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Coldplay go Legal – Dodgy Specifications Involved!

In recent weeks, it feels like I have been writing about pretty serious topics here – HS2, social value, fraud, failures in local government procurement in the UK and the like. So a story I saw recently was attractive as a topic because it wasn’t a matter of life, death or wasted taxpayer money. It was however (allegedly) about a waste of multi-millionaire rock star money. It was also an illustration of a key point that is forgotten surprisgly often when we’re writing specifications and talking to suppliers.

The band Coldplay has gone through an interesting critical trajectory. The hip and trendy NME made A Rush of Blood to the Head album of the year in 2002; but over the years, many started seeing them as purveyors of somewhat dull, middle-aged music. I’ve always thought they were fine songwriters although recent material is a little MOR for my tastes. But what no-one can deny is the level of their success – over 100 million albums sold and still the 14th most listened to band on Spotify today.

For some 22 years, their manager was Dave Holmes. Little is known about him, but more is coming out now as he and the band are busily suing each other. He started legal action in the summer, claiming £10 million from Coldplay in commission on earnings that (he sasy) they have not paid him. But the counter-case from the band is looking for £14 million from him, saying that he has wasted millions of their money. 

And this is where it gets Bad Buying interesting. Much of the claim is around preparation for the huge global Music of the Spheres tour, for which Holmes held ultimate responsibility. By the way, that tour took $617.8 million in ticket sales alone. (Ever thought you are in the wrong business?)  The band claims that costs escalated  and say that equipment was not suitable or was bought at inflated prices. As the Times reported;

Examples in the claim are eye-watering. They include, “16 bespoke stage pylons” for lighting and video that, it allegedly soon became apparent, would be unjustifiably expensive to even use. However, it was too late — €10.6 million had already been chucked at the pylons.

A “visual project known as Jet Screen” was commissioned for $9.7 million, with a huge chunk of that cost, the band claim, personally authorised by Holmes. The problem was that … the dimensions given to the manufacturers for the Jet Screen were wrong — and it was too big. It was only used for ten concerts in Buenos Aires.

Yes, it’s another “Irish government printer” faulty specification story!  In the Bad Buying book, we have the case study of the Irish government buying a state of the art printing machine that simply did not physically fit into the building that was supposed to house it. That was a reminder that sometimes getting the specification right is not a matter of highly complex technology or difficult outcome-based definitions – it can be as basic as the physical measurements!

The Times draws a parallel with the classic Stonehenge scene in the best comedy film of all time, Spinal Tap, where the band commission a model to use on stage – and when it is delivered, it turns out to be tiny. But in this case, the Jet Screen was just too big.

Holmes is also accused of not opening “the shared online Dropbox which contained the designs for the Music of the Spheres Tour at any time between August 2020 and February 2022”.  Rock and roll madness right there! More interesting is his relationship with Live Nation, the promoters of the tour. Holmes had taken loans from Live Nation at what look like preferential terms and the band say he owed some £27.5 million when he was negotiating terms for the tour with the firm. This, say Coldplay, was an inherent conflict of interest, and if those facts are acccurate, that does have some validity in my opinion. It is an interesting situation without a doubt – I certainly wouldn’t want one of my procurement managers negotiating with a supplier if she owed them money.

So we’ll see what happens next. And just remember, if you’re buying anything in the equipment line, just make sure you know how big you really want it to be! Many elements of the specification may be much more complex in many situations, but let’s face it – size really does matter.

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Why Is the UK so Bad at Capital Programmes?

It was tempting to write again about the HS2 rail programme given recent events and the question of whether it is going to ever get to Manchester – or indeed to Euston.  It will go down in history as one of the great British public sector disasters, perhaps costing us even more than NPfIT, the NHS IT programme a decade or more ago which certainly cost us billions.  From the very beginning, it was clear to me that the business case was a con in order to justify the programme, which was enough for me to think it was a misjudged idea.

But the wider question is this – why are we so bad in the UK at capital projects and programmes? A recent article in The Times from chief culture writer Richard Morrison highlighted that failure in the specific area of arts-related building projects. The renovation of the Colston Hall in Bristol – to be renamed the Bristol Beacon – is now expected to cost £132 million, against an initial budget of £48 million. In Manchester, the Aviva studios opens soon, with the price-tag of around £240 million, more than double the original cost estimate. In Edinburgh, the redeveloped National Galleries of Scotland is a relative bargain, a mere £38.6 million, only £22 million over budget.

