Youth services hit hard but weekly bin rounds safe
BIRMINGHAM youth services are set to be decimated as the devastating impact of the city council’s financial meltdown hits home.
But community wellbeing centres, mostly located in deprived parts of the city, have been protected.
Weekly bin collections will also continue for now, council insiders have told the Post – a move that’s had a mixed reaction amid calls to ‘bite the bullet’ and go fortnightly to save millions.
News is only now starting to emerge about exactly which services are going to be hit after the ‘broke’ council was ordered to make £200 million of cuts this coming year – the equivalent of more than a quarter of its usual spending on services – after being forced to declare de facto bankruptcy last summer.
It means radical cuts for every service delivered by the council that is not protected by law.
Youth services – including critical outreach services designed to steer young people away from exploitation and violent crime – are going to be slashed. Cuts had been rumoured last year, triggering huge concern. Now the axe is finally going to fall on at least some of the 15 youth centres run by the council, and associated services.
There are currently just 25 full-time equivalent youth workers providing services to around 120,000 teens across the city – that’s just one to every 4,600 teens. Ideally there should be one to every 400, according to the union Unite, especially in areas of high deprivation and where more teens are not in education or work.
Nathan Dennis, whose First Class Foundation organisation provides specialist youth work and training in city hotspots, has branded any future cuts “catastrophic”.
He said of the proposed cuts last year: “In a time where our city is going through increased youth violence and poor mental health resilience from the fallout of the pandemic, now more than ever we need to provide more safe spaces and support for young people.”
Some Labour councillors are understood to be furious about the loss of youth services, arguing they believe it was more important to invest in young people than maintain weekly bin collections.
Birmingham will remain an outlier compared with nearly every other council in the country that has shifted to fortnightly collections – but we understand a ‘transformation plan’ is on its way and changes are likely next year. “The people of Birmingham would eventually stomach a shift to fortnightly collections as long as they are reliable and the streets kept clean and recycling improves,” said one. “The loss of youth services, however, when young children are dying on our streets, would be exceptionally short-sighted. It feels like again we have bowed to vested interests and put off addressing problems within the waste service.”
The council’s Labour leadership, led by Cllr John Cotton, and its officers, led by chief executive Deborah Cadman, had been ordered to present the full draft budget for 2024-25 to government-appointed commissioners by Sunday January 7. Work was still frantically going on over Christmas and New Year to try to come up with enough savings while maintaining legally required services, including safeguarding children and adults at risk in the city.
Meanwhile, a campaign designed to help safeguard libraries in the city has been launched to try to protect community libraries and the flagship Library of Birmingham from cuts which could, fear activists, “reduce it to an unacceptable level of service for a statutory service”.
The Friends of the Libraries of Birmingham have written to every councillor urging them to resist more cuts, citing the impact of huge cuts in 2015, which dramatically reduced hours and staffing at every library.