Bankrupt Birmingham: the cuts will have a knock-on effect on the NHS

Keep Our NHS Public – Birmingham

Government commissioners are imposing a £300m cut over 2 years on the city’s spending, with a devastating effect on services. 600 jobs are to go.

Unemployment and poverty are bad for the health of workers and their families.

THE CUTS WILL HAVE A KNOCK-ON EFFECT ON THE NHS

1. Adult Social Care is to be cut by £22m from a budget of £903m. This will lead to more patients being stuck unnecessarily in hospital because they can’t get social care. A dreadful situation exacerbated by the proposed termination of the council’s in-house Enablement Team, who support people’s transition from hospital to social care.
2. Children’s Services to be cut by £57.04m out of a total budget of £428.8m inevitably leading to problems that the NHS will have to pick up.
3. Non-statutory public health services will be reduced, affecting environmental health, trading standards and well-being services.
4. Homeless services reduced.
5. Emergency welfare grants to go.
6. Housing maintenance reduced.
7. Up to 25 of 35 libraries may close, although a sop of “mixed delivery” proposals with a vague promise of “hubs” and talk of volunteers may keep around 25 as yet unknown locations, with yet unknown facilities. People defend on libraries during cold weather and, throughout the year, benefit from human contact, mental stimulation and the sheer joy of reading. These closures affect vulnerable and create the slide towards isolation and distress.
8. Reduced support for voluntary organisations dealing with social and community issues.
9. Sales of open spaces for development will impact on the health of everyone who enjoys them for health and relaxation.
10. Arts and culture funding is to be cut entirely over a period of 2 years. Studies show that the arts have an important positive effect on people’s mental and physical health including:

• more positive health and social behaviours in children and young people
• better mental health in adulthood
• lower risks of depression and dementia in later life
• lower levels of chronic pain

This text is taken with thanks from KONP Birmingham’s new leaflet 

 

 

Liam Byrne’s new book ‘The Inequality of Wealth: Why it matters and how to fix it’ – a script for Richard Parker?

Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, and has been an MP continually since July 2004. He currently chairs the  UK parliament’s Business Select Committee and will probably be in the Labour Cabinet if Labour wins office.

Hodge Hill is one of England’s most deprived areas. It has the highest fuel poverty rate, the highest child poverty rate, the second highest unemployment rate, and it ranks second lowest on the index of deprivation (Guardian 5 January 2023). Liam Byrne is the chair of the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Strategy (EBIGS) Board. (See the article on this in BATC: Link 1 below.)

‘The Inequality of Wealth: Why it matters and how to fix it’

In  March Liam Byrne’s new book was reviewed by Michael Roberts, a Marxist economist, on his blog, after attending its launch. Here are some extracts from his comments. (See Link 2).

Byrne reckons that the social mission of the UK Labour party is for ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’, not for any radical transformation of the economic structure of the capitalist economy i.e. socialism – in this sense, he represents the ‘moderate’ wing of the party, or you might say, the current dominant pro-capitalist wing.

At the LSE launch, Byrne said he aimed to find ‘a middle way’ to rectify things between the view that nothing can be done and the view that some revolutionary transformation of the economic structure was needed, which the electorate would not accept.  What were his policies for his ‘middle way’ to greater equality?  What we want, Byrne said, was a “wealth-owning democracy” – a phrase recalling Thatcher’s ‘property-owning democracy’, which actually kickstarted the sharp rise in UK inequality in the 1980s.  The phrase also echoes the position of the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer, who pledges to make Labour “the party of home ownership”.

Byrne’s aim is that everybody should get on the ladder to owning their own home (presumably with a mortgage) and also have some savings to invest for their retirement.  To do this, a government should give every young person £10,000 to kick their careers off; the government should establish a sovereign wealth fund to build up funds (what for Byrne did not explain); and there should be fairer taxation eg income from capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income from work.  Byrne even flirts with the idea of a wealth tax on the very rich that could bring in billions for the economy and for redistribution.  But that was basically it.  Moreover, all these ‘radical’ measures to reduce inequality of wealth would have to be slowly introduced over “three parliaments” (I make that 15 years!), so that electorate gradually got used to the policies!

Policies for redistribution are not enough. What are needed are policies prior to redistribution to stop the creation of unequal wealth.

What Byrne never talked about was why there was such inequality of wealth and income in the UK and in all the other countries of the world?  Why are the rich rich and why are the poor poor?  Surely, there is something endemic to the capitalist economies that explains this permanent inequality.  In several posts and papers, I have discussed the underlying causes of inequality; Byrne does not do so, it’s just there and shocking and we need to do something about it before it explodes into revolts.

But here is the policy problem.  If inequality is endemic to capitalism, then what is needed are policies prior to redistribution.  It is not a question of trying to redistribute excessive wealth from the rich to the rest of us through taxes and/or closing up evasion loopholes and tax havens etc.  That might help a bit, but the underlying generation of the forces of inequality would remain untouched.  Pre-distribution policies are needed.