In East London, there is the new East Bank cultural quarter on the former Olympic Park at Stratford. That was supposed to be £385 million, now we are looking at £628 million and still rising. As Richard Morrison said, we might wonder “what difference this glitzy arts campus will make to ordinary lives in London’s poorest borough”. Political vanity projects in London aren’t new of course. Remember Boris Johnson’s “garden bridge” fiasco?

Is it optimism bias we are seeing time and time again?  Is it simply incompetence in terms of properly defining the specification and carrying out costing exercises up front? Can we just blame inflation?  Is it poor contract management and a lack of control that allows suppliers to escalate prices through the project?  Or lack of control on changes in specification, changes which genuinely cause costs to grow?

The other possibility is conspiracy. It is in everyone’s interest for a project to look like a bargain when it comes to justifying it through the business case process. Your new concert hall (or railway) looks like a good investment at £x whereas it wouldn’t look good at £2x. so the sponsors, the professional services, engineering and construction firms involved, perhaps even local people, all want the case to be approved, so let’s make sure it is estimated at x and not 2x.  Everyone also knows that once it is underway, it is very difficult to stop these projects even as the costs escalate, as we are seeing with HS2 now.

This was discussed in a long running legal case over the new concert hall in Paris, which featured in the Bad Buying book. The dispute between the authorities and the architect, Jean Nouvel, got rather nasty before the case was eventually settled in October 2021.  Here is an extract from the book.

“In 2007, he (Nouvel) was contracted to build the auditorium for €119 million, but the final cost was estimated at €328 by the owners and €534 million by the regional state auditors (which in itself seems like a big discrepancy). Le Monde reported Nouvel saying that the €119 million was quoted purely to match the ceiling set for the public tender, and was not really a genuine cost estimate. He claims that €100,000 per seat was the established cost for similar concert halls, and the €119 million total would have required spending only half that much, so it was never realistic. He also claims that everyone knew that the real cost would be much higher – “this is pretty usual in France in public tenders for cultural projects”, he was quoted as saying. His lawyer also says Nouvel is being made responsible for failures in project management”.

So might HS2 have been a case of a conspiracy to reduce the predicted cost in order to get the project approved?  Is this happening in too many UK projects?  If Labour does win the next election, I would suggest an immediate and wide ranging review of why we seem to be so hopeless at building stuff to budget. You’ll need people who are genuinely independent or maybe folk who will blow the whistle on what really goes on! Because the answer can’t just be “a bit of inflation”. Something is going wrong on far too regular a basis in the UK.  

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Bad Buying in Birmingham?

Increasing numbers of local authorities (county, city and town councils) in the UK are facing financial crisis. The latest is Birmingham, England’s second largest city, which has issued a Section 114 notice – in effect declaring itself bankrupt. Commissioners will be sent in from central government to take over the running of the authority.

The core reason is an equal pay claim going back years. Women employed by the council weren’t paid as much as men doing similar jobs. But it seemed for some years that financial provisions had been made to pay those affected and all was well. But there appear to be more claims now, which suggests the original problems weren’t sorted out when they should have been. There should have been a serious job evaluation programme but somehow that hasn’t happened. Infighting amongst the ruling Labour Party has not helped either, some observers claim.

However, there also seem to be other reasons for the crisis. Birmingham spent over £100 million hosting the Commonwealth Games last year – good for motivating the locals perhaps, and maybe it brought cash into the city, but a lot of many to spend when you’re in a bad financial position.

Now we are moving into “bad buying” territory too, with  accusations of money being wasted in the procurement area. A report in the Daily Mail says, “calls for police probe into bankrupt Birmingham Council’s £11M payments to tiny taxi firm charging £200 a day to take one pupil to school”.  This firm, Green Destinations Ltd, (GDL) has grown rapidly in recent years to become the main beneficiary of  school transport contracts, and there is a suggestion that it might have been “close” in some way to executives who had influence on the contracts.

Now we have to be careful with headline reports. £200 a day might be for a special educational needs pupil who needed accompanying in the taxi and so on. But competitors also claimed that council officials told their drivers they might be better off working for the favoured firm in question. And the table of fares quoted by the Mail does seem to show very high fees compared to standard taxi rates. No doubt more will emerge on this.

