Publications

Most of the publications listed here can be downloaded in Word or pdf format. Others can be purchased from the European Services Strategy Unit.

The Case for an In-House Housing Service for the London Borough of Barnet

Originally 70 Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMO) were established as part of the Governments Decent Homes Programme which began in 2001 to improve living standards by
installing new kitchens, bathrooms and central heating. Most ALMOs have closed – only two remain
in London – Barnet Homes and Sutton Housing Partnership. Barnet Homes is part of the Barnet
Group Limited which is owned by the Council. The report documments the closure of 17 ALMOs
in London.

Barnet UNISON commissioned the ESSU to make the case for a Council managed Housing Service
to increase the integration of public services, improve strategic planning, and remove the
embedded workforce inequalities with two-tier terms, conditions and pensions. The Council’s
Oversight and Scrutiny Committee failed to effectively scrutinse the issues. The Labour Council’s
Cabinet also failured to address the key issues, but sanctioned a 10-year management
extension for Barnet Homes.

Barnet Housing Service

Published on 4th July 2020. Last updated 7th August 2024.

ESSU Research Reports

Research reports from the European Services Strategy Unit

In this section:
Barnet UNISON launch “We are Barnet” – Pay like Barnet! campaign
Barnet UNISON has published its Pay and Conditions Claim 2021 to The Barnet Group (TBG), the London Borough of Barnet’s arms-length company which delivers housing, physical and learning disability, residential and social care and other services. It had 300 employees in 2012 which increased to 1,150 by 2020.

The report details the employment policies of TBG and its five subsidiaries in the 2012-2020 period.
- Between three and six TBG executive directors received a total of £3,843,000 in salaries between 2012-2019, plus £259,000 in performance bonuses, £32,000 as honoraria, plus £465,000 paid into their pension scheme. The total salaries of Executive Directors increased 11.8% between 2019 and 2020.
- The average wage in YCB in 2013 was £28,935 but fell to £16,923 in 2020 – a reduction of £12,012 or 41.5% (YCB Annual Reports 2013-2020 – see Table 11 below). The average wage in TBG Flex was reduced by 9.8% between 2018-2020.
- Barnet Council is the primary funder of public services provided by TBG. In 2019-2020 Barnet Homes received £63,800,000 from LBB - 94% of revenue: YCB received £10,293,000 from LBB - 72.1% of revenue; TBG Flex 2020 received £9,874,000 in recharges from Barnet Homes and YCB - 86% is funded by LBB.
- The average pension cost of a TBG executive director was £20,400 in 2019- 2020 (page 64, TBG Annual Report 2019-2020). An ex-Fremantle care worker had gross pay of £17,684 (a 39-hour week on £8.72 per hour). Care workers on low pay rates cannot afford to contribute to an occupational pension scheme.
- TBG employees are barred from joining Barnet Council’s Local Government Pension Scheme despite the company being owned and financed by the Council. Instead they are offered a very inferior defined contribution scheme.
- There are major gaps between LBB and TBG Flex terms and conditions – 1.75 additional weekly hours, 4 months less sick pay on full pay, a grossly inferior pension scheme; and no wage increase at all for any of the YCB employees for eight years.
- TBG Flex is the Groups internal employment agency which charges other TBG companies a 4% annual fee for the employment of staff “…to ensure it contributes a viable surplus for TBG Flex” (TBG Flex Annual Report, 2020). It had accumulated profits of £372,000 (31 March 2020).
- Barnet taxpayers are paying for TWO chief executives to manage council services when most Councils have only one – an additional cost of about £190,000 inclusive of salary, social security and pension scheme contribution.
“Where is the justice in executive directors of The Barnet Group sharing £259,000 performance bonuses between 2012 and 2020 when frontline workers got nothing?” A Barnet Group worker

“I have rarely discovered such a deeply embedded scale of inequalities and exploitation in a local authority arms length company. This a damning indictment on the London Borough of Barnet who have colluded with this model for nearly a decade.” Dexter Whitfield, Director, European Services Strategy Unit

Three residential care homes privatised by Barnet Council in 2000, despite strong opposition, returned to Council ownership in 2019 but were located in the arms- length company.

