Bins, Brexit... and council secrets
So to check the claim the Birmingham Post submitted a request for the breakdown of overtime paid to the city’s bin workers during 2016 and 2017.
At the same time another request, again designed to verify or not rumours of ill discipline on the picket lines was submitted.
The city council, in particular the bins department, was understandably in meltdown last summer so it was no surprise that the reply and inevitable rejection of both requests was two weeks late.
What did come as a surprise on the discipline issue was that less than a week after being told that this was too sensitive to release to the press, a backbench councillor made the same inquiry at the council meeting and was given a full printed reply.
A while later the council admitted a blunder over this.
So an appeal was lodged on the overtime question and eventually a reply came from the council’s chief lawyer Kate Charlton. The key reasons here were that the information would attract publicity (negative we presume) and that it might help those staff making equal pay claims against the city council.
A key factor in the very costly equal pay cases of the last decade was that binmen were favoured with routine overtime which was denied to other staff.
While the council has an interest in suppressing such information, it is no reason to withhold it, so an appeal was duly submitted highlighting this ridiculous argument.
This dragged on and on, and by this spring there had still been no decision on the appeal, so the Birmingham Post called on the Information Commissioner to intervene.
It was only then, ten months after the original request, that the city council gave way and revealed that it spent at least £1 million on overtime for 374 bin men during 2016/17.
It showed that a third of the workforce were paid more than £5,000 overtime that year standing up the council’s claim that overtime was routine.
It was certainly a lot less than conclusive on the other rumour that a small clique were cornering large amounts of over time. The distribution seemed reasonable.
This could be an isolated case and on what was a very traumatic and far from resolved issue for the city council.
However it has also recently came to light that they are blocking release of an impact report into Brexit, compiled two years ago during the referendum. The report was initially blocked in the middle of the EU Referendum campaign, when it could have been used for propaganda by one or other of the sides.
However, there is no reason to withhold it now. One key area of concern is how gaps in funding from the loss of EU grants could be filled. The city has historically done very well from these in the past.
Councillors and the public need to see this detail. The fact Brexit is a political hot potato should be no barrier to this report being put in the public domain. The council needs to trust its citizens.
It all serves to demonstrate that despite nice comments about openness and transparency, Birmingham City Council remains a deeply secretive organisation which thinks it knows best.