Byrne advocated only one – better jobs with better pay for those at the bottom of the ladder.  How that was to be achieved given the state of the UK economy (and other capitalist economies) was not explained.  He also seemed to suggest raising the social security minimum level to take people out of poverty – again how that was to be implemented was not explained.

Would Richard Parker, if elected Mayor, campaign for Liam Byrne’s policies and aim to put them into practice in the West Midlands, and by a Labour Government?

Richard Parker’s campaign is based on ‘5 Pledges’:

• Create 150,000 jobs and training opportunities
• Revitalise high streets and bring back pride
• Tackle crime and anti-social behaviour
• Bring buses back into public control
• Fix the housing crisis and crack down on rogue landlords

Of course they should be supported, but they don’t go nearly far enough. For example, they don’t mention urgently tackling the causes of climate change. But there is another question on which Parker is silent. As Labour Mayor of the West Midlands he would be in a powerful position to aim to influence the policies of the Labour Party, and especially those of a Labour Government. Would he attempt to do so? We don’t know, because he has said nothing. And if he did, would he be using the Liam Byrne play-book?

What he should do, of course, if elected, is to campaign for policies for the redistribution of wealth and implement them where possible, while also campaigning for policies to stop the continuing creation of unequal wealth.

Richard Hatcher

29 April 2024

Link 1: https://birminghamagainstthecuts.wordpress.com/2024/02/20/what-is-birmingham-councils-biggest-neighbourhood-development-plan-and-who-control-it/

Link 2: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/03/04/inequality-the-middle-way/

Birmingham Council and pupil attainment inequalities in the school system: what is wrong and what the Council needs to do

Birmingham Council’s ‘Annual Education Performance Report’ was presented at the Education, Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 10 April. (See Link 1 below to access the report and the recording of the meeting’s webcast.) The report was introduced by Sue Harrison, Director of Children’s Services, and presented, with slides, by Lisa Smith, School Improvement Lead for Strategic Development. The meeting was chaired by Cllr Kerry Jenkins as Chair of the Scrutiny Committee. Cllr Karen McCarthy, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families, was present but did not speak in the discussion.

The report, including appendices, is 242 pages long and packed with data including numerous graphs and tables. The presentation by Lisa Smith, its author, took 22 minutes, including a total of 8 minutes to summarise the data on Key Stages 2 and 4. The presentation was followed by 28 minutes of discussion, including a 3 minute report by Tim Boyes, Head of the Birmingham Education Partnership.

The first point to make is that while it is valuable to have available as much relevant data as possible, a much shorter report should have been presented at the meeting focusing on the key issues and data. This point was made by the Chair, Cllr Kerry Jenkins, and accepted by Sue Harrison.

The overriding focus of the report is on comparisons between the performance of the Birmingham school system and national data, and data from other local authorities, including Core cities and statistical neighbours. In terms of specific categories of pupils the report focuses largely on pupils with Special Needs, and the presentation did so almost exclusively. There was also some mention of Exclusions. These issues were also the main themes of the discussion with Councillors after the presentation.

What is most striking about the report, and its fundamental weakness, is its failure to address issues of inequality, with the exception of SEND. The report contains numerous graphs and tables providing data. Almost all the data on inequality is presented separately as ethnicity, gender or ‘disadvantage’. However in reality in the lives of children and young people, and in their progress and attainment in schools, the three factors don’t operate separately, they combine in various complex ways to profoundly shape the performance of pupils in our schools. There is no discussion in the report – and there was none in the presentation of it at the Committee meeting and the discussion there – of the gross inequalities of gender, ethnicity and social class that the report reveals: of what might be its causes and what should be done to address these inequalities, including what schools and the Local Authority are doing and what more they could do. It is indicative, and extraordinary, that in the 242 pages of the report the words “equality” and “equalities” don’t appear at all.

Out of the dozens of tables in the report there are only two which combine data on gender, ethnicity and social class to report the joint impact of all three factors on attainment. One set is about Key Stage 2 Reading, Writing and Maths (p73). The second set (p114) is about Progress 8, a measure of attainment at age 16. These tables show the differences in attainment in terms of ethnicity, gender (shown as G for Girls and B for Boys) and ‘disadvantaged’ status (shown as Y for disadvantaged and N for non-disadvantaged). The official data category of ‘Disadvantaged’ is a crude indicator of social class.

I have based the table below on data taken from the table on page 73 of the report headed “% Difference to LA average for KS2 Reading, Writing and Maths At Least Expected by Gender, Ethnic Group and Disadvantaged”. It presents the data in 60 levels of attainment from the highest achieving group to the lowest. I have listed here for illustration the top 10 and bottom 10 groups according to their attainment scores. The groups are defined by ethnicity, gender, and whether ‘Disadvantaged’ (Yes or No).

