Long list of failure is blow to city’s future

areas) and without access to the same level of officer information, we had to take at face value the numbers they were presenting were based on plans that were at least deliverable. It now seems there weren’t always even plans in place, never mind ones that were deliverable.

Of course, even at the time we had our doubts, highlighting a £2 million black hole in the transport budget, after plans for congestion charging were dropped without any adjustment in the savings figures that this was supposed to deliver.

Overall, though, non-executive councillors in the current system are asked to trust the numbers put forward, with the debate centring around prioritisation rather than financial planning.

We know now that this budget was never going to deliver anywhere near the level of savings it promised.

Moreover, we know that the reason for this, as highlighted by the Independent Improvement panel, was that there was “insufficient understanding and ownership of the council’s 16/17 budget and a lack of comprehensive and robust delivery plans for the budget reduction measures that were required”.

This is a damning indictment of the council’s leadership. The authority’s inability to produce a balanced budget has led to the need for an independent review of the 2017/18 budget and long-term financial plan.

More importantly, it has led to the citizens of Birmingham being asked to pay the price for the Labour leadership’s incompetence.

The list of failure is a long one, but it is the ‘naïve’ assumptions around NHS money that is having the biggest impact. These ‘savings’ represented a significant chunk of the overall savings that had to be found and yet even the clinical commissioning groups that were supposed to be handing over the money had no idea of where it was going to come from.

No other council was making such assumptions (including Solihull which shares an NHS ‘footprint’ with Birmingham) and Birmingham is now paying a heavy price for this mistake, with at least an additional £73 million of savings that now need to be found for 2017/18.

Councils have a statutory duty to live within their means; they have an envelope of resources they have to manage and, whilst we may all like a bigger envelope we budget for what we have, not what we would like.

The projected overspend in Birmingham is far in excess of anything being predicted elsewhere in local government, while the leadership continues to see itself as the victim of cuts, it is abundantly clear that even given more taxpayers’ money, they simple cannot be trusted to manage it effectively.

This is why we called for a vote of no confidence in the current leadership of Birmingham City Council. The council, now more than ever, needs strong financial leadership that the current executive have shown themselves to be emphatically incapable of providing.

Councillor Randal Brew, Conservative Group Deputy Leader

Birmingham City Council