However, there hasn’t been any suggestion that procurement in Birmingham is generally useless or corrupt. But I did feature the authority a couple of times in my Bad Buying book. The first was a call-centre contract with Capita, which an enquiry into the service pointed out did not incentivise Capita very sensibly. They were paid on a per call basis, so had no incentive to sort out problems first time or take the required time to do that.  (However, it was the council itself that wasn’t very good at sorting out the underlying problems, to be fair to Capita).

The other mention in the book was the disastrous road maintenance contract with Amey, which ended up with the firm paying £215 million to get out of a 25-year PFI deal. The relationship between the two parties had broken down completely, with a famous report that the council tried to charge Amey penalties of £48.5 million because the firm didn’t repair two bollards quickly enough. All of that was not necessarily the council’s fault, but you have to wonder why you would get into a 25 year contract for any service really. (Maybe it would have some logic for a large construction PFI, but not for roads maintenance). Put those two together and you might perhaps draw conclusions about naivety and a lack of commercial nous in Birmingham.

Anyway, the city may now need to sell art galleries, housing and land to try and balance the budgets, which is very sad for what is a great city. Of course, the national Conservative government is loving this, claiming it is an example of “Labour failure”. But in fact, it is just the latest in a long line of local government waste, corruption, bad buying and financial problems, a line that runs through Liverpool, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Thurrock, Slough, Surrey Heath, Woking, Croydon and more – both Tory and Labour authorities.  Reduced funding from central government is one reason; but there are also too many incompetent or corrupt people in our local government system, it seems.

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UK Government Spend With Smaller Firms Declines

Without fanfare or comment, in the middle of the holiday season, the UK government recently published the data for spend with SMEs (small and medium enterprises) for 2021/22.  This covers central departments, and some associated bodies, although the definition of what is in and what is out is not always clear. The data is given as direct spend – money that goes straight to the small firms – and indirect, the spend that goes via larger firms that then use SMEs in their supply chain.

It is not unusual for it to take over a year from the end of the period in question before data is published. That is in part because it does take a while to gather the data, but I suspect the publication might have happened sooner if there had been a positive story to tell.

But the headline number was that SME percentage spend declined in 2021/22 compared to 2020/21.  The total was down from 26.9% to 26.5%, and the direct spend was down from 14.2% to 12.3%. That does not look good against the government target of 33% of spend.

Indirect spend was up by 1.4% but that was not enough to compensate for the drop in direct spend.  It looks like the main reason for the overall decline was a big drop in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) SME spend year on year. I suspect that is the “PPE effect” – as we know, there was lots of PPE bought in 2020 and 2021 from smaller firms. They were often crooks, chancers and friends of ministers, but they were SMEs, nonetheless.

Until the pandemic, the DHSC spend was relatively small compared to MOD and Transport – the two “traditional” big spenders.  Most health spend was out in the Trusts so not captured in this data. But the huge amount of “central “ buying, on PPE but also track and trace and other projects, pushed up the significance of DHSC in the overall numbers.

In 2019/20, DHSC spend was just £3.1 billion against MOD’s £21.1 billion. But the figure shot up to £13.3B in 20/21 (MOD was £19.5B) and was still £11.5B in 21/22.  In 20/21, 23.3% of the DHSC total was direct SME spend, so that made the year look better, but by 21/22 that dropped to 14.2%, pulling down the whole percentage.

I’m going into some detail there because it does demonstrate how ridiculous looking at the overall number actually is. When one factor – PPE – in one Department can skew the whole data set, it is pretty useless. But let’s go back in time and look at how this target emerged.  

Supporting smaller firms was one of the first “social value” type issues government embraced. I worked in the Office of Government Commerce (part of Treasury, the UK finance ministry) as a consultant back in 2009 on the implementation of the 2008 Glover report – “Accelerating the SME economic engine: through transparent, simple and strategic procurement”.  (That link took some finding!)

But Sally Collier (OGC’s Policy director) and I didn’t really like the idea of targets for spend with SMEs for various reasons. One was the difficulty of setting sensible targets, which really needed to vary by department to be meaningful. We were interested in departments and buyers simply doing the right things, and therefore also worried that targets would mean effort going into the data, not the real action. But our advice was ignored and after the 2010 election a 25% target was set. 

It quickly emerged that 25% was unachievable. The Ministry of Defence and the Highways Agency (Transport) accounted for almost half of central government procurement spend and there was no way an SME was going to build a warship or the M25 motorway.  So the target was changed to an “aspiration”, a classic Francis Maude fudge, and then indirect spend was included to make it easier to hit the target.

