Some of this story may sound familiar. Inspired by the free-market, small-state ideas introduced to British politics by Margaret Thatcher, a powerful group of Conservative politicians begin a drastic experiment. Orthodoxy is turned on its head; policies that seem to make precious little sense are enthusiastically rolled out. What they are up to triggers plenty of alarm, but their opponents are dismissed as cowards and throwbacks. Then, after a series of mishaps and disasters, the whole thing hits the skids – but the surrounding mess is so confounding that clearing it up will take years.
Over not much more than a month, that was the rough story of Liz Truss and her Tory allies. But over the past decade or so, a much longer and messier saga about the same fiercely ideological kind of Toryism has played out in Barnet, the suburban expanse that sits at the end of the London’s Northern line and contains such places as Hendon, Whetstone, Golders Green and Edgware.
Amid the borough’s mock-tudor houses, newly built apartment blocks and arterial roads, a political project variously known as “easyCouncil”, “Future Shape” and “One Barnet” has risen and spectacularly fallen. It was meant to blaze a trail that Tory politicians all over the country could follow. The basic idea was to drastically shrink Barnet’s council, mostly by handing an astonishing array of local services – highways, planning, regeneration, phone helplines, even cemeteries and crematoriums – to the outsourcing company Capita, the self-styled “consulting, transformation and digital services business” giant that does a huge range of work for national and local government.
Savings were promised, but didn’t materialise. Complaints about how people were being treated soon piled up. To cap it all, there were two cases of fraud related to the Capita contracts, together worth just over £2m. Not entirely surprisingly, the story eventually reached the kind of denouement that awaits Conservatives in Westminster: in May this year, the Tory administration that had run the borough for 20 years lost power to the Labour party, which is beginning to undo its predecessors’ work and return local services to the public sector.
Poetically, all this happened in the borough that contains Thatcher’s old constituency of Finchley. What led to such a watershed change was not just a tale of Tory failure. It also included a local revolt that was briefly known as the Barnet spring, and the tireless work done by a handful of bloggers – or, if you prefer, citizen journalists – who forensically exposed the Barnet project’s failures, and the dire failings of accountability and democracy at its heart. “What they’ve tried here doesn’t work,” one of them tells me. “It’s never worked anywhere. We told them that from the beginning and they wouldn’t listen. They allowed Barnet to be a guinea pig. And the guinea pig is dead. But what do you put in its place?”
On a sunny Wednesday morning, I spend 90 minutes talking to Barry Rawlings, the veteran Labour politician who is now Barnet council’s leader. We meet at Hendon town hall, a Grade II-listed building where the borough council sits, amid framed portraits of its past leaders.
“The story of what happened here really started in about 2005,” he says. “The Tories seemed to see the idea of a small council in the same way they saw the small state. A council would intervene as little as possible – that was the ideology behind it. The original idea was based on something they’d seen in America. The ideal council would have no more than 200 workers, all the services would be run by private companies, and the council would not have to meet more than twice a year, just to agree the budget.”
The prime mover behind this idea was Mike Freer, a Manchester-born Tory politician who became Barnet’s council leader in 2006. The media quickly termed his concept “easyCouncil”, in tribute to the kind of model of customer service used by budget airlines. “The idea was, you’d get a very basic service from the council, and pay extra for anything else,” says Rawlings. “You’d get your bins collected, but if you wanted more, you’d have to pay. But as it moved along, the easyCouncil thing didn’t work. I think it was unworkable; it imploded under its own contradictions. So they just went for mass outsourcing.”
In 2009, as Freer prepared to become the Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, he stepped down from the council leadership, though he continued evangelising about the need for councils to be stripped down and privatised. (Freer declined to be interviewed for this article.) By 2011, Barnet’s Tory leader was Richard Cornelius, who would oversee the drawing up and implementation of the council’s contracts with Capita. (He did not reply to my interview requests.) At that point, the austerity led by David Cameron and George Osborne was in full effect, and what the Tories in Barnet were doing chimed with Tory policy in Westminster.