KS2 Reading, Writing and Maths

TOP 10
White – Irish	Girls	No	24.8
Indian	Girls	No	24.1
Any other Asian background	Girls	No	22.9
Chinese	Girls	Yes	21.4
White and Asian	Girls	No	20.3
White and Asian	Boys	No	19.4
Bangladeshi	Girls	No	18.4
White and Black African	Girls	No	15.1
Chinese	Boys	Yes	14.1
White – British	Girls	No	13.9

BOTTOM 10
Any other black background	Girls	Yes	-11.0
White British	Girls	Yes	-11.4
Any other white background	Girls	Yes	-12.7
White and Asian	Boys	Yes	-13.7
White and Black Caribbean	Girls	Yes	-13.8
White and Black Caribbean	Boys	Yes	-20.2
White British	Boys	Yes	-21.9
Any other white background	Boys	Yes	-22.1
Black Caribbean	Boys	Yes	-25.6
Any other black background	Boys	Yes	-31.8

The report offers no analysis or discussion of its data on ‘KS2 Reading, Writing and Maths’. Here are my notes of some key findings from the tables above:

Of the 10 highest performing categories:

• 8 are Girls
• 8 are Not Disadvantaged
• The 2 Disadvantaged groups are Chinese Girls and Boys

Of the 10 lowest performing categories:

• All are Disadvantaged
• 6 are Boys
• 2 groups are White British.
• 5 groups are Black Caribbean or White and Black Caribbean (2) or Any other black background (2)

The only other table which presents data which combines gender, ethnicity and social class is headed ‘% Difference to LA average Progress 8 Score by Gender, Ethnic Group and Disadvantaged eligibility’, on page 114 of the report. Progress 8 is a measure of pupil performance that compares pupils’ progress from the end of primary school to the end of Key Stage 4. It is based on the attainment of pupils across eight different subjects.

Like the Key Stage 2 table, the Progress 8 report presents the data in 60 categories of different combinations of ethnicity, gender and social class (the latter indicated by the official data category of ‘Disadvantaged’). I have based the table below on the top 10 and bottom 10 groups according to their attainment scores in the Report. The groups are defined by ethnicity, gender, and ‘Disadvantaged’ (indicated by ‘Yes’ or ‘No’). The Progress 8 LA Average score is 0.03.

Progress 8

TOP 10
Chinese	Girls	No	1.41
Chinese	Boys	No	1.20
Indian	Girls	No	0.92
Any other white background	Girls	No	0.76
Indian	Boys	No	0.73
Black – African	Girls	No	0.67
Any other Asian background	Girls	No	0.67
White and Black African	Girls	Yes	0.66
Bangladeshi	Girls	No	0.59
Any other black background	Girls	No	0.56

BOTTOM 10
Any other mixed background	Boys	Yes	-0.45
Any other white background	Boys	Yes	-0.46
White – Irish	Boys	Yes	-0.47
White and Black Caribbean	Girls	Yes	-0.49
White and Asian	Boys	Yes	-0.55
Black Caribbean	Boys	No	-0.65
Gypsy/Roma	Boys	Yes	-0.73
White British	Boys	Yes	-1.03
White and Black Caribbean	Boys	Yes	-1.08
Gypsy/Roma	Boys	No	-1.17

The report offers no analysis or discussion of its data on ‘Progress 8’. Here are my notes of some key findings from the tables above:

Of the 10 highest performing categories:

• 8 are Girls. They comprise Chinese, Indian, Any other white background, Black – African, Any other Asian background, White and Black African, Bangladeshi, and Any other black background.
• Only 1 group is Disadvantaged: ‘White and Black African’ Girls.
• The highest scoring Boys are Chinese (2^nd) and Indian (5^th). Neither group are ‘Disadvantaged’.
• The highest scoring White British group, in 7^th place, is Non-Disadvantaged Girls.

Of the 10 lowest performing categories:

• 9 of the 10 are Boys.
• The only Girls category is ‘White and Black Caribbean’ Girls.
• 8 groups are Disadvantaged. 2 groups are Non- Disadvantaged: Black Caribbean Boys (in 6^th place) and Gypsy/Roma Boys (in 10^th place).

The two tables in the Report, and my extracts from them, illustrate the complexity of patterns of school attainment when all three interrelated factors are taken into account together, not just reported separately. The only combined comment provided by the report is “Generally, the pupil groups achieving more than the LA average are non-disadvantaged with a higher ratio of girls than boys. Disadvantaged ‘White and Black Caribbean’, ‘White British’ and ‘Black Caribbean’ boys are the furthest below the LA average for Progress 8.” (p113). But the report offers no analysis and no discussion of these results, their interrelationships, what could be their causes and how might schools and the Local Authority best address them.

What can we do in Birmingham?

These findings demonstrate how a complex of interrelated inequalities permeates our schools. That raises some key questions, in the context of the social and ethnic spatial divisions of our city. To what extent and in what ways are educational inequalities generated, reinforced or ameliorated

• by national education policy? (There is of course a huge literature about this issue.)
• by the structure of the state school system in Birmingham? (For example, by the existence of the 8 grammar schools.)
• by factors in the cultures of children and young people? (For example by racist behaviours or certain cultures of male youth identity.)
• by the policies, structures and professional practices within our schools?

And most importantly, what are schools and teachers in Birmingham doing that is having most success in tackling the inequalities of class, race and gender? And what can other schools and teachers learn from them, and how?

