Labour Leader of Birmingham City Council Cllr John Clancy has seen his authority crumble during the last week, since the announcement he had personally overseen a deal to stop the recent bin dispute.
Since his comments to the press last week Birmingham City Council have been at lengths to distance themselves from the Labour leaders deal cummliating in proposals going to the City's cabinet committee tomorrow to ignore the leaders deal and immediatly issue redundancy notices to the 106 effected employees.
The report goes on to say that the cost of Labour's bin dispute to tax payers was over £300,000 a week as contractors had to be brought in to try and get control of the City again (secion 4.2.4 page 4 of the cabinet report).
Meanwhile officers confirm the failure of the Labour Council to implement their own operating model for fleet and waste, chosen by Labour themselves, on time will cost the City over £2m in overspends this year on top of the costs from the strike. Over all Labour's overspend in the fleet and waste department is likely to exceed £4m by the end of the year despite an additional £5.7m put into the service this year.
4.25 of the report (page 4) reveals the massive cost to Birmingham City Council if the cabinet ignore officers recommendations and back Cllr John Clancy's Union proposals. The public section of the report clearly states that Cllr Clancy's proposal would leave the City subject to substantial equal pay risks. To the extent that the report states "meeting such liabilities would more than wipe out available headroom in the equal pay contingency, any uncommitted sums for capital investment and all available revenue reserves".
It adds this could leave the Section 151 Officer having to declare the Council was unable to continue setting a lawful budget.
In response to the news that the Council is recommending not going ahead with the Labour Leaders own published deal Conservative Group Leader Cllr Robert Alden said "failure to get on with implementing choices that Labour themselves have made has caused residents to suffer for over 7 weeks as refuse and pests built up all over the City. It has now been revealed the cost of clearing is going to run into the millions and to top it off the deal the Leader of the Council promised the Unions has been shown to be a disaster for the City Council and its taxpayers. It is increasingly clear when the Labour Leader met ACAS and Unite he either deliberately misled them agreeing to conditions the Council could not sign up to or is so out of his depth as Leader that he didn't even realise what every opposition Cllr and officer did, that what he was promising was simply not possible to deliver".
Cllr Alden went on to say "Now we have seen Cllr Clancy's deal has turned out to be a total dud and he has shown him to be totally out of his depth he needs to resign. First he hid for 7 weeks, then appeared claiming he had solved it all only to have it fall apart within a week. This whole account has been a disaster he needs to go now!"