes the least headache for them in terms of waiting and jumping through hoops. I believe there is consensus amongst most staff and management we want service users to be safe in the delivery of that service and for staff to feel safe and confident in the assessments they have made. The question is about how to deliver on these positions. We will be having a meeting for those staff affected by the question of trusted assessor 10.2.09 10am-12pm in Barnet House to finalise our UNISON position.
3) Should Administrators accept onto their role profile they should take minutes of Adult Protection case conferences.
Our current administrators in Adult Social Services are paid low wages for an important job of keeping us from completely grinding to a halt with the volume of administration necessary to our roles. Adult Protection cases are notorious for producing rain forests of documentation. From a social worker point of view it would be fantastic if some of the burden of this administration could be done by someone else allowing the social worker to concentrate solely on the investigation. However, our UNISON members on the administration side of things have indicated they would not be happy to carry out this new task – with or without the training and the pay. An issue they find difficult to deal with is the emotional trauma of listening to the sometimes graphic detail divulged in some of these meetings. It’s a fair point. Management was going to consider this and propose a way forward. We believe the best way forward would be to have a dedicated team which would deal with this administration. We will keep our members updated on any developments.
Dignity at Work and the DDA
UNISON and management are working together on statements to encourage employees with a disability to come forward and inform the employer on the adjustments they need to continue carrying out their work. This is to make sure no one has to face any indignities for the lack of adequate planning following a move into a new structure. We will be putting out more info on this in due course.
Drive My Car?
Finally I have requested a statement from management/ HR regarding essential car user allowance. Some of you have pointed out this is missing from the new role profiles and are worried about what this means. I have been verbally reassured there is nothing sinister in this, although the car allowance for team managers is falling under intense scrutiny. I await the written response with bated breath.
Future Shape – Essex Council staff up for SALE
A group of Essex County Council Officers has put its services up for sale. All services have been included, and the Council is prepared to pay a private company £5.4 billion of
http://www.unisonessex.org.uk/Outsourcing
Watch the story on BBC Politics Show (the
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hcrnk/The_Politics_Show_East_01_02_2009/
Barnet College update 4 February
Redundancies: an S188 Notice was issued to Union officers and representative today outlining potential posts at risk as a consequence of the anticipated shortfall in College funding 08/09 and 09/10. Details of an Accelerated Voluntary Redundancy Scheme have also been published.
UNISON reps at the College will be participating in the 30 days consultation process in order to seek to mitigate the total number of redundancies. We will also be representing the best interests of individual members who elect to leave under the VR scheme
-College financial situation: all Union reps will be briefed tomorrow morning (Friday) by the College Principal on the current situation with the College finances, which is the key driver for the present cost-saving exercises (staffing and non-staffing)
Montagu Road: it is now generally known that the College’s Montagu Road (ESL) site will be closing in the summer. The building is no longer fit for purpose and the ongoing necessary maintenance costs are prohibitive. Students and staff currently based at the site will be re-located to the
The Barnet College UNISON stewards
Remember the IBM takeover in Somerset—SouthwestOne?
Remember the ITV documentary on the IBM takeover of Somerset Council? In the documentary the Somerset Chief Executive explained that he visualised other councils queuing up to join SouthwestOne. Think again! The following story was reported in the Local Government Chronicle:
Alan Jones criticised councils’ unwillingness to consider efficiency projects devised outside their boundaries after the south-west’s biggest two authorities, Devon and Cornwall County Councils , both signalled they would not join the initiative.
The chief executive admitted that no new councils were currently considering entering Southwest One , despite
Institutional chauvinism
Mr Jones queried why councils were not seeking the savings membership offered and concluded: “The answer has got to do with institutional chauvinism. People want something that has been invented in their patch.”
He added: “Our experience is that people are too conservative and cautious — they look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Earlier,
He added: “
Transformed
Meanwhile,
Kevin Lavery, chief executive of Cornwall, which is shortly to be transformed into a county-wide unitary, said that the council was based in a relatively low-wage area and more likely to run services for other authorities than have them provided elsewhere.
“What we don’t want to be in the business of is exporting jobs outside of
“Can you Shape the Future of Public Services in Barnet?”
