Leader of Birmingham Local Conservatives, Cllr Robert Alden, write for Conservative Home at:
Once again, the Conservative Party Conference is returning to Birmingham. As always, it is lovely to welcome the Conservative family to our great city.
For the first time since the days of David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition, Party Conference returns to Birmingham with the backdrop of a Labour Government. Last time it was the tail-end of the fading Gordon Brown era Government. This time it is a brand-new Government, less than 100 days in office, who were just booed at the start of their conference this week.
Back in 2008 when the Conservative Party Conference came to Birmingham for the first time since 1933, Birmingham had a Conservative-led Council. The year before, Birmingham had been voted the cleanest city in Britain. The Council was financially solvent and considered to be well-run, winning countless prizes. In particular, the council was an exemplar for housing, having led a dramatic turnaround from the woeful housing conditions left it by the previous Labour Administration in 2004.
For those wondering what the next five years of a Labour Government may look like, there is no better place to start than Birmingham City Council.
Come to Conference and you will see a city weighed down by 12 years of Labour rule. Had you arrived a week earlier you would have found Victoria Square heaving with people on strike at the Labour Administration’s failure to resolve an equal pay crisis of its own making which, in part, caused the Council last year to declare two section 114 (bankruptcy) notices and a Section 5 notice (contravention of the law or maladministration.)
Despite what they say, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the Administration, risks around equal pay have been warned about since 2017. The Conservative Group raised concerns in meetings and called in Council reports, auditors and trade unions flagged the issues, the local press ran stories, and even some of their own cabinet members were tweeting their support for the Union claim ahead of the elections in 2022. But like so many of Birmingham’s troubles, the killer was a refusal by the Labour Administration to listen to anyone else. They sat in meetings hearing all around them say there was an issue – but were too stubborn to even go and fully investigate the warnings they received.
Go to any library in the city and you will find Brummies from preschoolers to pensioners campaigning to save their local library from Birmingham Labour’s brutal cuts. It would cost £2.4 million to maintain current library levels (out of a gross budget of £4.3 billion), but the Labour Council are axing this at the same time as paying £17.2 million a year in interest payments to finance the debt from their catastrophic Commonwealth Games athletes village that did not even house a single athlete.
A common theme; we called on the Council to use the purpose-built student accommodation in the city for the games village, to keep costs down. We warned them in March 2020, when they signed the contracts to go ahead with building a village that their risk register didn’t even include risk from covid-19, despite it being well known about by that time. In the end the Labour Council went ahead building the Athletes Village, costing the Council over £560 million, rising to over £800 million when borrowing costs are included; it was never finished and in the end the Council ended up using student accommodation anyway.
Planned to make a profit, despite having per unit build costs higher than the average property price in the area of the city it was built in, its recent disposal failed to clear the debt of over £300 million, leading tax-payers with a bill of £17.2 million a year for 40 years.
For Brummies, this is a familiar story. The botched Oracle IT rollout ignored red warnings to not go live. It ignored a lessons learnt report from previous rollouts as well as the procurement brief to not allow huge customisations of the scheme, despite it being well known that this would create a huge risk to the success of the rollout. Labour then approved a revised business case doubling the cost of the scheme and giving authority to officers to proceed in a way that contravened earlier warnings, without even seeing a full copy of that business case they were signing off. The administration ignored warnings and costs spiralled. A pattern of behaviour and outcome we have seen over and over again.
After 12 years of Birmingham Labour rule, the state of Council services has collapsed. The recent performance monitoring report laid bare just some of Labour’s mess.
Missed bin collections are running at almost 3 times more than their target. Recycling which at 22.9 per cent was already a quarter lower than when they took control in 2012, is running at five per cent behind the equivalent period for last year. Waste sent to landfill is over 20 per cent higher than the benchmark average, whilst waste that is incinerated is done so in a facility that will be 15 years beyond the end of its useful life by the time an alternative is in place, thanks to Labour’s failure to reprocure a 25 year contract.
Last year one in ten Council Tax and Business Rates owed went uncollected by the Council. This situation is of course connected to the botched IT roll-out of the Oracle ERP scheme. Having gone live, costs of the new system have rocketed. Not expected to be fully working until 1st April 2026, it is estimated to now cost the Council over £140 million to install, from an original budget of £19m.
One of the tragedies of the last 12 years has been the way Council tenants have been let down by Birmingham Labour. When Labour took control of the Council over 99 per cent of Council homes met decent homes standard. As of this September, only 31 per cent of Council homes now meet the decent homes standard. This has led to newspaper headlines calling the Council the city’s biggest rogue landlord! Social Housing tenants living in damp and squalor due to the failures of a Labour landlord.
A prime example of how the culture of the Council has collapsed under this Labour Administration can be seen when looking at the number of births registered within the statutory timescale of 42 days. Birmingham registers just 27 per cent, this compares to national benchmark of 87 per cent. The reason the Council gave for this failure was that “performance significantly dropped in Birmingham and across the country during the Covid Pandemic”. That may well have been true, but it doesn’t explain why every other council has recovered to at least near pre-pandemic levels, whilst in Birmingham it is left floundering. Yet you can sit in Cabinet meetings and see this reason being accepted without question by a Labour Administration, for whom failure is simply par for the course.
The next Council elections in Birmingham are not until 2026, but in those all-out elections the city will have the chance to vote for change. Labour needs to lose just 15 Councillors to lose control of the Council, the largest Metropolitan Council in the Country.
In four by-elections in Birmingham this year (all while there was still a Conservative Government) the swing away from Labour to Local Conservatives has been between 5.6 per cent to 14.6 per cent. For 12 years they chose to fail to meet saving targets, ignored warnings and advice, put off difficult decisions, and to try and blame anyone else but themselves, letting down our great city. Now, with a Labour Government in place, they have nowhere to hide.
So, whilst in Birmingham, please enjoy your visit. Birmingham is a wonderful city full of amazing people and businesses. Take time to sample some of the wonderful bars, restaurants and cafes our city has to offer. And please don’t blame Brummies for the mess Birmingham Labour have made of Birmingham!