Cornelius and his colleagues had already been busy cutting and privatising such services as social care and parking. Barnet’s libraries had been drastically hacked back. But it was the prospect of the new arrangements with Capita that tipped the mood of many Barnet residents into outrage. When I first came to the borough on reporting duties in 2012 – when the so-called Barnet spring was at its peak – I went to a packed public meeting where Cornelius seemed to be in a minority of one. “I believe this programme will deliver the savings we’re looking for, without the public actually noticing,” he told the audience, only to be met with one woman’s boiling fury: “Do you think we’re going to put up with you signing away our future for 10 years?”
Two decade-long contracts with Capita – worth about £500m to the company – were signed the following year. The first created a joint venture between the company and Barnet council that would deliver a huge chunk of the council’s services: planning, regeneration, environmental health, highways, transport. The second was a simple commercial contract, setting out how Capita would provide “customer and support services” to Barnet – helplines, payroll, human resources, IT.
The results of all this were often mind-boggling. Pension queries were suddenly handled in Darlington. Parking notices were done in Croydon. Payment of Barnet’s school staff was administered in Carlisle, and some of the council’s newly outsourced planning staff were based in Belfast.
“There are still four or five planning people in Belfast,” Rawlings tells me, raising his eyebrows. “And the council call centre’s still in Coventry.
“I’m not going to knock Capita – they’re a firm, like lots of others,” he says. “But the two or three central things that were wrong with the contracts were always obvious. One was the lack of accountability. Councillors and council officers are responsible to local people. But Capita is responsible to its shareholders; that’s its legal requirement, so it has to put its shareholders before our residents. I’m not saying you can’t have contracts with private firms, but you have to be in control. The council wasn’t. And they had 10-year contracts with no break clauses. That was another mad point.”
In 2018, it was discovered that a council worker named Trishul Shah had stolen £2m while working for the joint venture between Barnet council and Capita that had been set up in 2013. The fraud had been spotted by his bank. He was jailed for five years. A subsequent review said that the council’s and Capita’s financial controls had been “inadequate”; Rawlings said the fraud demonstrated “incompetence of scandalous proportions”. (Capita said the review was “highly caveated and limited”, but accepted that the case “highlighted failings”.) Then, two years later, a man working at Capita’s offices in Darlington was found to have stolen £70,000 from Barnet council’s pension fund. He got a two-year suspended sentence.
“There was some really basic stuff going wrong,” Rawlings tells me. “We criticised the council’s leader; we asked him what he was going to do. And it was all: ‘We’re going to change the system.’
“You’d have expected someone to resign, and take the responsibility,” he says. But that, it seemed, was not how the new council worked.
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Theresa Musgrove is a Barnet-based writer and academic researcher, and one of the people who has most closely followed the borough’s recent history. “You could tell things were going wrong right from the beginning,” she says. “Just simple things, like you couldn’t phone the council any more and speak to someone. We all have experience of that. They wanted to put a barrier between themselves and the public. First, they began to exclude everybody who couldn’t use a smartphone; everything that you wanted to communicate with the council about had to be done online. And if you did try and phone up, there were very few people answering the phones. You’d end up in an endless labyrinth of options, to the point that it wasn’t worth phoning them at all. We were told it was down to ‘teething problems’. But it was ‘teething problems’ for 10 years.
“Everything seemed to be run by Capita,” she continues. “And it didn’t seem to matter how badly things were run, they would always find excuses, and be allowed to carry on. Partly because no one wanted to lose face and admit it was a terrible mistake, but also, right from the beginning, there wasn’t a plan B.”
In 2011, under the pseudonym Mrs Angry, Musgrove began writing a blog called Broken Barnet, which doggedly monitored what the council was doing. She was not alone: by 2012, at least five Barnet bloggers were scrutinising Capita and the council, and exposing their failings.