These patterns of inequality are fundamental features of education in Birmingham schools. They are very complex and multi-level, from the overall social structure to individual children’s life-worlds. Addressing them is an absolute priority. They cannot be fully solved solely at individual school level. But we know that some teachers and some schools are more successful at addressing them than others. We urgently need to identify them and find ways of sharing their expertise. And we can also draw on the research studies which present the evidence for successful strategies.

What do we know about successful strategies in Birmingham schools?

In Birmingham there is a wealth of relevant information about successful strategies for tackling inequalities in education in our schools. Much of it may be trapped within individual schools, perhaps even individual classrooms. How can this knowledge be systematically identified, collected, centralised, analysed, disseminated and shared?

One way would be through a research project run by academic researchers. This could undoubtedly collect valuable evidence, though it would need to be on a large enough scale to do justice to good practice concerning the three interrelated issues of class, ethnicity and gender across the age ranges and in a range of different schools, and that would require grant funding. But it would be wrong to think that the best way to improve policy and policy and practice is to rely on a time-limited research project whose findings could be used as a sort of recipe for improved practice. The sort and scale of change that is needed is an iterative and collective process of making changes, learning from them, sharing them and revising them over time, not the one-off application of a model.

The principal agency that is already doing this on behalf of the Council is of course the Birmingham Education Partnership, which has a 7-year contract with the Council, focusing on Key Stages 1 and 2 and promoting groups of schools to work together to share knowledge and practice as local clusters or MATs and academy groups.

The teaching unions are also actual or potential sites for sharing knowledge of successful strategies. And relevant local information and knowledge may also be being circulated and shared among informal networks of teachers and of parents.

The challenge now is to address issues of educational inequality in the city by coordinating, deepening and upscaling this potentially rich assemblage of knowledge and practice, infusing it with the most relevant evidence from outside Birmingham, and finding the most effective ways of sharing it with schools, teachers, parents and communities across the city. The process to enable this needs to be constructed, and the only body with the potential to coordinate and lead it is the Local Authority.

How could this be done? Slide 10 of the ‘Annual Education Performance Report’ presentation is headed “Keeping what’s great and building on it”. It says “But we need to recognise that there has been a lack of education strategy across the city – schools have carried on working themselves but now there needs to be a genuine partnership with the local authority”. The Council’s practice of publishing an annual report of pupil performance is proof that it accepts this responsibility. But what it does not do is carry out the responsibility of tackling the inequalities that it identifies.

Some Council statements about tackling inequalities that need to be built on

Equality issues are one of the Council’s priorities, addressed in the Birmingham City Council Report to Cabinet 6 September 2022 ‘Everyone’s Battle, Everyone’s Business Equality Action Plan 2022 -23’. Its author, Cllr John Cotton, who was Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Community Safety and Equalities at the time and is now Council Leader, said: “Everyone’s Battle, Everyone’s Business is a strategy for the whole council: no single team or directorate can do this on their own – it has to be a collective effort by everyone.” “… we are making good progress, but this work will not stop while our communities continue to face inequalities in our city. We want to build a Birmingham that is fair for all, where inequalities are tackled wherever they are found.” These aims have yet to be embodied in the Council’s work in education.

Another potentially positive statement that has yet to be put into practice can be found in the documentation of the 14 June 2023 meeting of the Scrutiny Committee – ‘Appendix 3: Corporate Priorities, Performance and City Outcomes’. Under the heading of ‘Grand Challenges’ it lists ‘Priorities’, three of which could provide the foundation for a reinvigorated policy for education:

5. Tackle poverty and inequalities
6. Empower citizens and enable the citizen voice
7. Support and enable all children and young people to thrive

The most recent relevant Scrutiny Committee document was launched at its meeting on 29 November 2023 and is titled ‘School Improvement – the New Relationship with Schools’. It is a 19 page report by Sue Harrison, Director Children and Families, authored by Lisa Smith, School Improvement Lead for Strategic Development. It says “This report accompanies a presentation which sets out a proposed new relationship with schools that is currently being discussed with school leaders.” The Report was presented by Sue Harrison and was based on a series of slides (Link 2).

The report notes the “High levels of diversity and deprivation” in Birmingham schools, the “Constant churn of senior leadership at the council and lack of systems leadership”, and that there is “No way of holding schools to account where policy impacts negatively on children or on other schools”. It continues “But we need to recognise that there has been a lack of education strategy across the city – schools have carried on working themselves but now there needs to be a genuine partnership with the local authority”. The report notes the “Positive engagement from schools with Director for Children’s Services, who is building a stable leadership team to last”. It makes no mention of the role of the Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families.

The report lists the principles of “Our new relationship with schools” (p12), including:

• The council must own its statutory duties relating to schools causing concern and school improvement
• Local authority services will be held to account in a professional way
• Individual schools and governing boards will be held to account in a professional way
• This requires a significant system change if we are going to deal with the ever-growing pressures that are affecting our frontline teachers and school leaders.

