Leader Listens

Barnet Council’s new Cabinet

January 14, 2010 – 5:26 pm

Barnet Council’s new Leader of the Council, Councillor Lynne Hillan, announced her new Cabinet in December.

The two new faces on the Cabinet are Councillor Sachin Rajput, with responsibility for a new Adults portfolio, and Councillor Daniel Webb, Cabinet Member for Policy and Performance.

The new Deputy Leader of the Council, Councillor Andrew Harper, will take over as Cabinet Member for the Children’s Service, and Councillor Daniel Thomas will gain the portfolio of Environment and Transport.

Councillor Melvin Cohen, Councillor Matthew Offord, Councillor Helena Hart and Councillor Robert Rams will continue with their previous portfolios (see list below) while Councillor Richard Cornelius’ portfolio will change from Community Services and Regeneration to Housing and Regeneration.

Leader of the Council & Cabinet Member for Resources – Councillor Lynne Hillan
Deputy Leader of the Council & Cabinet Member for the Children’s Service – Councillor Andrew Harper
Cabinet Member for Planning & Environmental Protection – Councillor Melvin Cohen
Cabinet Member for Housing & Regeneration – Councillor Richard Cornelius
Cabinet Member for Adults – Councillor Sachin Rajput
Cabinet Member for Public Health – Councillor Helena Hart
Cabinet Member for Policy & Performance – Councillor Daniel Webb
Cabinet Member for Investment in Learning – Councillor Robert Rams
Cabinet Member for Environment & Transport – Councillor Daniel Thomas
Cabinet Member for Community Engagement & Community Safety – Councillor Matthew Offord

By Barnet Council | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Expenses for October – November 2009

December 8, 2009 – 4:47 pm

There have been no changes to my expenses from last month.

october-2008-october-2009

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What you see is what you get

November 4, 2009 – 3:17 pm

I am delighted that council yesterday unanimously approved a motion that Barnet Council publish all spending over £500 on Barnet.gov.uk from the next financial year.Politics is still reverberating from the furore over Westminster politicians expenses and everyone in the political process has to look at how we can reassure the general public that politics, and public servants for that matter, are almost all good people doing good work for the benefit of the country.

We have probably been over concerned about how critics can misuse information rather than trusting in the good sense of the population as a whole. I have now decided to start publishing my expenses on this blog every month in a clear form. Frankly these have been available to critics under the Freedom of Information Act for years and are regularly requested by journalists using the act to trawl for scandal across the UK (the expense to the taxpayer of such fishing requests is something I should return to another time).

I trust publishing these figures here will demonstrate to critics and cynics, and to you, that Barnet has nothing to hide.

leaders-expenses0809

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features | Tagged barnet, Council, expenses, leader, October | Comments Off

Greener than us…

September 23, 2009 – 9:32 am

Here is a rather nice example of community activity in Barnet.

Barnet in Bloom judged East View Gardens, High Barnet as the ‘most outstanding garden’ in the borough. The judges were impressed with the community spirit shown in transforming a disused piece of land into a garden that whole street can enjoy.

There has obviously been fair amount of discussion about the nature of the council support for community activity over the past few weeks, in large part built around the limits of what the council can or should do in the current financial climate.

The example of East View Gardens is a very good illustration of where the lack of council involvement has been an entirely good thing.

A couple of gardeners from the council might, just might, have produced a garden as lovely as the local residents have done here. They would not however, have produced the community spirit, the sense of neighbours, young and old, working together to transform their street.

I am told that the community are due to have a street party in celebration of their win and that they are now looking to expand the garden onto a neighbouring plot. I very much hope they will have a great time, and I very much hope they will be able to expand. We cannot have enough projects like this in Barnet.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features, events | Tagged barnet, community, Council, flowers, plants, residents | Comments Off

Local government finance, is it easy?

September 16, 2009 – 10:45 am

People often talk about the lack of news in August and a perfect example recently being when the details of Barnet Council’s Future Shape plans became national front page news.

It is a quiet news day indeed when one council’s plans for reorganisation are deemed the most interesting thing to have happened in the country that day…

The Guardian picked up on a phrase I used comparing our plans for developing our services to budget airlines. This was then picked up by several other national papers, the BBC, and ITN.

Myself, I am surprised no one has looked at how airlines like Easyjet redefined their services before now. They are a very successful business in an industry where several competitors have fallen by the wayside. Giants like Pan-Am and TWA have gone, but the new airlines prosper. Why?

They have simply asked their customers what they really value. The former giants assumed that a flight to Rome automatically involved checking in at a set time, a ‘free’ (and not very good) meal and a set amount of luggage. The budget airlines fly you there but if you have £200 pounds to spend on your trip you pay £100 for your flight but the other £100 you can spend on checking in later, or booking later, or carrying extra luggage. You can even use some of it to eat a better meal in the airport than you can on the plane. Alternatively you can just save £100 and spend it on something else. As a business model we’d be daft not to look at it.

