Two £38k Haringey Council Jobs Advertised for Haringey People

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Permalink Reply by pamish on March 7, 2013 at 15:42

Not at my desktop but IIRC, HP Lite is sent direct to me, or at least as a live link to the LBH website.  HP downloadable is there if you know when to look for it, but I don't get a reminder when a new one arrives.

HP has been cut by 2/3 (? 12 down to 4 issues pa?) so they have been forced to cut it, that was probably at least one more FTE job gone splat, regardless of what y'all think of the content, plus work for printers and layout people and the very very occasional photographic commission.

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on March 8, 2013 at 14:34

at least one more FTE job gone splat, regardless of what y'all think of the content, plus work for printers and layout people

Employment is a good thing, other things being equal, but it rarely exists in a moral vacuum. For example, all the workers of the one-time world's largest chemical company – IG Farben – were employed and doubtless their spouses and dependents were glad of it.

We cannot ignore "the content" i.e. the product of people's labour and the effects that has on society. Bankers aren't always good for the wider world.

In the case of the council press, such jobs tend to displace jobs in the private sector. HP tends to compete with the independent newspapers and council advertising can be used as a lever to control the editorial line in the free press.

Know any local papers that have closed?

Council propaganda needs a reappraisal.

But equally important, jobs ought not exist at the council just for the sake of it: they should first serve the interests of the wider community, secondly be good value to tax payers and further down the priority list, provide perks, pensions, promotion and career structures etc.

At Haringey Council the priorities seem to be reversed.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on March 8, 2013 at 12:40

It seems everyone wants better communication from the Council - what are they going to do, and why?

All council tax payers have a password-protected account at Haringey.gov.uk where they can see bills.

If LBH put a menu on the 'logged-in' page, they could have tailored info. Polls. Fix my street. Message your Cllr, 'this affects you'. etc. I'd like full-text searchable access to every non-exempt email and document, and be able to comment on them in a way that reaches the instigators directly.

If they turned Haringey.gov.uk into a sort of local version of Facebook+Twitter, would it change HoL?

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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on March 8, 2013 at 12:43

Password??? Huh.......?

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on March 8, 2013 at 12:48

Sorry Seema, don't understand.  To see your Council Tax account, you have to log into the LBH website. It's confidential, so you need to register to get a username and password.

https://statement.secure.haringey.gov.uk

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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on March 8, 2013 at 12:57

Thanks Chris, I had NO IDEA you could do this.... :) xXx

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on March 8, 2013 at 15:08

Hope you'll add your voice to the call for the Council to provide more of the standard, off-the-shelf facilities to residents that many websites provide as a matter of course. The LBH IT department doesn't even have a mechanism for residents to join a 'user' group of residents who care, let alone a place where we can identify who's going to do what to the site, when and why. They could publish their internal change control system at no cost to taxpayers.

Information is power - I'd like to see an 'open source' approach to everything, delivered by the many free open source packages that are in use by Councils elsewhere, saving money in software licence fees, consultants and proprietary training courses.

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on March 8, 2013 at 18:14

I'd like to see an 'open source' approach to everything, delivered by the many free open source packages that are in use by Councils elsewhere, saving money in software licence fees, consultants and proprietary training courses.

Agree: the council is wedded to an overbearing US company that regularly flouts the law. Criminally convicted of abusing its monopoly in about 1999, the latest count is a relatively modest fine levied this week by the EU.

The Beast of Redmond could have been fined 10% of its global turnover for having flouted their earlier promise – but they were fined less than 1% – only $731 m. They had previously been fined a total of about $1.6 billion by Brussels (you'd think that might have detered them) but still they thought they'd cock a snook at the EU.

The only language this company understands is sales and money and the latest fine is surely not large enough. The excuse that it was a technical error and "mistake" will be believed by no one. The error went on for 14 months ... I reckon Harringay's Marek would have noticed it!

Meanwhile, the local council keeps pressing money on them.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on March 9, 2013 at 1:11

Further, the quality of most popular open source software is known - I think it's often excellent, and far better than 'closed' source products. M$ (and Google) 'retire' software they can't make a go of, and buy and suppress rival software that threatens a better product - how evil is that?

Open source software need never die if someone wants it - it's open to anyone to nurture. It's a 'gift economy', similar to scientific research - freely given without payment in the hope of a better world.