The report then illustrates the proposed “New ways of working” with a diagram of 6 concentric circles, at the centre of which is the Director of Children’s Services. This “Ensures headteachers, school governors, academy sponsors, principals, local authority services promote educational excellence for all children and young people and be ambitious in tackling underperformance”. Again there is no mention of the role of the Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families.

‘School Improvement – the New Relationship with Schools’ could offer an opportunity for significant improvements. But there are three big problems with it.

First, it does not represent a break from the Council’s tradition of offering no combined analysis of equality issues. In fact the “Universal truths underpinning the vision” (p13) include “Statutory duty on the council in terms of education performance for all children” and “Inclusion, SEND, attendance and achievement are everyone’s business”, but again, as with the ‘Annual Education Performance Report’, avoids prioritising tackling the interrelated inequalities of ethnicity, gender and class. The report actually states that “There are no direct equalities implications associated with the proposed new relationship set out in the presentation”.

The failure of the “School Improvement – the New Relationship with Schools” report to prioritise and offer an analysis of inequality issues in pupil attainment and how they need to be addressed is not just an isolated omission, it is rooted in the culture of the Birmingham Council. The Council needs to recognise that its conceptual and practical framework for school education needs fundamentally reworking, drawing on the best of existing theory and practice.

The second problem concerns citizen participation: where is the public voice in the “new relationship with schools”? In recent years, in keeping with a national trend, Birmingham Council has given some more prominence to issues of public participation in policy and practice. The most recent statement is “Powered by People: Putting the public at the heart of everything we do”, a new 20 page City Council policy document headed by Cllr Sharon Thompson, the Deputy Leader. (See Link 3). It promises to ‘Build the voices of the public into governance structures so that people are part of all decision-making processes…’. But this document has now been withdrawn, including from the Council website, without explanation.

Is the commitment to “Putting the public at the heart of everything we do” embodied in “School Improvement – the New Relationship with Schools”? The short answer is, it isn’t. In particular, there is no mention at all of the role of parents in the proposed new policy agenda. In fact the word ‘parent’ only appears twice in the Report – once to state that we “Need to understand all our children – we’re all corporate parents” and once to recommend “School Attendance Workshops for schools, headteachers and parents”. There is no notion at all that if we are to tackle inequalities parents need to be involved in the whole policy process at Local Authority level, just as they are at school level, including as parent governors. Also absent are the voices of teachers and their unions, and the voices of school students. On these issues too the Report needs urgently rethinking and amending.

The third problem with “School Improvement – the New Relationship with Schools” concerns the roles of Council officers and elected Councillors. The report is written and presented by officers. In this new plan there is no mention at all of the Councillors who are leading the work of the Council on education: Karen McCarthy as Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families and Kerry Jenkins as Chair of the Scrutiny Committee. In contrast, the central role in the proposed structure of “the New Relationship with Schools” is taken by Sue Harrison, Director of Children’s Services, who also wrote the report.

It is striking that, at the meeting of the Scrutiny Committee on 29 November at which this intended groundbreaking policy was launched, Cllr McCarthy, the Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families, was not present. Nor was Cllr Jenkins, the Chair of the Scrutiny Committee and 5 of the other 9 Councillors on the Committee, nor any of the 4 non-Councillor members. In contrast, the report speaks of “Positive engagement from schools with Director for Children’s Services, who is building a stable leadership team to last”. Is it a tacit acknowledgement that education policy in Birmingham’s Council is actually made and led by officers, not elected Members?

This whole issue raises the question of the role of Cllr Karen McCarthy as Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families, which includes education and schools. At the Education Scrutiny Committee meeting in June 2023, Appendix 2 lists “Cabinet Member Priorities and Pending Decisions which relate to the remit of the Committee”. They include:

• To continue efforts on ensuring our services are sustainable, compliant and designed to deliver best outcomes for children, young people, families and communities through working with our partners and wider city council team.
• To continue to ensure everything we do is inclusive for all our children and young people from all communities, backgrounds and needs.

But the focus is on SEND support: again, there is no mention of the wider issues of inequalities of social class, gender and ethnicity that shape pupil attainment throughout the whole school system. And the priorities are not embedded in a plan of action by the Cabinet Member responsible.

Three strategies for a new relationship for education in Birmingham between citizens and the Council

A new relationship between the City Council and Birmingham schools and Birmingham parents is urgently needed. The immediate step should be to set up a Sub-Committee of the Scrutiny Committee specifically on Equality Issues. The Council’s Constitution says that Scrutiny Committees can “Establish sub-committees to undertake aspects of that committee’s remit, or Task and Finish Committees to carry out specific time limited enquiries”. The Education, Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee should set up a Sub-Committee to address inequality issues. The Sub-Committee should expand its capacity, expertise and representativeness by including representatives of parents (as the present Committee already does), teachers’ unions (as the Committee used to), and representatives of school students (as the Council’s Youth City Board already does). It could also draw in Councillors who are not members of the Education, Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee who want to contribute. It could also involve activists from the affected communities and related campaigns. It may well need to establish a more long-term perspective and status.

