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Bournemouth whistleblower reinstated

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10th Apr 2012
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After six months on suspension for emailing councillors his concerns about a shared services outsourcing deal with Mouchel, Bournemouth City Council chief accountant Stephen Parker has returned to work.

But Parker is now working for the company he complained about; after the controversial contract was extended in January Mouchel took on responsibility for the council’s finance function from 1 February.

Parker was suspended and escorted from the town hall last October after emailing his concerns about a report on extending Mouchel's existing shared services contract to include HR and finance.

With the outsourcer already struggling due to a share price slump it said stemmed from a spreadsheet error, many within the council questioned whether the arrangement would achieve its projected. A report to the council’s cabinet did not provide an adequate assessment of risks or deliver an independent and robust evaluation, Parker had warned.

The Bournemouth Echo reported this morning that the council had released a statement explaining that the displinary measures against Parker had been resolved.

“The council accepts that Mr Parker made public the information contained in his email of the 11th of October with honest intent. The council has withdrawn the suspension of Mr Parker and has informed Mouchel Limited, his new employer, of that decision,” it said.

A timeline on the controversy maintained by the Liberal Democrat opposition in Bournemouth reveals some intriguing background, including the involvement of PricewaterhouseCoopers in compiling a report on the original bid when it was also acting as auditor for Mouchel.

In spite of the opposition, and with Mouchel reporting in November that its losses for the year to 31 July 2011 had mounted to £64.8m, Bournemouth’s cabinet ratified the contract extension at a meeting on 6 January 2012 after considering an independent risk assessment of Mouchel’s accounts by KPMG.

As a result, 100 HR and finance staff - including  the suspended chief accountant - became employees of Mouchel under TUPE rules on 1 February 2012.

According to PublicTechnology.net, council deputy leader and cabinet member for resources John Beesley said Bournemouth had negotiated “significantly improved contractual measures, which are commercially sensitive”. It also made a £135,000 provision to cover the potential cost of bringing HR and finance functions back in house, should Mouchel fail.

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By Roland195
12th Apr 2012 16:13

Strange result

Does anyone else find this result strange?

As I understand it, council employee does not believe outsourcing to be a good idea and says so, and then gets the boot.

The lawyers get involved, bayonet the wounded, strip the bodies and then the employee comes back to work, only now not at the council but TUPE'd over to the company he objected to in the first place.

Now, presumably neither he wants to work for this company and Mouchel don't want him working for them (but neither party can admit this) so I assume we can look forward to reading about Mr Parker's forthcoming constructive dismissal case.

I assume it will be the rate payers of Bournemouth who foot the bill for this fiasco.

 

 

 

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7om
By Tom 7000
13th Apr 2012 13:29

Bayonetting

Well the only way an outsourced finance function is chepaer than doing it yourself is if the outsourcer bayonetts a chunk of staff. So I bet if you check in 12 months time of the 100 staff Tupe'd over there is less than half left and the other 50 have ben replaced by 25 Polish workers on minimum wage...or am i being too cynical again....and If I was the Mouchel FD I would give steve parker the nice job of telling hios 50 colleauges they are all down the road.....watch yer back steve you could be No 51

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By flim33
14th Apr 2012 09:59

No surprises

This does not surprise me and common up and down the country.  All in the name of 'saving monies' and saving the job of the FD at the Council. He/she will have done a 'Great' job shifting in house finance depart costs off Balance Sheet and has less to do at the office and get the same pay!

  

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Replying to TheLambtonWorm:
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By I'msorryIhaven'taclue
16th Apr 2012 10:26

Not Playing to the Whistle

The outsourcing of public services to private companies would appear to be booming - one such private company whose affairs we handled evidently used the milions of pounds it received to run NHS departments to fund large directors' salaries and hugely overdrawn DLAs. Unlike solicitors, estate agents, holiday travel firms etc there was no specific requirement to keep the funds in a separate client account (and before anyone says so, yes there is a general requirement to separate funds held in trust that we considered, which the company circumvented).

Whenever I hear David Cameron, and before him Gordon Brown, banging on about throwing millions of pounds at the health service then it puts me in mind of just how such public funds are dished out willy-nilly, be they council run, NHS, or educational. Who in their right mind would throw millions of pounds at a company with no assets and no track record? The answer I discovered in our case was members of the "old boy network" would. I have formed the opinion that the reason such grace and favour deals go largely unnoticed and unheralded is due to three prime reasons:

1 The incompetence and general malais of NHS / educational / council staff: one NHS manager I knew bragged openly that she was paid £40k a year to sit there reading the newspaper; the bursor at a local school paid a large deposit for a room of computers without checking out the supplier, who duly went bust before a single computer was delivered.

2 The sensationalist propoganda dished out by the press, which focuses heavily on low-level scams, dodgy deals, and misdemeanours to the extent that people are diverted from the larger issues: everything from the rabble-rousing tabloids whipping up fury over a benefit cheat, to last Friday's Aweb story of accountant David Wilford's conviction and exclusion from the ICAEW for stealing £139k from the charity that employed him. Meanwhile, the more sizeable leakages from public funds go unreported.

3 The fact that nobody can quite bring themselves to believe what goes on: perhaps best illustrated by another Aweb report last week entitled "Osborne shocked by millionaire tax avoidance" (after the Chancellor had taken a butcher's at a sample population of 100 millionaires' tax returns). It's no surprise to me, and probably not to you, that millionaires will find a myriad of perfectly legal avoidance measures rather than stump up highest rate tax; one can only hope that when that penny has dropped with the Chancellor he might then be prepared to take on board the extent to which public funds often end up in the wrong pockets, whether intentionally or negligently. Perhaps his accountants are afraid of telling him that, in case they too get suspended from their jobs.

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By justsotax
16th Apr 2012 09:41

Wonder whether Steve considered

resigning.....we all have a choice....if you don't like it you know where the door is.  Don't get me wrong....this is probably a ridiculus decision by the council, but haven't we all worked where stupid decisions have been made (and if we had been in charge things would be different).  I have no doubt he will be on a good bonus to make sure things work....and yep he will be responsible for sacking half of those colleagues....

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By johnm41
16th Apr 2012 10:33

How many people were really needed to run the department?

I have no idea whether the Bournemouth in-house team were efficient or inefficient, but after reading the story of the German public official who admitted not working for 14 years (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9200054/German-civil-servant-says-he-did-nothing-for-14-years.html) I wonder whether there was scope for tightening things up before the  out-sourcing?

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