TBG has announced that from 1^st April the London Living wage will be paid to all the staff who were TUPE transferred to YCB from Fremantle care homes. This means the hourly rate will move from £8.72/ hr to £10.85/ hr. However, the workers will be part funding this themselves by having their enhancements for working weekends, bank holidays and night shifts removed. The other part of this will be funded by Barnet Council itself.

Flawed model

The arms-length company model, illustrated by Barnet, has several functions or negative impacts.

Firstly, to provide services that local authorities consider politically difficult to outsource and have a high risk of failure.

Secondly, they enable Elected Members to transfer services to an arms-length organisation with austerity driven budgets allowing them to distance themselves from responsibility for job losses, pay cuts and the rationalisation of services.

Thirdly, they allow directors and managers to adopt commercial practices in terms of their own pay and conditions and to adopt commercial corporate practices such as the Group model with subsidiary companies.

Finally, local authorities have a very chequered track record in monitoring outsourced contracts, which is also reflected in the governance and control of arms-length companies.

Barnet UNISON Press Release and continued information about the campaign
- Barnet UNISON TBG Pay Claim Final.pdf
ESSU Reports and Briefings

Range of additional reports and briefings by ESSU and Andrew Morton.

In this section:
ESSU Reports for public bodies, trade unions and community organisations

Reports researched and written by ESSU for public bodies, trade unions and community organisations.

In this section:
Books and articles by Dexter Whitfield
New Book: Challenging the rise of Corporate Power in Renewable Energy: Strategic opportunities for public ownership and industrial and economic development, by Dexter Whitfield, 26 January 2023.

A new dimension to the climate crisis has emerged as a result of the corporate domination of the renewable energy sector. The book details strategies for a democratic public future for renewable energy, protection of the built environment, nature and biodiversity. and demonstrates how decarbonisation, retrofitting, environmental adaptation and protection create new economic and industrial opportunities and generate significant good quality jobs.

One of the Top ten beach reads to ideologically warm up any long hot summer - Labour Hub. "Dexter Whitfield offers an alternative: a renewable energy programme rooted in saving the planet, not saving the fossil fuel industry from itself, More than enough to brighten up any beach read."
https://labourhub.org.uk/2023/07/25/top-ten-beach-reads-to-ideologically-warm-up-any-long-hot-summer/

Scale of corporate domination

This book exposes how corporate interests dominate the renewable energy sector. These include private investment funds, venture capital funds, private equity funds and subsidiaries fossil fuel companies which are developers and owner-operators of wind farms, solar parks, battery storage, hydro, biomass and energy-from-waste projects. Market ideology dominates the sector and outsourcing is widespread.

These projects are bought and sold in a secondary market with development rights and ‘construction-ready status’, either as individual projects or as part of a portfolio of operational projects, often located in several countries. The analysis is based on the European Services Strategy Unit Global Renewable Energy Database which contains 1,622 transactions between 1^st January 2019 and 31^st December 2021.

Several publicly-owned companies in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, China, Romania and the Republic of Ireland are developers and owners of renewable energy assets, but the public sector accounts for 4% of renewable energy global generating power.

Deep structural flaws
- Private Equity Funds have carved out a pivotal role in financing and owning renewable energy assets – they acquired 369 renewable energy assets and sold 178 projects between 2019-2021.
- 41 major renewable energy companies registered in tax havens, were involved in 264 transactions to acquire assets whilst a further 47 transactions involved the sale of renewable energy assets. The use of tax havens to avoid or reduce corporate taxation increases corporate profits but reduces tax revenue for governments.
- A sample of 20 private renewable energy companies paid their shareholders £8.75bn (US$10.7bn) in dividends in the study period reflecting a high level of profiteering in the sector.
- Despite the wide criticism and failure of many Public Private Partnership projects, the World Bank and regional development banks continue to promote the PPP model for renewable energy projects in developing economies with 2.928 PPP projects signed since 1997 plus 839 fossil fuel projects.
Public ownership, values and economic, social and environmental justice

The book sets out the attributes of public goods and ten public service principles and a Core Public Values Framework is based on five key pillars - quality, effectiveness, equality, efficiency and sustainability – that are essential in providing public infrastructure and services to meet social, economic and environmental needs and human rights. Not only are the five pillars inter-dependent but they are also dependent on inputs, working methods, impacts and outcomes, outputs and monitoring and evaluation.

