ISiS vote - an historic occasion for the wrong reasons

LAST night, I attended a specially-convened meeting of the full Deane council which I believe in time to come will be seen as an historic moment.
We were being asked formally to support the council signing up to the ISiS project – Improving Services in Somerset.
I spoke against it, and I voted against it.
I was the only councillor to do so, although one of my Conservative colleagues also voiced some concerns as well.
Needless to say, the vote was carried overwhelmingly and the Deane council is now on course to enter a partnership with the global IT giant IBM and with Somerset County Council as a third member of the deal.
It means the councils will pay IBM something like £400 million over the next 10 years to run a number of services better than we do at present.
Of course, by running the services better, IBM will be able to run them more cheaply, and will generate millions of pounds in savings which we councillors can then use to provide even better services to you, the public.
So, the public will benefit twice over. Once, because IBM will be coming up with all sorts of brilliant new ideas for giving people what they want where they want it and when they want it; twice, because it will cost less than it does now and will mean council tax does not need to keep going up like there’s no tomorrow.
Hundreds of staff from both councils will transfer to the private sector to work for IBM.
Their jobs and terms of employment will be guaranteed for 10 years, so they say.
You may well ask, then, why was I so stupid as to vote against it.
Well … all of the above is theory.
I’ve lost count over the past 30 years of the number of stories I’ve read, or even written myself as a journalist, about local authorities entering groundbreaking new partnerships which will revolutionise services for ratepayers and save money.
Those which have actually succeeded can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I do not believe for a moment that IBM will deliver what they promise. I also do not believe for a moment that the Deane council will actually be able to hold them to their promises.
I would be surprised if we don’t see the departure of a lot of the staff who have moved over, as despite what may be promised, working for profit-driven private enterprise is far different than the world of public service.
To me, it appears more of a grandiose, empire building exercise designed to improve the job lot of senior officers who are most involved.
As a fairly new councillor, I’ve come to this at the eleventh hour, after political party leaders on all sides have swallowed the IBM line hook, rod, and sinker, and committed themselves to the deal.
They have been looking at it for something like two years already, so they ought to know a lot more about it than I do.
I do not profess to properly understand the business case behind the deal – we’ve hardly been told a lot about it, and what we have been told is by way of bombastic presentations where figures in the tens of millions of pounds are bandied around and anybody who queries anything is simply told: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it right on the night.”
Alarm bells started ringing for me when a presentation was entitled “Improving the social and economic well-being of Taunton Deane, Somerset, and the South West.”
I asked why the South West, why not the UK? The question was taken seriously and they started to explain that we should first concentrate on the area we knew best …
I am told about 30 other local authorities and public bodies of different sorts around the South West are keeping a watching brief on ISiS and could sign up to it later on to share in the glory and the savings.
Well, I am just a poor councillor elected by the good folk of the Blackdown Hills to make sure that their black bin bags are collected on time and that planning applications are processed properly, and that sort of thing.
They did not elect me to start running schools in Cornwall or libraries in Gloucestershire.
Yes, I believe history was made last night. But I think in 10 years’ time we will be looking back and seeing that it was for the wrong reasons.