The Capita Scandal: How Barnet Gambled with Public Services, and Lost
A £322 million experiment. Decade of dysfunction. And residents in Finchley Church End who are still paying the price.
In 2013, Barnet Council’s Conservative administration made a bold, and deeply controversial, decision. It handed over almost all of the borough’s core services to a single private company: Capita. Highways. Planning. Environmental health. IT. HR. Finance. Customer services. Revenue and benefits. In one sweeping act of political ideology, the people of Barnet were told that a profit-driven corporation would look after their roads, their bins, their planning applications and their tax records better than the council could itself.
They were wrong. And the consequences are still unfolding today.
The 'easyCouncil' Experiment
Barnet’s outsourcing programme was branded ‘One Barnet’ and the council behind it openly styled itself an ‘easyCouncil’, inspired by the no-frills model of budget airlines. The ambition was to strip public services to their core and let the private sector deliver them more cheaply. Critics at the time warned this was reckless. Unions objected. Residents signed petitions. Local democracy reporters raised the alarm. The Conservative majority on the council pushed ahead regardless.
Capita was awarded two enormous contracts, a £322 million, ten-year Customer and Support Group (CSG) contract, and a further Regional Enterprise (RE) partnership covering highways, planning and more. Together they represented one of the largest local authority outsourcing deals in English history.
£322 million: the value of the CSG contract with Capita.
2018: Capita admitted to IT failings affecting 21,000 schools’ pupil data.
2018: A ‘significant fraud’ by a staff member in the RE partnership went undetected.
£3.5 million of IT systems sat outside the contract, creating chaos and duplication.
When It All Began to Unravel
Within a few years, the cracks were visible. The council’s own review identified a number of ‘performance issues’ particularly within IT. Then in 2018, Capita admitted to a serious failure in an IT system used by 21,000 schools in the region, an incident that could have wrongly linked contact details between pupils, with alarming data protection implications. That same year, an internal review of financial controls had to be commissioned after a significant fraud by a member of staff within the RE partnership came to light.
Capita itself, the company trusted to run Barnet’s core services, was simultaneously in financial crisis. It posted a £513 million pre-tax loss, carried over £1.1 billion in debt, and held a pension deficit of over £400 million. Barnet Council had tied itself, and its residents, to a company on the brink.
The Mess Takes Years to Clean Up
When Labour took control of Barnet Council in 2022, ending nearly fifteen years of Conservative rule, one of their first acts was to begin unpicking the outsourcing legacy. In April 2022, they voted to terminate the Regional Enterprise contract and bring highways, planning and other services back in-house. But even this was not straightforward: IT, customer services and revenues and benefits were deemed too complicated and expensive to insource quickly. The contracts were extended, at additional cost, into 2026.
By 2025, Barnet’s trade union UNISON was running an active campaign called ‘Bringing Services Home’, warning that the council was showing bias against insourcing and that the remaining Capita contract had left IT services fragmented, duplicated and inefficient. Over a decade on from the original deal, Barnet is still arguing about how to undo what the Conservatives signed in 2013.
Who Paid? You Did.
The residents of Finchley Church End did not vote for the One Barnet programme. Many opposed it. But they paid for it, in higher council tax, in degraded services, in years of IT failures, in data risks, and in the considerable management cost of trying to unwind a decade of privatisation. The people who made those decisions faced no personal financial consequences. The bill, as always, fell to ordinary residents.
This is the pattern Reform UK stands against: ideology over accountability, corporate interests over residents’ interests, and a political class that experiments with your money and walks away from the wreckage.
What Finchley Church End Needs Now
Finchley Church End deserves a councillor who will fight for transparent decision-making, who will scrutinise every major contract, and who will hold executives and councillors personally accountable when their decisions cost residents money. The Capita scandal should never have happened. The question now is whether Barnet’s residents will allow the same political class to continue making decisions, or whether they will demand real change.
Common sense, accountability, and putting residents first.