“There was just a colossal vacuum,” says John Dix, an expert on council outsourcing whose blogging handle is Mr Reasonable, and whose revelations have included the fact that Capita charged the council £8 a call for inquiries to local libraries (Capita told me it “will not be commenting on exact figures for individual costs or savings”). “And that’s why we did it, as much as anything else. Even back then, the local media were severely constrained financially. We had two papers at the time, the Barnet Times and the Barnet Press. They just didn’t have the resources to do it. They took the council press releases and just reprinted them. So we said: ‘No, the council needs some scrutiny.’
“The Capita contracts threatened very, very basic aspects of democracy,” he says. “Because once you’ve contracted something, that moves beyond the accountability that councils are meant to work on the basis of – which is that if you don’t like something, you can vote them out and there’ll be change. Once you’ve signed a contract for a fixed period, forget it.”
Capita’s contracts included both regeneration and planning, which Musgrove points to as a clear conflict of interest. How could the same company that led plans for development also be in charge of the processes surrounding council decisions about what did and didn’t go ahead? “I’ve compared them to the East India Company in the past,” she says. “They found a colony, and they were given a licence to exploit it.”
Until a Barnet Labour councillor exposed it, she says, developers could pay to select a particular planning officer – the person who would then advise councillors about how to vote on particular proposals. “The whole system was opaque, and totally geared towards development,” she says. The result, as she sees it, is a borough now full of urban sprawl, a view shared by other Barnet insiders I speak to. “Those developments will go ahead, whether or not there’s any infrastructure to support them: schools, doctors, roads, even water mains. Barnet’s infrastructure can’t cope.”
When I contacted Capita with a list of questions – including sizeable chunks about its relocation of Barnet’s services around the UK and its planning and regeneration regime – I was sent a list of “strictly off-the-record” responses that the company’s PR representative said were not for publication, and a short statement. “Capita has a long-term relationship with Barnet council and has worked in partnership with the team to deliver services that improve the lives of local citizens,” it said. “We are proud of this record of service delivery, including providing vital support throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, and the award-winning work of our planning team. Any changes to services over the course of the contract have been through mutual agreement with the council.”
The company’s deal with Barnet began to unravel while the Conservatives were still in charge. In 2018, a handful of council services, including finance and human resources, were brought back into the public sector. Two years later, after the aforementioned fraud and a £1,000 fine from the pensions regulator in 2016 for failing to submit basic information, the council ditched Capita as the administrator of its pension scheme, and another five council services came back in-house. Then, in May 2022, Labour took control of the council – taking 16 seats from the Tories for a total of 41 – and swiftly announced that Barnet’s era of massed outsourcing had reached an end. Rawlings insisted the borough’s deal with Capita had been a “failed experiment”; by way of proof, he said that the council had paid £229m more than the original contracts had set out (which Capita put down to “special projects”).
“People wanted something new,” he says. “In the pandemic, councils became more important. And I think people’s view of the importance of the public sector changed. It was councils that had helped vulnerable people, and set up vaccination centres, and given out business grants. I think people wanted a new council, and what we offered them struck a chord.”
Bringing services back is complicated: a few, Rawlings says, will stay with Capita until March 2026. He is a tentative, guarded kind of politician, who instinctively shies away from talking up what has happened, and emphasises how difficult it is moving from one way of running things to another. But he well knows that the Barnet story goes straight to the heart of something fundamental. “Right from the start, to me, it’s always been about accountability, and whether we’re serious about being a democracy,” he says. “You can say that you only get a vote every four years, but democracy is also about the way you work, how you make decisions. It’s an ongoing thing. And now we’re trying to do things differently.”
Barnet’s new council may be starting a new era, but the national picture is more complicated. As Rishi Sunak and his ministers talk endlessly about tough financial decisions, places already blitzed by long years of cuts are preparing for more austerity. When it arrives, outsourcing and subcontracting may well be suggested as the remedy. If so, the story of Barnet’s doomed local revolution will offer a vivid corrective. Here, after all, is a very cautionary tale.