The second step that should be taken is to rethink the role of the Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families. The Cabinet Member needs to be a leading public figure in the city, well-known to parents and teachers. This should be achieved through two strategies that feed into and complement each other. One strategy is to be developing and leading key policies for education aimed at raising standards in schools and offering a radical and progressive vision, including of course tackling issues of inequality. The second strategy for the Cabinet Member is to accompany this by being an active public figure in the city, including often holding public meetings in local areas.

There is a third and major reform of local government which we need in Birmingham: participatory democracy to transform the policy process through regular thematic city-wide open public Assemblies where citizens can, in person and on-line, engage with Council policy-makers, discuss concerns, raise proposals and help shape Council policy. (Link 4). They should include regular Assemblies on education issues, including of course concerns, evidence, policies and actions about inequalities. The Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families would be expected to take part, as would all the members of the Education, Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

Richard Hatcher

14 April 2024

Richard.Hatcher@bcu.ac.uk

LINKS

1. “Annual Education Performance Report”

https://birmingham.cmis.uk.com/Birmingham/Document.ashx?czJKcaeAi5tUFL1DTL2UE4zNRBcoShgo=UTJgtXwFPvq1fZB4rtWbzoAzIGGAgt29tazTEbfUeOiARnxhssKX8Q%3d%3d&rUzwRPf%2bZ3zd4E7Ikn8Lyw%3d%3d=pwRE6AGJFLDNlh225F5QMaQWCtPHwdhUfCZ%2fLUQzgA2uL5jNRG4jdQ%3d%3d&mCTIbCubSFfXsDGW9IXnlg%3d%3d=hFflUdN3100%3d&kCx1AnS9%2fpWZQ40DXFvdEw%3d%3d=hFflUdN3100%3d&uJovDxwdjMPoYv%2bAJvYtyA%3d%3d=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&FgPlIEJYlotS%2bYGoBi5olA%3d%3d=NHdURQburHA%3d&d9Qjj0ag1Pd993jsyOJqFvmyB7X0CSQK=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&WGewmoAfeNR9xqBux0r1Q8Za60lavYmz=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&WGewmoAfeNQ16B2MHuCpMRKZMwaG1PaO=ctNJFf55vVA%3d

2. “The new relationships with schools”

https://birmingham.cmis.uk.com/Birmingham/Document.ashx?czJKcaeAi5tUFL1DTL2UE4zNRBcoShgo=kdzd2ctdzI9mZSDcwBDdwSN5uE2kwRobwo0%2fpPUHYb8O1%2fVm%2b5S%2bUg%3d%3d&rUzwRPf%2bZ3zd4E7Ikn8Lyw%3d%3d=pwRE6AGJFLDNlh225F5QMaQWCtPHwdhUfCZ%2fLUQzgA2uL5jNRG4jdQ%3d%3d&mCTIbCubSFfXsDGW9IXnlg%3d%3d=hFflUdN3100%3d&kCx1AnS9%2fpWZQ40DXFvdEw%3d%3d=hFflUdN3100%3d&uJovDxwdjMPoYv%2bAJvYtyA%3d%3d=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&FgPlIEJYlotS%2bYGoBi5olA%3d%3d=NHdURQburHA%3d&d9Qjj0ag1Pd993jsyOJqFvmyB7X0CSQK=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&WGewmoAfeNR9xqBux0r1Q8Za60lavYmz=ctNJFf55vVA%3d&WGewmoAfeNQ16B2MHuCpMRKZMwaG1PaO=ctNJFf55vVA%3d

Here is the link to the webcast:

https://birmingham.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/867115

3. https://birminghamagainstthecuts.wordpress.com/2023/12/31/bccs-new-report-powered-by-people-putting-the-public-at-the-heart-of-everything-we-do/

4. “What we need in Birmingham is regular thematic city-wide open public Assemblies where citizens can influence Council policy-makers and shape Council policy”

Short version: https://birminghamagainstthecuts.wordpress.com/2024/03/24/what-we-need-in-birmingham-is-regular-thematic-city-wide-open-public-assemblies-where-citizens-can-influence-council-policy-makers-and-shape-council-policy/

Full version: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7c695hb4fz4rt6hx9us6h/24-3-24-BCC-Public-Assemblies.pdf?rlkey=3ts8lvwtixqah7sruvzn95797&dl=0

The Campaign to Save Birmingham’s Libraries

Friends of the Libraries of Birmingham has requested formal involvement in the decision-making process concerning the future of Birmingham’s library service. In the absence of a response, we have written again to the BCC leader and Cabinet to renew our response. This message is below. Underneath that is a message we have sent to all BCC councillors outlining our position.

We are sending you these messages since they outline our concerns about the planned consultation; our views on how it should be run; and our detailed critique of the library cuts package and its threat to the future of the library service.

Martin Sullivan

Friends of The Libraries of Birmingham

1. LETTER FROM FOLOB to BCC LEADER & CABINET (27 March 2024)

Dear Councillor Cotton, further to our previous messages, I think that it is timely that FOLOB was invited to be involved in the discussion on the future of the library service – both on the current proposed cuts and on the long-term future of the service, which is threatened by those proposals.