Challenging corporate domination of renewable energy

Whitfield describes various ways in which the corporate domination of the renewable energy sector can be challenged, for example by eliminating companies that use tax havens; by requiring improved democratic accountability and continuous community and trade union participation in planning and service delivery; by direct investment in place of auctions; by intervention in private sales of assets. He sets out a strategy to significantly increase public ownership of renewable energy including via remunicipalisation, new national and local public sector organisations and direct investment in renewable energy projects, decarbonisation and retrofitting.

Spokesman Books - https://spokesmanbooks.org/ (Paperback £18.00, ePub £10.00).

Additional data available - https://www.european-services-strategy.org.uk/public-ownership

Book Review - The Great Green Scam

Helen Mercer, Morning Star, 17 April 2023 - highly recommends an invaluable guide to the state of private ownership of renewable energy, and what to do about it.

Dexter Whitfield has performed an invaluable service over the years in researching the mechanism of corporate control over public services and its extremely profitable but socially disastrous effects. He has written widely on creating "a public alternative to the privatisation of life."

Here he turns his attention to the provision of renewable energy. Painstaking research into annual reports, company press releases and corporate bulletins shows that globally the private sector provides 86 per cent of the capital investment required: public-sector involvement is insignificant except for facilitating this private investment through public/private partnerships.

Private equity companies such as BlackRock "have carved out a pivotal role financing and owning renewable energy projects": pension funds also play a significant role.

A sample of 20 private renewable energy companies paid dividends between 2019 and 2021 of £10.7 billion. And of course, among such stakeholders, there is widespread use of tax havens.

He exposes how private companies have used environment, social and governance benchmarks to greenwash their activities and to exaggerate the benefits of private-sector involvement.

Similarly, he exposes the parallel marketisation of nature and biodiversity, paraded as a means to value natural resources with a view to their conservation, but actually turning "ecosystem services" into financial assets which can be traded in a market with an estimated value of $120 trillion per year.

Having laid out the ongoing capture of environmental policies by the private sector and by neoliberal economics, in the second part Whitfield considers how this dominance is to be challenged and what national and international strategies are needed for the transition of human economies to renewables.

Prominent among these recommendations is a radical increase in public ownership so that "all public financial support must be conditional on binding agreements that give the public sector the first option to acquire full ownership of a project in any sale."

A new agency, a national renewable energy agency, is needed to increase direct public investment and nationalise key companies.

Other forms of government influence and direction of the sector are needed in order to, for example, strengthen national grid networks, and promote the decarbonisation of agriculture, transport and construction.

Government activities, he emphasises, should be bound by frameworks for assessing the impact of policies on aspects of social and economic justice.

Whitfield has tackled a huge topic and the size of the challenge is well-illustrated in the ideas being discussed by the PCS for a national climate service.

His research and prescriptions will help to inform future debate.

SOCIALIST PROJECT: THE BULLET

Global Trade in Renewable Energy Assets Soars

23 May 2023 Dexter Whitfield

Draws on Global Renewable Energy Secondary Market Database 2019-2021 which reported on 1,622 transactions in renewable energy assets in a three-year period. It reveals the dominant role of private equity funds, wide use of tax havens and limited role of public ownership. The market creates new opportunities for profiteering from the generation of renewable energy. Revenue from the sale of assets accrues to the parent company that owns the equity and does not directly benefit the project, community and local economy.

It is vital that corporate domination of renewable energy is challenged combined with establishing the case for increased public investment and ownership of renewable energy. Eight ways in which corporate ownership can be challenged are described.

Ways in which local, regional and central government can be publicly owned, the importance of increase public ownership of renewable energy generation and return national grids and local distribution networks to public ownership are set out.

