Time for real clarity over council debts

DEAR Editor, The last thing that the irate citizens of Birmingham need right now is pabulum from Birmingham’s Lead Commissioner Max Caller , who was appointed after the council declared effective bankruptcy last year.

For Max Caller to boldly announce that Birmingham “can be great again”, which is both condescending and patronising , is decidedly not what we want to hear.

What the people of the UK’s Second City want to know is where has all their money gone?

There is a lot more to the economic collapse of Birmingham City Council than just the equal pay and IT disasters (as an internal Labour Party report concluded), resulting in approximately £1bn being required to deal with the claims and implement an efficient lT and finance system .

Additionally, savings of £300m need to be made over the next two years.

Birmingham City Council has an annual budget of more than £3bn and the citizens of Birmingham are entitled to know how every penny of that money has been spent/misspent. In the interests of transparency and democratic accountability, the lead commissioner should publish a detailed account of contracts that have caused concerns to the auditors – the ones not considered to be competitive and value for money.

We should be told specifically who awarded/ signed off such contracts, and why, and to who, they were given, and what sums of money were involved ?

How much money was misspent/overspent in paying for inflated contracts?

It was men like Joseph Chamberlain who made Birmingham great, not the current crop of incompetent politicians.

Birmingham, however, remains a great city, whatever shenanigans have taken place in the Council House.

Birmingham, which has been endorsed as one of the great cities of the entire globe by the World’s Best Cities Report, is great through the skill, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit of its people.

Peter Henrick, Northfield, Birmingham