Future Shape – Meeting the Leader
On Friday 30 January the Trade Unions had a meeting with Leader of the Council & Lead Cabinet member for Adult Social Services.
Background
On 16th January 2009 the Acting Chief Executive launched Phase Two of Future Shape programme (See the Barnet Intranet Future Shape website). The launch made a request for staff participation in the Future Shape Groups, high profile forums meant to meet monthly and report back to Members in June. However it was the absence of any role for the Trade Unions in these Groups that left them no option but to seek a meeting with Councillors. The Trade Unions were also concerned that regular meetings with the Future Shape team were not taking place and that the formerly amicable relations were starting to break down
There has been a lot of information about Future Shape. There have been some allegations that the Trade Unions have been scaremongering about the dangers of mass privatisation (something we have always denied). However closer scrutiny of the last two Cabinet Reports and Future Shape Groups on the intranet quickly reveal good reasons why both staff and Trade Unions feel uneasy about the direction Future Shape is heading.
More recently it has been revealed the remit of the Barnet Transact Future Shape Group (see below) …
“Barnet Transact aims to identify all of those services that are not the core business of the Council, or that are not part of the value chain of services that are, and seeks to find alternative ways to provide these services. On the basis that the Council should only do what it is obliged to do, this group will develop outline business cases for services where the quick wins can be generated.”
The Trade Unions and staff were interpreting this and other comments to mean that the Council was going to carry out a comprehensive review to identify what are the statutory services they have to provide (“only do what it is obliged to do”) and everything else could be prepared for procurement ‘quick wins’.
The Joint Trade Unions view is that the majority of staff work in services that are not statutory hence our concern that there was going to be mass procurement/tendering of services/staff. That was until last Friday when we aired our concerns to the Leader. We had a frank exchange of views. It was in one of these exchanges when the Leader provided a comment on his and the Cabinet’s view of Future Shape so far.
He was unequivocal that no decision had been made, was proud of the excellent services being provided by the staff adding that Cabinet were still to be convinced of the merits of the model being proposed for Future Shape. We said that it would be good if staff could hear this statement themselves, so as promised, the Leader has provided the following statement:
“The staff work streams are focussing on the ‘how’ before we move onto the ‘who’. Once we get to look at the ‘who’ it may be that we partner with other organisations to provide a service in a different way. Equally, it may be that we continue to provide a service because we are the only organisation that can achieve sufficiently high quality at sufficiently low cost. This is an interpretation the Council does what only the Council can do. Clearly we have many excellent services and we would not embark on unnecessary disruption, but we would be in favour of change if we were confident it would bring significant improvements in quality and value for money”.
What followed was a discussion about where we were in the process. The Leader felt the Trade Unions had ‘jumped the gun’, we were told the Groups are brainstorming sessions looking at ‘How’ we could provide services in the future. Clearly the next stage would be looking at ‘Who’ could provide those services. This crucial distinction is important as the Trade Unions are concerned that possible “service delivery models” could be identified in June 09, with little time and resources available for work to be done on in house services. We asked that a detailed explanation on the timetable and key milestones on Future Shape be provided on the Councils intranet/website.
Finally we had discussions about possible working across public services in Barnet, the Group which will be looking at this is called:
“Barnet Support incorporates the full range of ‘back office’ functions, HR, ICT, Legal, Finance, Audit, Procurement. Public private partnerships in this area are already reasonably commonplace. The focus for this group is to determine the future requirement for these services in the context of a Council that is externally focussed on the place rather than on itself as an organisation. Might there be, for example, a trading opportunity to sell a set of support services to Businesses in Barnet or to other London Boroughs?”
There is still quite a long way to go. Communication is clearly going to be important. The Trade Unions have had their proposal to sit on the Groups rejected so we will not be able to feedback on the progress of the Groups. We will be submitting comments to the Groups and will communicate our contributions to our members…….watch this space……………
WEATHER WARNING – Barnet UNISON
The following announcements are on the Council website
http://www.barnet.gov.uk/highlights/adverse-weather-services/harzadous-weather-staff-updates.htm
http://www.barnet.gov.uk/highlights/adverse-weather-services.htm
We advise our members working for the Council to keep checking this website