Commissioners appointed to oversee improvements at Labour’s bankrupt Birmingham City Council have expressed their concern at the lack of pace with the identification of savings to fill the financial blackhole left by Labour’s mismanagement of the council budget. In comments on a financial update to be presented to Cabinet next week (25 June 2024), commissioners have warned that they are ‘very concerned that within the four months after Cabinet approved the budget, only £7m of new savings have been identified to address the residual gap in 2025/26 of £67m, and none to address what will be a significant gap it 2026/27. If the Council does not increase the pace and focus on this task we are concerned that BCC will be in a real financial crisis in the autumn, similar to 2023.’
Commenting on the report, Councillor Robert Alden (Con, Erdington), Leader of the Opposition and Birmingham Local Conservatives said:
The scale of the failings of political leadership from Birmingham Labour has ceased to be a surprise to anyone connected with the city, but even by their own appalling standards, to be yet again in a position where they have to be publicly warned about the urgency of the situation and their lack of progress is a truly shocking state of affairs. This is a mess entirely of Labour’s own making, having ignored repeated warnings over a number of years about the impending disaster from equal pay, oracle, and non-delivery of savings. One would think that the issuing of an effective bankruptcy notice and the appointment of commissioners may have forced them to finally stand up and start to act, but yet again all we are seeing is the same old inertia, indecision and incompetence.
The Commissioners have also repeated earlier statements about the scope for transformation and efficiencies savings that would avoid the need for some of the more brutal cuts to front-line services but warned that the window for this is rapidly closing.
Councillor Ewan Mackey (Con, Sutton Roughley), Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Birmingham Local Conservatives said:
For a number of years, we have been calling for greater focus on transformational savings through things like procurement, shared services and a more fundamental reset of the culture of the council. There is nothing groundbreaking in what we have been saying, many councils across the country have already shown the way, but Labour preferred to bury their heads in the sand and blame everyone but themselves. Had Labour followed this path earlier, then we would not be in the position we are now. The residents of Birmingham simply cannot afford any more delay, for every opportunity for efficiency saving that is missed now, another front-line service will have to go.
Councillor Alden added:
We have long-standing concerns with the way Labour manage procurement in the city which they have routinely ignored. There is huge scope for savings from the way the council buys good and services. Too often, contracts fail to get best value because the council does not get the basic rights, leaving it too late in the day to competitively tender, or not even bothering to go to market at all, allowing contracts to lapse and continuing to pay over the odds. It is a statutory requirement for the council to have a register of all contracts in excess of £5000 publicly available, and yet time and again we find details of contracts that are missing from this list meaning the council does not have any true picture of what it is spending or where. Procurement has now been highlighted by the commissioners as a key area of focus for the council to get right, but the political leadership’s failure to get a grip of this during more a decade of labour control has cost the city dearly.