We are beginning to do something similar at Barnet Council and have begun to trial more flexible services. In adult care for instance we now involve users in defining their own services. We no longer turn up and say “we are from the council, we think you need this”. We are moving to “we are from the council, what do you think you need?”. Of course this involves help and advice from experts but where in the past there was a feeling that the council knew best, now we think you do.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged airline, barnet, borough, budget, Council, future, shape | Comments Off

Building strong foundations

August 4, 2009 – 11:38 am

Funding for housing projects has been uppermost in my mind this week as the Council has been getting conflicting signals from central government.

Like all of London, Barnet has been under huge pressure to build more homes. The reasons for this are varied – from changing demographics with more Barnet people living on their own, to pressures on London as people move in from both elsewhere in the UK and across Europe to take advantage of what has been, until recently, a booming economy.

Even the current recession is likely to slow, rather than end this trend.

We have had great success across Barnet with ‘kickstart funding’ – targeting money small(ish) amounts to provide the infrastructure, from roads to drainage, that developers require before they start work. The return to tax payers of this funding is striking as it opens up major developments that may provide thousands of homes and create hundreds of jobs.

However the recent much heralded £1.6 billion that central government is to put into new housing turns out to be, in large part, a reprioritising of money ‘provisionally’ promised to places like Barnet.

For us this means that potential projects in West Hendon and Colindale could be delayed. I appreciate that they will not be cancelled but this is the very time that we need to be doing all that we can to bring work in the construction sector forward. The Colindale project alone has the potential to generate 500 jobs and with Barnet coming to terms with the depth of recession any help that we can have to get work moving would be welcome.

After a lot of work, we have succeeded in getting our plans underway at Stonegrove and Spur Road and credit, where due, we have had funding from the Homes and Community to kickstart these projects.

We had been planning to keep up this momentum, but the removal of £2.6 million will make our job much more difficult.

The scale of development that we are trying to achieve in the Borough is ambitious but has the potential to make Barnet an ever better place to live. But these long term ambitions won’t be achieved with conflicting messages and policies that chop and change.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features | Tagged barnet, construction, Council, homes, housing | Comments Off

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone

July 24, 2009 – 11:34 am

Anyone who thinks that politicians do not live in the real world would probably be pleased to learn that I experienced swine flu at first hand this week.

I was laid low with what is increasingly becoming known as ‘flu like symptoms’ last Friday.

For me swine flu felt very much like ordinary flu, but I understand that everyone reacts differently. By far the most unpleasant thing was four days of daytime TV. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

My first thought was that it was a summer cold but when I developed a very bad sore throat I thought I’d better check it out. The on-line advice is good and it looked as if I had some (but not all) of the symptoms. Only on Friday afternoon did I get the diagnosis from my GP – by telephone – that it might be SF. The telephone diagnosis from my GP was very efficient and the tamiflu distribution point at Finchley Memorial worked effectively.

In some ways I’m relieved to have got it out of the way. Barnet NHS has done an excellent job of dealing with this major public health issue. However, the likely wider spread of the virus will present real challenges to all of Barnet’s public services.

So far fewer than 2% of Barnet’s population have experienced swine flu. Central government is talking about around 30% catching it by the end of the year – in those circumstances our task will be to make sure we are able to keep our key services running. Fortunately our business continuity team have been planning for just such an eventuality.

My advice is – if anyone is showing symptoms, they should have themselves checked out.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features | Tagged barnet, Council, flu, illness, NHS, swine | Comments Off

Barnet too interested in health consultation – shock

July 3, 2009 – 1:57 pm

The biggest shock of the week for me has been healthcare for London’s publication of the public consultation into trauma and stroke treatment in London. The NHS is proposing a series of specialist centres for the treatment of serious trauma injuries and separately, a series of centres of excellence for the treatment of strokes.

There are good arguments for building up specialist clinical expertise in the issues but I am at a loss as to why this expertise is best concentrated, in the case of trauma, through central and south London at the Royal London (Whitechapel) Kings College Hospital (Denmark Hill), St George’s (Tooting) and St Mary’s (Paddington). As it stands the option of trauma care at The Royal Free in Hampstead looks likely to be rejected. I believe this decision would be wrong.

As for specialist care for stroke victims, proposals look likely to lead to units in Hammersmith, Denmark Hill, Harrow, Romford, Tooting, Orpington, Whitechapel and Euston. Although Barnet has a high incidence of strokes, there is no provision for a stroke specialism at Barnet Hospital, even although the consultation recognises that the hospital would be well able to provide such a specialism.