We are part of the library community, representing users and the various groups which support library users, either as designated Friends groups or as campaign groups which have been recently established. Given that BCC has already made contact with groups and individuals outside this community, we had expected a response.

One of these groups, the Save Birmingham Campaign, does not represent users (although some people had the impression that they were claiming this) and their objectives are contrary to ours. Similarly, a proposal from an entrepreneur, again from outside the library community, does not represent users’ views. Our views were well expressed by the 200+ users who attended an event at Acock’s Green Library last Saturday as part of their campaign to save that library.

We are particularly anxious to have sight of the consultation questionnaire before it goes out on 2-4 April. You will be aware that there were many complaints about the quality of the earlier survey, which was poorly designed and seemed set to place some of the smaller areas of the cuts at the bottom of the league table, implying mistakenly that they had little public support. That survey seems to have been set aside.

Any future questionnaire should include open questions so that respondents can express their views on the cuts proposals, avoiding Qs along the lines of: rank these services according to how important they are to you.

We would also like to know what other forms of consultation there will be.

BCC’s thinking on the future of The Library of Birmingham should be publicised before the consultation begins. If BCC has not yet homed in on a single proposal, it should tell us what options they are considering. The continuing silence on this key item in our library service is causing concern across the board – not least to the staff who work in LOB.

Library users, and library staff, are keen to ensure that the results of the consultation are an accurate reflection of the community’s views.  Likewise, BCC’s executive and political management will not want the findings to be invalidated by apparent faults or weaknesses in the consultation process which could have been avoided by involving a wider group in the pre-launch process.

****************

       2) LETTER FROM FOLOB TO BCC COUNCILLORS (27 March 2024)

Dear Councillor, below, for your information, is a copy of a message which we (FOLOB) have sent to the BCC Cabinet asking for involvement in the decision-making process for determining the future of Birmingham’s library service. We consider that the planning of this exercise should include user representation alongside the management focus.

We do not support BCC’s current proposals. Firstly, the drastic nature of the cuts, with at least 25 libraries being closed, unless volunteers come forward to run them. We believe that libraries should be run by trained library staff so that the full range of advice and support services can be provided. The model of a volunteer-run service with minimal BCC financial support was tried at Castle Vale. It failed.

Secondly, the model for the remaining 10 libraries (one per Birmingham MP) is highly unsatisfactory in that it will mean that library services would be squeezed into noisy, multi-occupied BCC ‘hubs’ with little space for the wide range of community uses which are currently available. The criteria by which libraries will be placed into one of these two categories is not yet known.

Thirdly, the way in which the library service would be broken up means that, as such time as BCC’s finances might improve, it would be impossible to restore the service even to the level to which it was reduced in the 2016-18 cuts.

I am sure that your constituents are/will be telling you this. Many wards have already held Ward Forums to discuss the whole cuts package. It would be useful if those which have not yet held meetings did so in the next month. We understand that the consultation exercise will be launched on 2-4 April.

Martin Sullivan
Friends of The Libraries of Birmingham

What we need in Birmingham is regular thematic city-wide open public Assemblies where citizens can influence Council policy-makers and shape Council policy

The current crisis of the Council is the result of the failure of the management of the Oracle system and of the failure to pay women Council workers equally with men. James Brackley of Sheffield University has exposed the underlying causes – see recent issues of Birmingham Against the Cuts (February 28 and March 10). But the crisis has a more fundamental cause: the lack of citizen democracy in local government in Birmingham in the neo-liberal policy context.

The fact is that if we had participatory democracy empowering the citizens of Birmingham then neither the Oracle shambles nor the equal pay disaster would have happened. The facts would have been public knowledge long ago and there would have been a democratic civic structure to coordinate mass public demand for alternative policies and urgent action to sort them out.

The cuts being imposed by the Government’s Commissioners have to be challenged through political campaigning and trade union action, but the underlying failure of local democracy also has to be challenged by empowering citizens through demanding participatory forms of local democracy through city-wide open Assemblies so that they can exert pressure to shape the policies of the Council and oppose the neo-liberal dominance over local government.

This article makes some specific proposals for participatory democracy through regular thematic city-wide Citizens’ Assemblies engaging directly and regularly with the Council leaders in Birmingham. It is a short version of the full-length article which you can access at Link 1 below.

Birmingham Council is now being reshaped, not by the people of Birmingham, not by the elected Councillors, but by Michael Gove and his Commissioners on behalf of the Tory Government

Their toolkit is provided by ‘The way forward: an independent review of the governance and organisational capabilities of Birmingham City Council’ carried out by the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS). (Link 2) The key discussion by the Council leadership of this 54 page report took place at the Council Cabinet meeting on 12 December 2023.

The CfGS report is damning about the culture of the Council, but the following clause makes crystal clear the perspective of the report: neo-liberal managerialism:

5.6 …. It is clear the solutions the Council adopts will need to be ones that are framed around changes to culture and behaviours: ‘This will not be about dramatically changing the structures and systems…. but changing the attitude, mindset, and mentality of people across the Council in coming together to tackle what are cross-council problems.

