Monday 25 March 2019

Warm welcome planned for Capita staff returning to Council employment on April 1st

From Barnet Alliances for Public Services (BAPS) and Kick Out Capita who have campaigned vociferously for out-sources services in the Tory Flagship London Borough of Barnet  to be brought back in-house.  This is a landmark decision and perhaps a warning to other boroughs.
Monday 1 April is officially the first day back into Council employment for former Capita Finance and Human Resources staff.
This will mean Phase One of the Capita review has been completed.
After years of campaigning, BAPS and the #KickOutCapita campaign invite you:
Join us to welcome back the workers who return in-house
There will be cake and Welcome notices, feel free to bring your own placards. All welcome!
However, we also want to send a very clear message to Barnet Council that we want to see the swift return of all the former Council services, currently provided by Capita, back in-house ASAP.
At the moment councillors are considering bringing back the services in phases over 18 months:
Phase Two: Highways & regeneration (scheduled to be discussed in Policy & Resource committee in June 2019)
Phase Three : Estates, Social Care Direct, Safety, Health and Wellbeing, Strategic planning, Procurement, Insight, Cemetery and Crematorium, Revenues and benefits
Phase Four: Customer services, Information Services (IT), Planning (development management and enforcement), Regulatory services, Transactional HR services (including Payroll and Pensions Administration), Any other remaining services.
But we think that the proposed time scale is dragging the process far too long. Other councils like Southampton, Blackburn and Darwen, Sheffield and Birmingham all in-sourced the services within a much shorter time.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Martin.

Meanwhile, Capita has come under fire for its delivery of Personal Independence Payment (DWP) for Department for Work & Pensions.

Capita are the assessors of Herefordians' entitlement to PIP, but have no proper testing facilities in Hereford. My advocate in my PIP claim lives 13 miles from me in more remote Herefordshire, with traffic problems. In response to our cancelling Capita's issuing me an 09:00 appointment at a 'pop-up clinic' in Hereford, we had enormous problems with the corporate culture of Capita's call-centre system. That was followed up by their issuing me a 27 March appointment in Cardiff for 08:10.

That 08:10 appointment in Cardiff would also be too early for my advocate to attend. Moreover, if I was unenlightened enough to attempt to attempt to attend there alone in response to Capita's bullying reminder letters, I would have to travel to Cardiff the previous evening to arrive ill-prepared. A local Green Party friend who contacted Capita switchboard to query the general wisdom of such appointment logistics stated that Capita's response was not so much 'unhelpful' as 'positively obstructive'. Subsequently, I wrote Capita by Royal Mail Special Delivery and contacted my local Tory MP. A major problem with call centre culture is a lack of documentary evidence regarding previous correspondence.

Further, an autistic woman told me, "I told Capita, 'If I could make it alone to Cardiff, I wouldn't be needing PIP.'"

The 'bottom line' is that as Social Work Action Network has said since its inception, the 'public service delivery system' has been subverted by managerialism and privatisation. Under 'managerialism' appointments are made devoid of the core values of real public service delivery.

Alan Wheatley