Calls for ‘criminal’ probe into city bins strike chaos Ex-council leader Clancy denies acting ‘unlawfully’ after scathing investigation
ADAMNING report into the way the 2017 bin strike was handled by Birmingham City Council has triggered calls for a criminal investigation and resignations.
The 48-page report condemns the conduct of then leader John Clancy, who it concludes acted “unlawfully” when he struck a deal with the union Unite to try to bring the summer strike to a swift end.
The report also implicates his then Cabinet colleagues, some of whom are still in positions of power.
The former leader acted ‘without authority or power’, it said, but some cabinet members also failed to challenge him “for fear of losing their posts”.
Councillor Clancy has issued an emphatic retort, claiming the report was “nonsense from start to finish” and a “whitewash” designed to cover up the failings of the city council’s legal department.
The independent review was commissioned by Birmingham City Council to ‘learn lessons’ from the handling of the bin dispute.
It was tasked with looking into an agreement struck between the city council’s leadership and Unite in August last year, which sought to bring the strike to an end. The key findings of the review were that Councillor Clancy “did not have the authority or power” to enter into that agreement with Unite and that an informal Cabinet meeting to ratify the agreement did not have any powers to make that decision.
It also ruled the council failed to accept the “norms of decision making” and that day-to-day governance of how a council ought to be run was, in 2017, missing or distorted.
The review has called for the council to review member and officer protocols.
The council also needed to “consider whether there are grounds for bringing action against a member for both misconduct and misfeasance in public office.”
Councillor Jon Hunt, leader of the council’s Liberal Democrats, said: “The report makes very serious comments about the conduct of former City Council leader John Clancy during the 2017 bin strike and reaches damning conclusions about the way the City Council was being run.
“It does not set out the costs to the taxpayer of the mistakes that were made but we know they run into millions, including the settlement of the dispute in favour of the Unite trade union.
“In the light of its contents some of the matters may need to be considered by the Crown Prosecution Service.
“The report makes it clear that Councillor Clancy was not the only politician responsible for the fiasco.
“It says he should have been chal- lenged by members of his cabinet when a secret discussion was held on August 18 about his proposals to settle the strike. It exonerates the present leader, the present deputy leader and former cabinet member Councillor Lisa Trickett, stating that they did challenge his actions.”
But he called on cabinet members who “failed to challenge Councillor Clancy’s actions” to “consider their positions”.
Councillor Clancy took to Twitter to condemn the findings of the report, adding that he had acted “appropriately and with full legal powers throughout this dispute.”
He argued that it was the failure of council officers to “carry out my instructions and to frustrate them politically and administratively that was unlawful and actionable”.
He confirmed he refused to have anything to do with the review and report, which he said was destined to be a “whitewash”.
He vowed to present his own report detailing how the actions of senior officers “brazenly worked to prevent the democratic will.”
Conservative group leader Councillor Robert Alden called for the resignations of current leader Ian Ward and deputy leader Brigid Jones.
“They have been on the cabinet for the entire time of the administration, they didn’t stop these things happening, they haven’t changed the culture,” he said.
“If the organisation needs a ‘reset’, they need to resign as they have been at the heart of the organisation and every crisis of the last six years.
“When the report says cabinet and officers can’t trust each other, we know nothing has changed.”