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Did you notice that wordprocessed Council documents, some quite important, are often scanned, often badly, before being published on the LBH website? They can't handle the workflow needed to preserve them in electronic form it would seem.

Scanned in documents are not searchable unless you implement that facility and LBH haven't.

I bet there's an archive of every document and email safely backed up somewhere (post Levinson) but can we access the 'non-exempt' ones?  

The archivists (Bruce Castle Museum) can get hold of paper copies of pretty much everything but simply cannot physically store much and have no electronic storage.  The Council throws everything away. So, many documents get shredded and, presumably in the case of electronic stuff, deleted from the backups - what a waste when they take up so little electronic space that most people could store the entire output of Council documents on their mobile phones and still have room for a flock of angry birds.

I'd like to have seen all 218 (presumably long since destroyed) competition entries the Council received for the building of Hornsey Town hall in 1933, which cost £150m in today's money - a building that was cutting edge, high tech and adventurous at the time.

Also, where are the minutes of the Council meeting that decided to give the design work (and the £150 prize) to an inexperienced person fresh off the boat from New Zealand?

Why did this prosperous parish, the 'Brent Cross' of it's day, take the risk of selecting 27yr old architect Reginald Uren, who'd never built anything remotely similar nor on such a scale?

What will future HoL readers want to see of today's LBH output?

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on March 9, 2013 at 7:29

Chris the council's continuing to print out documents on paper, then scanning them, is a great example of how backward parts of it are.

This work-tripling and storage-quintupling is pure ignorance and inefficiency and I cannot work out why they invest so heavily in administrative problems for the future.

Cllr. Stanton and I don't always agree on everything, but one thing we did agree on is the sheer inefficiency of this. They need to create PDF's from the original file, rather than scan in paper. I believe Alan and at least one other councilor have tried to get movement on this – utterly basic stuff – but apparently, its all too hard!

Surely even some of the DOS-Windows PC-users at the council can understand this issue?

My own suspicion is that, those in the council whose inclination is to conceal information from the pubic, prefer things this way, knowing that searchable text makes things easier for the public.

I was pleased when, after three months of trying, the council finally released the building survey of Alexandra Palace. But I was astonished at how they went about it: they photocopied, 80-odd A3 pages in colour.

N.B. the council paid a great deal of tax money to a firm of surveyors to produce this document, which is likely to have been a proper PDF file in the first place.

I hold out some hope that new-broom CEO Nick Walkley can clear away obstacles to progress. I understand he may be a Northerner. This could be good on several levels: a fresh approach is needed

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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on March 9, 2013 at 9:33

Thanks for raising this again, Clive. I hadn't checked recently and was astonished to see this stupid, wasteful, dysfunctional system is still practised. For example, the latest set of "cabinet" papers from 12 February 2013, is a 49 megabyte download - mainly because they are scanned graphic files. 

Can I suggest that as you have on more than one occasion publicly expressed your admiration for the Dear Leader, a request from you to change this may be more effective than my past efforts.

You may be right that it's part of the culture of secrecy. Or it may be a mixture of secrecy, plus incompetence, plus a poor ability to learn - all of which mark the present "Cabinet" senior leadership.

You are also right that Mr Nick Walkley the new Chief Executive may be a welcome new broom. As I voted against his appointment - and had the Labour whip removed for doing so - this may surprise you.

I've now met and talked with Mr Walkley on a "walkabout" he arranged with some of his senior officers and Lorna Reith, Reg Rice and me, as the ward councillors for Tottenham Hale.

I was pleased and surprised: first to find him keen to see and learn about our part of Tottenham; and second because he seems very well-informed, intelligent, frank and open-minded. He also has a sense of humour. These are not a list of qualities I always expect in a Haringey Chief Executive.

Most important from your point of view: he is on record as favouring transparency. Plainly he can talk the Talkley.

(Tottenham Hale ward councillor. Labour Party member. Whip-free.)

P.S. Anyone interested in how easily stored, searchable and retrievable electronic documents are turned into huge, scanned graphics files for the Haringey "cabinet" please see my Flickr page.

Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on March 15, 2013 at 3:17

Hi Chris,

Sorry I missed this... Im not too techy, have you discussed this idea with anyone?

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