Comment ‘Awesome’ round number exposes the awful truth
statistics out of any bunch of councils even for a single, most recent, year, let alone for 2010/11, is nigh on impossible – as the Government Equalities Office (GEO) found this April as it sought to measure and compare councils’ gender pay gaps.
Lacking the GEO’s statutory authority and resources, I confined myself to comparisons of the seven councils’ known redundancies and my guesstimates of their current workforces.
Just how guessy is illustrated by Birmingham, who provided the GEO with mountains of unrequested and historic background data but no current workforce figures, and whose successive council leaders, back to Sir Albert Bore, had talked of council employment being reduced to 7,000 by 2018/19.
But there was also the ‘council spokesperson’ who advised the LGC that Birmingham’s large figures had to be “viewed in the context of its size back in 2010, when we had approximately twice as many employees as we do now”.
So, while I’m more confident about some of the other boroughs, Birmingham’s 8,000 is a big guess.
Obviously, though, that really isn’t the main point, which is that the services Birmingham City Council is delivering today are being provided by a council workforce roughly half the size of that just eight years ago, while the other boroughs are doing so with workforces cut by between about a quarter and 40 per cent.
And that’s closer to awful than awesome. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of Birmingham