But many of the first-tier suppliers to government have no idea really how much they spend with SMEs, so the data is pretty dodgy. Then the 25% target – which had never been achieved – was stupidly changed in 2015 to 33%, purely because the Cameron government wanted to say something positive for the “small business” lobby in their election manifesto.  And 33% is unachievable too, as we’ve seen, even including indirect spend.

The other issue is whether supporting SMEs is the right target today. We have become much more sophisticated in the 15 years since Glover and now most large private firms are interested in supporting diverse suppliers, not simply small firms.

So why not shift the focus to using government procurement to support charities and social enterprises, minority owned firms, innovative businesses, firms in deprived areas or those that employ lots of disabled people?  You don’t see Unilever or other admired private sector businesses defining some prospective suppliers as special just because they are small. Indeed, many SMEs are small because they want to be, or because they just aren’t very good.

But there has been good work in government over the years in terms of helping SMEs. For example, even back in 2009, MOD led some impressive initiatives to promote SMEs through their supply chain. But really, this element of public procurement policy is crying out for a refresh, a more nuanced set of objectives and – if we must have targets – something that is realistic and motivating, not a painful data collection exercise that is bound to end in failure.  

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HS2 Rail Programme Rated as “Undeliverable” by Government’s Own Experts

I’ve decided that I’m going to win the 100 metres sprint at next year’s Paris Olympics. I believe the benefits for the UK economy will be huge and I will inspire millions with my efforts. My wife has pointed out that my best time for the event was 13.8 seconds, recorded at Houghton School some years ago (many years ago to be honest). I need to beat that by some 4.5 seconds next year, but I am quietly confident.

However, in her annual report on my planned activities, Jane has had the temerity to rank my chances of success as “red”.  That red rating indicates that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.” That means “there are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable”.

I am disgusted by this lack of positivity. My gold medal will lead to transformational benefits for generations to come, improving connections and helping grow the economy. And I have already spent billions on food supplements, very expensive training programmes and massages, so you wouldn’t want to waste that money, would you?

That is pretty much the situation with HS2, the high-speed rail programme that is going to link London with other cities in England. The latest report from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), which sits within the government’s Cabinet Office, has given the first two phases (1 and 2a) of the HS2 programme an unachievable “red” rating, defined as above.

There is no mention of HS2 anywhere in the report’s various narrative sections, despite the fact it is the biggest single programme in the UK in terms of cost.  In the table that list all 250+ projects, all it says next to the red rating is this. “A new railway connecting the country’s biggest cities and economic regions enabling rebalancing and regional growth in the Midlands Engine and Northern Powerhouse – through a high capacity, high speed and low carbon transport solution”.

And the Department for Transport’s response is also pretty much as above.

“Spades are already in the ground on HS2, with 350 construction sites, over £20bn invested to date and supporting over 28,500 jobs. We remain committed to delivering HS2 in the most cost-effective way for taxpayers. HS2 will bring transformational benefits for generations to come, improving connections and helping grow the economy”.

That really is treating us as idiots. No attempt to actually respond to the undeliverability issues, or explain how “red” will turn to amber and green, just that they’re committed to it and we’ve spent a sh** load of money already, so hey, let’s spend another £50 billion or so. At least.  

Clearly, all those supposedly super-clever people in Treasury and Department of Transport have never heard of the sunk cost fallacy. Well, of course they have heard of it but this is politics. Civil servants just have to do what their masters tell them, but you can be sure HS2 will be disappearing from a lot of senior peoples’ cvs on LinkedIn in a few years’ time. This is just a terrible, disgraceful and ridiculous waste of public money, from the beginning when the business case was manipulated to appear positive, and my daughter’s generation will be asking questions for years to come about just how we allowed this to happen.

William Hague in The Times agreed.

“If I were still in government, I would be climbing the walls about this. I would want to stop all work on HS2 today, but I know I would be told that the contracts signed for its construction make that impossible. I would want to fire somebody senior, but I would be informed that the chief executive of HS2 Ltd already quit last month so that satisfaction would be denied me.

Then I would say that if we can’t cancel it we should at least make sure that the bits that haven’t been abandoned will work well, but I would be told that the cost of making it start in Euston has doubled recently, that no one could decide how many platforms they wanted to build, that this crucial part is currently unaffordable and that the transformational, high-speed connection of Birmingham to central London might not even reach the latter. And then I would want to scream”.

