‘Join the Army and see the world’ used to be the War Office’s boast. In those inter-war years it meant Egypt, Malta, Jamaica and Hong Kong, but for a lucky few recipients of the King’s shilling their next deployment will be to organise rubbish collections in Birmingham.
The government has announced that a ‘small number of office-based military personnel with operational planning expertise’ will assist Birmingham City Council in dealing with the effects of a month-long strike by refuse workers. At the end of March the council declared a major incident, with up to 20,000 tonnes of rubbish lying in the city’s streets and reports of rats the size of cats roaming with impunity.
The army is at its smallest size since we faced Napoleon more than two hundred years ago and has been, to quote the House of Commons Defence Committee, ‘deployed above [its] capacity’ and ‘consistently overstretched’. You could be forgiven for thinking that helping a council run its bin collections is an odd use of scanty resources.
We should not labour this point: this is not a matter of soldiers helping to clear the streets, as independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr Ayoub Khan suggested in the House of Commons last week. HQ Standing Joint Command (UK) in Aldershot is providing a very limited number of planners to help tackle a genuine public health crisis. But it is worth stopping to think about what is happening.
There are well-established procedures for the armed forces to provide what is called Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (Maca). It is governed by four principles. Maca can be authorised when: there is a definite need to act and a clearly defined mission; all other options have been considered; the civil authority lacks the required capability for the task and cannot reasonably develop it; and/or the capability exists but is unavailable or insufficient for the immediate situation.
The situation in Birmingham is not a sudden crisis beyond the council’s expectations or remit. Unite the Union called an all-out strike of its members on 11 March in protest at the scrapping the role of Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO), the existence of which at a higher pay grade could, the council claim, leave them vulnerable to an equal pay liability.
In September 2023, Birmingham City Council issued a notice under section 114(3) of the Local Government Finance Act 1988, warning that it did not have sufficient resources to meet its financial obligations and was therefore effectively bankrupt. A major contributory factor to this was an historic equal pay liability initially estimated at £760 million, with £1.1 billion having already been paid since 2012, so it is understandable that councillors and officials were anxious about any additional cases. Unite claims that abolishing the WRCO role will affect 150 employees, with a pay cut of up to £8,000 a year for some and the loss of pay progression for hundreds of others. The council disputes these figures.
Industrial action has sometimes necessitated military assistance. Operation Fresco in 2002-03 saw armed forces personnel provide emergency cover during a strike by firefighters, and during the infamous Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 the government turned to the army for firefighting and ambulance services. The stoppage in Birmingham is much more limited, with fewer than 400 workers on strike.
This is not just about a local authority and a trade union at loggerheads. It is reasonable to observe that a Labour government has brought in military assistance to manage the results of a crisis at a council which has been run by the Labour party since 2012 involving a trade union which is affiliated to the Labour party. Although Unite pointedly did not endorse Labour’s election manifesto last year, it donated more than half a million pounds to 88 MPs. One of them was Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, who is now in charge of local government.
With local elections now less than three weeks away, this is not a resounding endorsement for Labour in town halls up and down the country. It is impossible to tell whether voters will see the government’s use of military resources as a show of tough-minded resolve to tackle a crisis, or a panicked attempt to deal with a catastrophic situation which is a bitter feud within the Labour family.
No doubt the search is already underway for a suitable scapegoat, but Sir Keir Starmer has been in office for nine months now. When highly-trained soldiers are being asked to manage a council bin collection, voters are entitled to ask how this crisis developed so far, and why no-one was able to stop it.
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