City council ‘will be great again’, claims lead commissioner
BIRMINGHAM City Council ‘can be great again’ when it overcomes the ‘self inflicted wounds’ that have brought it down, the city’s lead Government commissioner said.
The council has fallen from being one of the best in the country to ‘requiring intervention’ because of a collective failure to heed warning signs over many years, said Max Caller, addressing the council’s coordinating scrutiny committee.
“This was a great council and you can be again. Your citizens and local government need you to get it right,” said Mr Caller.
On the city’s damaging budget cuts ahead, including £149 million of cuts this year, affecting children’s services, libraries, bin collections, day centres, adult care, schools and kids with disabilities, he warned more would follow.
Council tax bills are also landing on doormats with a 9.99% rise.
“There are no quick fixes,” said Mr Caller. “You still have a gap in funding. This is a time to be frank and honest. Until you do that there will always be a feeling there is some clever wheeze that can be done. There is not.”
He told councillors: “Every single line of the budget is going to be a challenge... but if you don’t deliver these things you have to deliver something else.
“I hate the fact that you have got into this position, that you did not know the size of the gap you were facing on the day we arrived and had no plan for making these savings.
“Had you known that you might have avoided some of the things we are going to have to do.”
He revealed he had written an interim report to Secretary of State Michael Gove in January, three months earlier than required, because he was so concerned that the council would not be able to deliver on its financial obligations.
He told the committee: “At the time I wrote the letter (dated January 9th) we had serious doubts about whether the council was going to be able to strike a budget that could be signed off.
“It is a major achievement of this council to have produced a set of proposals, no matter how unpalatable to you and your residents.”
Many areas of the council were delivering in ways that ‘every member can be proud of.’
“There is no council in the country that is all good or all bad,” he said.
But “what has happened in Birmingham is that you have really lost your way from being one of the best councils in the country to getting into intervention.
“You have been on notice of that for many years.
“It has felt as though the council felt it was too big to listen to other people, knew better and did not want to learn from good practice elsewhere.”
The council had failed to learn from and internalise the lessons of the Kerslake Review of 2014 (prompted by previous council failures), he said.
“Hard decisions have not been taken... officers felt it was never possible to tell bad news to senior management or councillors, and councillors felt they were never told the truth, resulting in a climate of mutual distrust and suspicion and occasional poor behaviour.”