Indeed, the IPA report is generally disappointing. It is full of case studies of successful projects and programmes (244 now in the portfolio), with little or no discussion on the problems. And I’m not sure how the rapid charging fund for EVs can be seen as a success when you read this. Most of the case studies have a few initial issues but are turned round thanks to the IPA to deliver success.  It reads in the main like a marketing document from a consulting firm. (I actually wonder whether privatisation is on the cards?)  I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, at the end of the day, the IPA is not truly independent, it is part of government, so it does have to toe the party line.

It is also noticeable that so many projects are rated amber – no less than 80%. That can be a bit of a cop-out rating really. It says there are issues, but nothing too much to worry about. I think when the IPA or its predecessor first started, there were amber/red and amber/green ratings too, but I suspect that put too many projects into the (at least partially) red bracket, which is embarrassing for the government. But really having 80% of the projects ranked at the same level reduces the usefulness for any external scrutiny.  

Anyway, in the couple of hours it has taken me to write this, another £4 million or so has been spent on HS2. What a waste.

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Always Check Those Invoices!

The US Government Department of Justice recently issued a news release.  

“Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation has agreed to pay the United States $377,453,150 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by improperly billing commercial and international costs to its government contracts. Booz Allen, which is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, provides a range of management, consulting, and engineering services to the Government, as well as commercial and international customers”.

I do love the precision of the final $150 on that number! Couldn’t they have rounded it slightly?

The accusation was that between 2011 and 2021, the consulting firm charged costs to its government contracts and subcontracts that should instead have been billed to its commercial and international contracts. That particularly applied to some indirect costs. So the government was allegedly paying for activities and services that had nothing to do with the work the firm was actually doing for government organisations.

Now allocating overheads can be a tricky issue, as many of us know. And Booz Allen issued a statement, as you might expect.

“Booz Allen has always believed it acted lawfully and responsibly. It decided to settle this civil inquiry for pragmatic business reasons to avoid the delay, uncertainty, and expense of protracted litigation. The company did not want to engage in what likely would have been a years-long court fight with its largest client, the U.S. government, on an immensely complex matter. The company fully cooperated with the government and is pleased to move forward.”

So there is no admitting liability or guilt here. I can understand why the firm does not want a long, expensive fight – on the other hand, if you were 100% sure of your position, many firms would choose to take it further rather than handing over quite such a large amount of cash.

The most amazing element of this story is this. The investigation was sparked by a whistleblower, a former Booz Allen employee, Sarah Feinberg, who tipped off the authorities about the alleged misconduct from 2011 to 2021. And now she will receive no less than $69,828,832 as a thanks (it’s that precision again…)  

$69.8 million!  Good grief, I’m going to have a good think now about every firm I’ve ever worked for and whether they might have done anything “naughty” in their dealings with the US government …  

The moral of thee story is simple. Check your billing from professional service firms. I once took on a senior interim commercial/procurement role in government with an organisation that had around 100 consultants from one firm working on its major programme. That was £500K A WEEK we were paying this firm (it better be nameless…)  

I took a look at the invoices – incredibly there was no contract manager for this contract – and found that amongst other things, we were being billed for the senior partner’s assistant. The partner was only working about a day a week on our project, but we appeared to be paying a grand a day, every day, for his PA. We were also billed for the whole day for the whole team when I knew they had stopped work at lunchtime for their office Christmas Party! “An unfortunate error” I was told.  I saved £50K with one phone call there…

Of course, if you can structure any professional services assignment on a fixed price basis, most of these issues are avoided. That approach is usually – although not always – better for the buyer and actually arguably for the provider too. That is another question in this Booz Allen example. Why was so much government work being done on what sounds like a pretty loose “time and materials” basis?

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PPE Dumped – An Unhappy Reminder

There was an unhappy reminder of the pandemic and the PPE Bad Buying saga recently when several hundred pallets of PPE (mainly aprons, it seems) were discovered apparently dumped in Calmore, near Testwood Lakes Nature Reserve in the New Forest (near to Southampton). No-one knows how it got there…

Some of the material involved was identified as coming from a supplier caller Full Support Group (FSG). Now there is an interesting story about that firm. It was relatively late in the PPE saga when it became public that it was in fact the largest single supplier of PPE in the UK into the health system, with estimates that close to £2 billion had gone to FSG to buy huge quantities of PPE.  It was not immediately apparent though because the firm was already a major supplier to the NHS pre-Covid, so the pandemic purchases were made using existing framework contracts, which did not show up on registers of new contracts.  (That’s a weakness of the transparency rules by the way, but let’s save that for another day).