These are issues about which Barnet residents feel very strongly. So strongly in fact that 27 per cent of all the residents in London who responded to the survey are from Barnet, 2335 out of the 8611 total, – by far the highest of any London borough. Response to the London-wide consultation varied from a low of 43 responses in Tower Hamlets to around 500 or so in other areas where campaigns were held to encourage response.

There are two ways of looking this. Either Barnet Council is so effective at encouraging consultation that we produce a response four to ten times larger than other boroughs. Or, people in Barnet feel that the proposals do not meet the needs they have of the healthcare system. Tempting though it is to claim credit, I cannot help but feel that the latter is the case.

The response of Ipsos MORI who have conducted the research for Healthcare for London is to treat Barnet as an oddity, to publish figures for Barnet separately and to highlight the views of the rest of London if Barnet is taken out of the equation. This seems to me absurd.

The boroughs where the public mood most closely matches that of Barnet are, unsurprisingly, Enfield and Haringey. Obviously north-west London is unhappy with plans that place support for emergency treatment so far away from us. I myself wouldn’t fancy a trip around the north circular to St Mary’s on IKEA sale day…

This consultation shows that north-west London has real concerns about these plans. Healthcare for London has to address these concerns. I will be continuing to make sure that the needs of Barnet are considered as decisions are made. I hope residents will continue to make their views heard too.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features, Uncategorized | Tagged barnet, consultation, Council, health, NHS, strokes, trauma | Comments Off

It’s Flu…

June 26, 2009 – 10:41 am

Three schools in the borough reopened this week after being briefly closed after bouts of swine flu. The first two schools in the borough to see any cases of swine flu, Garden Suburb Infants and Junior schools had quite extensive outbreaks.

The Hyde School closed for two days after flu amongst teachers meant that we couldn’t guarantee proper adult supervision of children. This later issue is now the key deciding factor on whether we will close a school. We are now getting one or two pupil outbreaks at other schools – usually with reference to ‘flu-like symptoms’. Schools are behaving as they would with any other outbreak of flu in a school. Those children showing symptoms are sent home but work in the school continues. At this stage the advice we are receiving from the NHS is that the virus is, comparatively, mild and there is no reason to close schools.

For me the most striking thing about this is the reports back from the schools about how rational and sensible the staff and parents have been. It seems parents have been much less over wrought than much of the media coverage of the spread of swine flu.

Parents seem sensible, concerned about their children’s health and realistic about what can be done to deal with the spread of swine flu. It is likely that there will be more cases of swine flu in the borough over coming weeks so I hope this sensible attitude prevails. It is a tribute to how the schools have kept parents informed, and to the parents themselves, that everyone has been so calm.

I hope that any pupils, and indeed adults, who may catch swine flu over the coming weeks, have a speedy recovery.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features | Tagged barnet, Council, flu, influenza, NHS, schools, swine | Comments Off

Beyond 5pm

June 26, 2009 – 10:33 am

As many of you will be aware we are changing the way we provide some of our services to older people.

At the moment some of the residents of sheltered accommodation benefit from a full time warden on their site. We plan to change this and replace this ‘9 to 5’ service with a more flexible structure of mobile teams, able to support residents across the borough, whether in sheltered accommodation or in their own homes.

This has not been uncontroversial….

Our wardens provide help and advice, they check up on residents and carry out tasks like changing a light bulb. They do not provide care support for residents – that is supported by a separate part of the council.

I fully appreciate that existing users of this service really value it – frankly I would be disappointed if anyone who receives a service funded by the Council does not think they get a good service from us. But all of our sheltered housing add up to 1,500 places – out of 55,000 older people in the borough.

However, harsh though it may seem, I am afraid that the appreciation that existing users have for a service is, on its own, not enough of a reason to avoid change and improvement. It is certainly not an argument against looking at how we can provide the service more efficiently and extend this service to more people.

In recent years, support for older people has moved from funding people in care homes to helping people to stay in their own homes as long as possible. This leads to better health, general wellbeing and frankly is just more decent than the alternative.

The new mobile teams are likely to remain based at sheltered housing schemes but, for the first time, will be able to provide support for people living in their own homes. Support will be given depending on a person’s need rather than their location and the new teams will support people outside of the traditional ‘9 to 5’ hours. A 24-hour alarm system will remain in place and where 24-hour care services are needed, such as Barnet’s recently opened extra care sheltered housing schemes at Wood Court and Goodwin Court, they will be provided.

All sections of the public sector have to look creatively at how we spend every penny of tax payers money, and make sure that we are providing a flexible service that supports residents where and when they need it. The days of a one size fits all council service that closed down at 5pm have gone.

By Barnet Council | Posted in Features | Tagged accommodation, barnet, Council, housing, older, people, sheltered, wardens | Comments (0)