Last month, in the heart of Birmingham’s Grand Central station, a mechanical bull called Ozzy was unveiled to great fanfare, led by local politicians. With nostrils flared and red eyes shining, the bull had been transformed from a 2022 Commonwealth Games prop into a lasting, virulent symbol of this vital, diverse, brilliant city.
Among those lined up for the photo op were West Midlands mayor Andy Street and Birmingham City Council leader John Cotton, recently promoted to the top job after a Labour party coup. ‘Brand perception of Birmingham has moved forward dramatically since the Games,’ boomed Street, the Conservatives’ local poster boy.
The reality is that everywhere you look there is culpability, all of it manmade, all of it avoidable
Today, the city is finally facing up to the financial reality that was masked by the Games. Bold, Brilliant Birmingham is now Broke Birmingham.
Yesterday it was announced that Birmingham City Council, the biggest unitary authority in the country, was in such financial distress that it needs extraordinary financial support. Government commissioners might be sent in as part of the fix.
This is a desperately dark time for our city. The ramifications and the impact on the poorest will undoubtedly be far reaching, though right now they are hard to quantify.
Already the council has deferred plans to give extra support and funds, including cash for foodbanks, to those hit hardest by the cost of living crisis this winter. Every bit of council spending will now be subject to microscopic scrutiny. The city’s voluntary sector – much of it operating on a shoestring and funded by the council – is anxious about what this means for grassroots projects and is fearing the worst. The unions are preparing to fight any job losses and service cuts. There could be strikes as a result.
In the next 20 days, the fog swirling around the scandal should become a bit clearer. The council will have to set out its financial recovery plan at an extraordinary full council meeting, with sign off from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Decisions will have to be made that could cost jobs, livelihoods – and dare I say it, lives.
First some context. Austerity has had a devastating and lasting impact on Birmingham. In the past decade, the government has taken away the best part of a billion pounds and thousands of staff from the council in cuts.
Our city has pockets of some of the worst deprivation in the country. When you step outside the city centre there are places where over half of children live in poverty. Hundreds of them are stuck living in awful B&Bs because of the housing crisis. Thousands more live in some of the 24,000 council properties that don’t meet the very basic Decent Homes Standards. Too many of our young people are out of work.
But as we emerged from the shadow of coronavirus, we were assured things were looking up. This was the start of a ‘golden decade’ – a phrase repeated ad infinitum by the council’s then leader Ian Ward, who was later unceremoniously dumped by Labour in an internal coup. Mayor Street was happy to join in, hailing the twin promise of HS2 and the Games as transformative for the city.
Everything back then was about the Games, and showcasing Birmingham on a world stage. The Games last year were indeed a triumph, by many measures. But once the crowds went home and the first incarnation of the Bull was dismantled, reality hit again. There were the impoverished school children at foodbanks, the queues of families so desperate for temporary shelter they would put up with a grubby B&B or mice-infested high rise, the piles of rubbish on the streets.
The Section 114 notice issued by the city’s interim finance director Fiona Greenway starkly sets out what has gone so horribly wrong. Top of the list is that the council is on the hook for what will likely turn out to be a billion pounds in equal pay claims, owed to thousands of its own workforce who have been victims of discriminatory pay practices over recent years. Just last month I exposed how the city’s management had been allowing its bin collection crews – nearly all men – to work to a ‘task and finish’ regime since the pandemic, with many knocking off hours early as a result. If there was a textbook example of a practice likely to trigger an equal pay claim, this was it.
It was subsequently discovered that the council accounts signed off in 2020, 2021 and 2022 were flawed, with no accounting for the equal pay situation and liabilities.
It’s not the only manmade disaster to afflict the council. A £20 million new IT, finance and HR system designed to ‘save money’ has been so poorly implemented by the council that it is going to cost an eyewatering £100 million to put right. And rising demand for costly adult care and children’s services, the housing crisis and inflation meant that the council already faced an £87 million end of year shortfall.
So far, predictably, focus has been on allocating blame. Who failed to heed warnings around equal pay issues? How much blame lies with the decimation of services and staff caused by 13 years of Tory cuts? Are the senior officers now running the council solely to blame? Why did local politicians, responsible for holding those officers to account, fail to spot this unfolding catastrophe? Is this part of a wider national failure to invest properly in local services and local government?
The reality is that everywhere you look there is culpability, all of it manmade, all of it avoidable.
There will be a reckoning for the officers, councillors and the government over what’s happened in Birmingham. Reviews, investigations and plans for a judge led inquiry will lay bare what’s happened here. Villains and heroes will be uncovered. Some will lose their jobs. Some will lose their reputations. But in the end they won’t be the real victims of this failure – instead it will be the ordinary Brummies who rely on local services who feel the brunt.
In the meantime, Ozzy the mechanical bull will keep snorting and glaring as people cross the Grand Central concourse. Perhaps he will end up as a symbol, not of Birmingham’s boldness and brilliance as planned, but of the folly of focusing on glamourous projects while the roof is caving in.
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