I had some personal communications with the founder and CEO of the firm, ex-nurse Sarah Stoute, and I’m still not really clear whether FSG and its leaders are amongst the heroes of the pandemic or the villains. In terms of heroes, the owners took huge risks when they saw the pandemic starting, and committed to buy PPE mainly from China at their own risk in late 2019 and early 2020 as prices started rising. That could have literally bankrupted the firm if the market had moved the wrong way but those stocks helped the NHS get through the crisis – and of course prices went up and up, benefiting the firm’s bottom line.  

The owners also tried to advise the NHS and the PPE buyers about the suitability or otherwise of some of the new sources of PPE that started coming on board. Now that might be seen as self-serving – “buy from us rather than these unsuitable new suppliers”. But Stoute was proved right on some occasions where (as we now know) the government bought PPE that was unsuitable or didn’t meet specifications – or was bought from firms that turned out to be run by crooks, basically.

The counter argument basically runs that the owners made huge profits as shortages grew and bought themselves a Caribbean villa for £30 million, an equestrian centre and a country mansion in the south of England for £6 million.  As I say, they took substantial risks, but maybe buying villas wasn’t the most tactful thing to do quite so quickly. I think I might have waited a couple of years at least!

But back to this dumping of stock. Clearly that was nothing to do with FSG or with the NHS or individual NHS trusts. However, we do know that the NHS some time ago appointed firms to help with disposal of unwanted PPE, most of which was sitting in shipping containers around the country (some was still being held by suppliers to).

So the most likely explanation is that someone was contracted to dispose of PPE, they probably then passed on the task to another firm, and maybe another one again, util it ended up with a bunch of criminals who offered a cheap price for disposal then simply dumped it.

Sara Stoute has also said that the reason this stock is surplus is that it wasn’t stored correctly – their lawyer said, “the PPE became unusable because of the way it was stored after delivery, not due to wrongdoing on their part”. If that is true, that is another indictment around the whole story of mismanagement we’ve seen unfortunately from the beginning of this saga.  As well as the money (and time) wasted, the disposal issue highlights the “wasted” carbon emissions embedded in the product and now the pollution and waste disposal risks and costs around it.  Not a happy tale, all in all.

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Waste in Woking – Taxpayers will Pick up the Bill

The trivialisation and celebritisation of British politics continues apace.  The headlines are dominated by why Nadine Dorries didn’t get her peerage (and why Charlotte Owens did – anybody got any ideas)? It is all about personalities and in particular our own Trump wannebee, Boris Johnson, the man who had damaged the UK more than anyone I can think of since 1945.

Meanwhile, stories that should be causing debate, analysis, and angry mobs with flaming torches marching in the streets, get limited coverage and little real analysis other than by a few dedicated journalists. For instance, we’ve mentioned before the billions wasted by a number of local authorities (councils) in the UK, including Thurrock, Liverpool, Slough, Croydon, and my own council, Surrey Heath.

But Woking – only 10 miles from my home – might turn out to be as big a scandal as any. The “bad buying” in this case is firmly in the property sector, as the Tory-led council “invested” in major developments both in their own town and more widely. Apparently, the idea was to make Woking the “Singapore of Surrey”, an idea so far-fetched you have to wonder what the council executives and elected representatives were smoking. (as the Guardian asked!)  The council is now bankrupt, and I would be furious if I lived 10 miles down the road.  

Woking has core revenues of around £16 million a year, and debts of around £1.8 BILLION currently. That debt to income ratio is the biggest we’ve seen so far in failed councils.  It is likely that something around £600 million, maybe more, will need to be written off in terms of current asset valuations. A review into how this happened found that within the overall figure, the council borrowed £160m for purposes outside regulations and had “sub-optimal record keeping.”  A huge amount was borrowed from the central government controlled Public Works Loans Body (PWLB) and total debts may end up at over £2 billion. A Section 114 notice has halted all spending on non-essential services.

