According to a recent issue of Private Eye, the independent auditors for Newtownabbey Borough Council found a number of unlawful policies and practices, such as:
* “in lieu” payments to officers who didn’t take their full leave entitlement
* using council credit cards to run up thousands of pounds of personal expenditure
* paying compensation (in excess of 100,000 pounds) to officers for premature retirement or redundancy, without appropriate consideration
I can’t find this report anywhere, so I’ve written to the Department of the Environment, who appoint the auditors for local councils, to see if I can get a copy.
In report sproduced by the National Audit Office in England there is a statement to the effect that the work of the NAO saves the taxpayer at least eight pounds for each pound spent running the office.
The Northern Ireland Audit Office make no such claim. So I’m wondering if they calculate it and don’t print it, or don’t actually know.
Accordingly I’ve made a request to the NIAO to find out. I should probably also make one to the NAO to find out how they calculate theirs…
Recently I received my copy of the Spring 2005 “City Matters”, the magazine distributed by Belfast City Council to every home in the area.
There are several articles in it about the new anti-litter campaigns around Belfast. Apparently since last April 746 fixed penalty notices have been issued for littering, and they’ve just employed another litter warden and two more enforcement officers (bringing the total to 3 wardens and 6 EOs). Apparently 122 individuals have also been prosecuted in the courts for this.
It currently costs almost 10m a year to have the streets of Belfast cleaned, which is much higher than similar cities across the UK.
Currently all money raised through fines is paid to the Department of the Environment, but there is legislation planned for the summer which will allow the concil to reinvest this money in making Belfast a cleaner city.
There has also been a major anti-litter advertising campaign, “Don’t drop it, stop it!”. This has recently been independently evaluated, and, according to “City Matters”, has successfully got the message across to people, with 54% remembering the campaign without any prompting and 86% after prompting. Apparently “more than half of the people asked understood that our message was to ‘stop littering’”.
In my world, if nearly half of the people who’ve seen your ad don’t realise that it’s trying to get you to stop littering, then it’s actually a colossal failure. But “City Matters” doesn’t go into any great detail about this evaluation, so I’ve wrtten to the City Council to get a copy of the results.
It’s beginning to look like all I’m interested in is parking! So time for a whole different type of request. One of the other fascinating documents I found on the NIAO site was their June 2004 report into the Use of Consultants by Northern Ireland Civil Service. This is a horrifying document reporting on a survey of 85 consultancy contracts and discovered that 74% of them had no formal business case, that over 8 million pounds was being spent annually on reports without even clearly identifying the business need, that a third of these weren’t tendered competitively, that even when the initial contract was on a fixed or capped fee basis, almost half of these were extended, and that the costs tended to rise by 65%, and that 93% were paid for without being subjected to any documented assessment procedure.
Some of the case studies are fascinating:
Case Study D:
The department’s original contract for this assignment was for a fixed fee of just under 20,000. The department subsequently agreed to three extensions to the contract. These increased the consultancy assignment by 115 days and the daily rate by 20%. As a result, the overall cost to the department was 140,000 – seven times greater than the original contract.
Case Study G:
The department commissioned an external IT consultant to produce a departmental e-business strategy. Although all departments had been requested to undertake similar studies, no arrangements were made to commission an NICS-wide collaborative study. In the absence of central arrangements, the department commissioned its own study. Originally awarded for a sum of 30,000, as the project progressed, the department agreed substantial changes to the original specification and a number of extensions. Total payments to the contractor amounted to 183,000.
None of the consultants are named in the report. FOI has an exemption, allowing the withholding of information due to “commercial interests”. But the Office of Government Commerce have stated that even where such an exemption may initially be warranted, the information should be made available after 12-18 months.
So, I’ve written to the NIAO asking for them to provide, for each of the 85 contracts surveyed:
- the government department in question
- the consultant(s) used
- the background / description of the contract
- the initial cost agreed, estimated, and/or approved
- the total expenditure
Hopefully they’ll release this, and I can go digging further.
The report that I received from the NIAO on On-Street Parking referenced a survey of on-street parking commissioned by Roads Service in 1998. This was the one that revealed that 41% of cars surveyed were parked illegally (94% in some areas), and that thus Roads Service could be losing as much as £300k a year of income in unpaid charges.
This seems like an interesting thing to try to dig deeper into, so I’ve made a request to Roads Service for any reports or results from this survey. I’ve requested that it should ideally be made available on-line, but that I’ll accept an email version, or, as last resort, hard copy.
The nice people at the NIAO responded very quickly to my request letting me know that they could post a copy of the report out to me. However, as their office is just across the street from mine, I suggested that I could just pick it up. They left a copy of it out for me, and I collected it late this afternoon.
Some of the highlights:
- Parking is significantly profiable. In 1999-2000 Roads Service received £1.23m from the sale of parking tickets, with expenses of £0.35m. A further £390k was received from the Courts through fixed penalty notices
- In 1999 Roads Service commissioned consultants to surveny on-street parking. They found that around 41% of vehicles were illegally parked (as high as 94% in some areas)
- Thus Roads Service are probably losing as much as £300k a year through unpaid charges.
- There are 22 traffic wardens in Belfast, covering 20 ‘beats’ and 1,323 parking bays
- There are huge variations in the numbers of tickets issued per beat and per warden
- It takes 10-15 minutes to issue a ticket compared with computerised wardens in GB, who can issue a ticket in less than one minute
- 20% of fixed penalty notices are cancelled or suspended – in most cases because the DVLNI’s register of vehicles is inaccurate
- 28% of salary costs go towards overtime, however this is undestated and is probably considerably higher. A large part of this is for Saturday cover, which is automatically classed as overtime.
- Sick leave amongst traffic wardens is very high at 26 days a year (The RUC, as a parallel was 21 days)
- To prosecute for having no ticket, it has to be established that there was convenient access to an operational ticket machine. In a survey of Feburary 2000, over 60% of machines were out of order at some time during the month, some on more than 5 ocassions.
- It is not recorded how long machines are out of order, or the response times to fix them.
The report concluded:
- The current enforcement regime does not provide for the efficient and effective operation of on-street parking
- The levels of manpower may be inadequate
- The service is poorly managed, with low levels of cover during peak periods, no ongoing review of the composition of beats, high levels of overtime and sickness absence, and littoe or no attempt to monitor or benchmark performance
- Introducing a decriminalised parking scheme could provide a viable alternative
I recently discovered the Northern Ireland Audit Office. They’re the NI equivalent of the NAO, and have pretty much the same goals – to make sure that local government is working effectively and to combat public sector fraud.
Unlike the NAO who seem to produce several reports a week, the NIAO only produces about 10 reports a year. But they certainly seem to pick some juicy topics: Waiting for Treatment in Hospitals, Improving Pupil Attendance At School, Investigation of Suspected Fraud in the Water Service etc.
Although their website details reports going back to 1994, they’re only really on-line since 2002. So, my first request to them is to discover how I can get copies of the earlier reports. The website says I can purchase them from The Stationery Office, but that doesn’t seem right.
So I’ve emailed the NIAO to see how I can obtain a copy of their 2000 report on On-Street Parking.