Environmental Injustice in Renewables

Dexter Whitfield - THE SPOKESMAN 154 (pages 47-55) 2023 Founded by Bertrand Russell

Examines the crisis and opportunities in the context of the climate crisis including the regional differences on dependency on coal, oil, and natural gas. In addition, there are significant structural flaws in the renewable energy sector such as the increasing reliance on market forces, the activities of private equity funds and the limited effectiveness of Environment, Social and Governance criteria.

Who will control renewables?

Regan Scott review of Challenging the Rise of Corporate Power in Renewable Energy in The Spokesman 154 (pages 116-117) 2023.
"Dexter Whitfield's new book on corporate power in the renewable energy world is unique in looking ahead and in depth at the implications of high global financial capitalism's penetration of the undoubtedly much needed and welcome renewable energy industries."
https://www.european-services-strategy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Regan-Scott-Review-1.pdf

Democratic Left Scotland review

Review Democratic Left Scotland Download
In this section:
The Fragmentation of London Local Government

Identifies five forms of fragmentation - institutional fragmentation which involves the formation of new institutions or transfer of responsibilities to companies or trusts; organisational and managerial fragmentation by transferring duties to business units; service fragmentation by outsourcing; employer fragmentation as a result off institutional, organisational an service fragmentation leading to multiple employers; workplace fragmentation with separation to different offices and depots. This report examines the effect on services, users, staff and trade unions and the key policy issues (35 pages - 1997).
- Fragmentation London Local Govt
The Future of Business Development Centres in Newcastle

The Newcastle City Council’s Business Development Centres are very successful in contributing to implementing the City Council’s corporate and economic development policies and have generated a large number of businesses which would not otherwise have started or survived. However, they were threatened major budget cuts and/or outsourcing in 1999. This report recommends their retention as a key economic development strategy and draws on experience in Birmingham.
- Newcastle Business Ctrs
Briefing paper on the use of tax havens by Scottish Hub and PPP Project Companies

Researched by Dexter Whitfield, European Services Strategy Unit, and member of the SAPPP Taskforce.

Briefing paper published by Common Weal as part of the Scotland Against PPP Task Force for Financing Public Scotland:

Introduction and methodology
Impact of tax havens
Governance and disclosure
Corporate tax haven Index
Use of tax havens by Hub Companies
Use of tax haven in NPD project companies
Dalmore infrastructure and Ednaston Project Investments Limited
Dalmore Holdings Limited moves to Jersey
Scottish Public Sector Pension Fund Investments in PPPs
Recommendations.
- SAPPP_Policy Paper
Archive of key Centre for Public Services and SCAT reports

Important documents on a range of public policy issues produced between 1973 and late 1990s.

In this section:
Lie of the Land

Community Land Act: Land Nationalisation Betrayed

SCAT worked with several community campaigns confronted by property speculation including the Battersea Redevelopment Action Group and the North Southwark Community Development Group to produce a highly critical analysis (1976) of the Community Land Act 1975 as a betrayal of land nationalization. It contained reports on Southwark, Cardiff, Lewes, Battersea and Newcastle in addition to a guide of the Act.
- Lie of the Land

Barnet Housing Service

ESSU Research Reports

Barnet UNISON launch “We are Barnet” – Pay like Barnet! campaign

Barnet UNISON TBG Pay Claim Final.pdf

ESSU Reports and Briefings

ESSU Reports for public bodies, trade unions and community organisations

Books and articles by Dexter Whitfield

Book Review - The Great Green Scam

SOCIALIST PROJECT: THE BULLET

Global Trade in Renewable Energy Assets Soars

Environmental Injustice in Renewables

Who will control renewables?

Democratic Left Scotland review

The Fragmentation of London Local Government

Fragmentation London Local Govt

The Future of Business Development Centres in Newcastle

Newcastle Business Ctrs

Briefing paper on the use of tax havens by Scottish Hub and PPP Project Companies

SAPPP_Policy Paper

Archive of key Centre for Public Services and SCAT reports

Lie of the Land

Lie of the Land