As the Guardian said: “In Woking’s case, the 114 notice shows the council had advanced the colossal sum of £1.3bn – money borrowed from the PWLB – to joint venture companies, notably Victoria Square Woking Ltd, in which the council held a 48% stake and a Northern Irish developer, Moyallen Holdings, held the majority. Then the value of the assets fell”.

There are also questions about why Woking partnered with Moyallen, a relatively small property company, for the Victoria Square development. That venture still operates, but the Bank of Ireland placed four of Moyallen’s other operating units into administration – including two entities used to control the Peacocks Centre at Woking.  The council’s former chief executive was allowed to operate far too independently, it seems. An “acquisition opportunity fund” allowed him to spend up to £3m on regeneration projects without formally approval from the council or executive, and that led to purchases including farmland for £1.5m, and £2.3m on two pubs, one of which burnt down!

Primary responsibility must fall with characters who have all moved on now – previous Tory Leader of the Council, David Bittleston, Chief Executive Terry Morgan, and Finance Director Leigh Clarke.  It would be good to see those three in court charged with malfeasance in public office. However, all the councillors who failed to raise the alarm also share some blame. One councillor tried to sound the alarm about the dealings but was shouted down in council meetings.

But other stakeholders who deserve a lot more criticism than they are getting are those in central government. The majority of the loans came from the PWLB – a central government body within the Treasury that lends money to local councils. Concerned observers had contacted Treasury and the Department responsible for local government – currently called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC) – about Woking but were ignored. In 2017, the Times  “raised the alarm about reckless council spending” but were told by central government that “ that there were “strong checks and balances” in place to protect taxpayers’ cash”. 

Well that was clearly total nonsense, so Treasury and DLUHC must share some of the blame for this fiasco. Partly because of that, government will have to bail out the council. There is no way local taxpayers can cover the debt (without bankrupting them personally) so this will effectively end up as a wider taxpayer debt write-off.

In recent years, we’ve seen both Labour and Tory councils getting into trouble around bad investments, bad buying and criminality at times too. This is about personal and systemic failures, not really party politics, although central government has failed to monitor the gross incompetence of these councils.  So given the outlook for the next general election, and if Labour are serious about giving more power to local councils, we really need some new parallel measures put in place. We have to make sure more power does not simply lead to more huge failures, with more crooks and incompetents wasting or stealing huge amounts of our money.  

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Huge Ship, Tiny Error, Major Problem

Picture: LPhot Alex Ceolin, UK MOD© Crown copyright 2019

You may know the expression “don’t spoil the ship for a ha’pworth of tar*”, but we have a case now where the ship most certainly has been spoiled – or at least put out of service for some considerable time – because of a tiny error in manufacturing. The impact of this has also led to a tricky contract management situation.

In August 2022, the British aircraft carrier Prince of Wales broke down just one day after departing its Portsmouth base for training exercises off the US coast. That was hugely embarrassing for the Navy given the ship had cost some £3.1 billion and this wasn’t the first problem since initial launch in 2019. This time, the issue was traced to a starboard propeller shaft fault and an installation error. Responding to a recent parliamentary question, Ben Wallace, the UK Defence Minister, said that based on “initial reports” the shaft was misaligned by 0.8 – 1 millimetre. That is a tiny mistake, but apparently caused a huge problem.

As well as the operational issues this caused, the question of who should pay for the error is also complex. Construction and delivery of the warship was carried out by a consortium of three firms under the banner of the now defunct Aircraft Carrier Alliance. BAE Systems, Babcock and Thales were all involved, which makes it complex to assess liability. Will the Ministry of Defence (MOD) end up paying or will they be able to pin the responsibility onto one or more of the firms?

A report on the “Breaking Defence” website said that the MOD “declined to comment on why the repair bill liability decision has not been made yet, nor when a decision is likely to be made”.  But MOD did say that repairs were likely to cost some £25 million, and that an investigation was looking at how to ensure the failure was not repeated. Well yes, one would hope that the same won’t happen again!

John Healey, the Labour Party’s shadow defence secretary pointed out that since the ship entered service in December 2019, it had spent 411 days in dock for repairs, compared to just 267 days at sea. A previous deployment also ended in embarrassment and a quick return to base in Portsmouth after an internal flood left the engine room and electrical cabinets submerged for 24 hours. The current repairs were supposed to be completed at the Rosyth dockyard in Scotland by February, but at time of writing (May 2023) still seem to be going on.

We could draw analogies here between our (literal) flagship and the wider state of the UK. Still pretending to be a significant global power, but incapable of actually doing anything to live up to that fantasy and all that sort of thing. But keeping to the facts, in a more mundane fashion it does highlight the importance of absolute clarity in the contract whenever you are buying from a consortium of any kind – and that doesn’t just apply in the military world of course.

Don’t assume a consortium will act as one entity if something goes wrong. It’s just as likely that each party will fight to protect their own position, which can leave the buyer in a difficult position, as we may be seeing here. So a strong and clearly written contract, including a definition of what will happen if there are issues after the formal consortium is dissolved, is essential.

And you can see why the UK Treasury (finance ministry) is not too keen on increasing the MOD’s budget for spending on more equipment, even given the present Russian threat. Cases like this (as well as high-profile failures such as the Ajax armoured vehicles) all add to a lack of confidence that such money would be spent well.

* A bit of research suggests that the expression was originally about sheep rather than ships! I didn’t know that…

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TSB Systems and Contracting Failure- CIO Fined

In my Bad Buying book, I wrote about the IT disaster that affected millions of TSB bank customers back in 2018. Here is the story from the book.

“In 2015 Sabatell acquired TSB, a UK-based retail bank, formally part of the Lloyds TSB Group. TSB at some point needed to move onto its own IT platform, rather than continuing to use the Lloyds  group systems, as they were now competitors to their former parent company. But the move, in April 2018, turned into a disaster.

Account holders couldn’t use mobile or Internet banking, and some reported seeing accounts details from other account holders. Customers struggled for weeks to make mortgage and business payments, as the new TSB systems failed to function properly. The issue was serious enough to be raised in the British Parliament, and in September 2018 TSB’s CEO, Paul Pester, resigned.

In March 2019 The Sunday Times reported that an investigation into the affair put much of the blame onto the IT firm that handled the transition.13 However, the twist was that this firm was SABIS – which is part of the Sabatell Group itself. So although it has a separate identity, this was in effect the internal IT function of the group that owned TSB.

Reports suggested a range of technical and programme management issues around the deployment of new software, rather than problems with the underlying infrastructure. But whatever the cause, the whole episode cost TSB £330 million,14 and there is a  ‘provisional agreement’ (according to the firm’s annual report) for SABIS to pay TSB £153 million. In November 2019 an independent report from law firm Slaughter and May concluded that the issues arose because ‘the new platform was not ready to support TSB’s full customer base’ and, second, ‘SABIS was not ready to operate the new platform’.

Questions have to be asked about the choice of ‘supplier’ here. Was SABIS the right choice to carry out this challenging task? It certainly doesn’t appear so, in retrospect. Did TSB have a choice, or was the firm told by top Sabatell management that it had to use SABIS? Would a firm with a wider and broader experience of banking systems than SABIS have done better? And why didn’t TSB accept the offer of help from Lloyds, which was made as soon as news of the problems broke?”

Now, five years later, there is an interesting postscript. Carlos Abarca, who was the TSB chief information officer, has been fined £81,620 by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the body that provides oversight of the UK banking system. In their 35 page report, they explain how Abarca’s failure caused a debacle that might have threatened financial stability more widely.

He apparently ignored early signs that the migration was not going well before the big switchover. He “did not ensure that TSB formally reassessed Sabis’s ability and capacity to deliver the migration on an ongoing basis”. Sabis told Abarca that they were migration ready and that subcontractors had given written confirmation that their infrastructure was fit for purpose. but the Authority felt this was not enough because the statements were caveated with comments about outstanding tasks. Abarca also did not obtain a written updated confirmation of readiness from Sabis when he told his own Board everything was ready for the transition.

The PRA said, “Mr Abarca’s failings undermined TSB’s operational resilience and contributed to the significant disruption TSB experienced to the provision of critical functions and potentially impacting on financial stability”.

This might be the first time a senior executive has been fined and disgraced for a failure in contract and project management. Now clearly in most industries, there is no equivalent of the PRA to  carry out this sort of investigation and take such action if someone screws up in a similar manner. But if you are in the financial services industry in the UK, it is a warning. If you are responsible in some way for operations, and that includes some procurement and contract management activities, then you must be very careful and must conduct your work with considerable diligence. And make sure you cover your back carefully at every point if a supplier tells you, “yes, everything is fine, don’t worry”!

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