The report is about internal managerial competence, not structures and systems. Of course “the attitude, mindset, and mentality of people across the Council” need to radically change, but the citizens of Birmingham need much more than that – they need radical changes in policies and decision-making structures, and these will only happen if citizens are empowered to drive and shape it, not imported management experts policing a neoliberal agenda for Birmingham on behalf of Government.

Meanwhile, the Council has announced that it is going to cut back on opportunities for citizen involvement, not increase them. The Birmingham Mail on 9 March lists the following plans: (Link 3)

• Ward Forum meetings, reduce the number of ward forum meetings and staffing levels accordingly from 4 to 2.

• Cease area based community work and cease Neighbourhood Development Support Unit (NDSU) non-statutory functions, cease area-based community work and cease NDSU non-statutory functions. Restructure team to reflect reduction in service activity.

• Neighbourhood Development Support Unit, reduce the management capacity to reflect the reduction in NDSU activity.

• Neighbourhood Action Coordinators, cease the 22 ward pilot and do not roll out city wide.

Campaigning against the cuts

 The most powerful force to oppose the Council cuts in Birmingham and defend jobs and services is of course the trade unions. We will see over the coming months how effective they will be. Meanwhile, we are seeing develop now around the city forms of collective social action against the Council cuts, such as the campaigns to defend local public libraries. Hopefully these will spread to other areas of social provision currently under threat. These defensive campaigns are vital, but to challenge the imposed neo-liberal agenda and press for alternative progressive policies by the Council we also need a new form of collective city-wide organisation to engage directly with the Council leaders.

Democratic participation “to tame radical energy” or to release and grow citizen power?

It is true that forms of public participation have increasingly been used by local government as a strategy to integrate citizens into Council (and Combined Authority) agendas rather than to empower them, but that doesn’t mean citizens can’t use them to challenge dominant power.

Of course, on its own citizen empowerment in local government is not enough: it needs to link to other forms of public action and empowerment. But regular citizen assemblies as an integral part of local government have the potential to mobilise collective popular power for radical policies at local Council level and bring collective public pressure to bear on Government-driven agendas.

The importance of drawing in marginalised citizens and communities

The trade unions are by far the largest active working-class organisations in Birmingham, and with a majority of members – 57% – being women. But unions only involve a minority of workers. According to the latest Government figures trade union membership is 22.3% of workers and declining. In 2021, 50% of public sector workers were in a union, but only 13% of private sector employees. Employees over 50 are the most likely to be union members. There is a decline in young people joining unions, partly as a result of the growth of the gig economy. 54% of trade union members have a degree or equivalent. So the large majority of the citizens of Birmingham are not involved in union action, especially young people, those with lower educational qualifications, and workers in the private sector.

Open Citizen Assemblies offer another way of drawing not just employees but all citizens into political campaigning against the neo-liberal agenda and for working-class policies. However, although Open Assemblies can be powerful instruments of participatory democracy they can also reproduce social inequalities by favouring more experienced activists. Activists need to do all they can to attract and support community members to get involved in Assemblies, including calling for restoring Council support for participation.

We need a timetable of thematic issue-based city-wide public Assemblies for Birmingham

We already have the existing place-based Ward Forums. The Constitution of the Council says “Ward Forum meetings focus on the issues, priorities and decisions important to people in their local area”. Many of these issues apply much more widely, perhaps even to every Ward, but Councillors often try to restrict discussions only to a very limited range of issues which impact in their Ward and exclude wider political agendas. In any case Ward Forums have little or no power or even influence because they don’t engage directly with the leadership of the Council.

The majority of issues that concern residents of Birmingham’s neighbourhoods actually apply widely across the city. They cannot be resolved at the level of individual Ward Forums. What is needed are regular city-wide issue-based People’s Assemblies where Birmingham citizens, in person and on-line, can engage with Council policy-makers, discuss concerns, raise proposals and shape Council policy.

Here is how the Assemblies should be organised

There are 7 issue-based Cabinet roles: Housing & Homelessness (Jayne Francis), Environment (Majid Mahmood), Transport (Liz Clements), Children, Young People & Families (Karen McCarthy), Health & Social Care (Mariam Khan), Digital, Culture, Heritage & Tourism (Saima Suleman), and Social Justice, Community, Safety and Equalities (Nicky Brennan). Each of these issues or themes should be the basis of a separate open city-wide public Assembly, meeting regularly in person and online.

So for example the Assembly on Housing & Homelessness could meet every 2 or 3 months according to need. The same would apply to each of the other 6 thematic Assemblies. The relevant Cabinet Member would be expected to take part.

The Council also has 7 issue-based Scrutiny Committees which roughly correspond to Cabinet Members’ roles: Economy and Skills; Education, Children and Young People; Finance and Resources (internal finance policy); Health and Adult Social Care; Homes; Neighbourhoods; and Sustainability and Transport. Each Committee has 8 Councillor Members: 5 Labour, 2 Conservative, and 1 Liberal Democrat. Each Member should be expected to attend the public Assemblies corresponding to the theme of their Scrutiny Committee, along with the relevant Cabinet Member.

There are 2 Members of the Cabinet who have an overarching brief: the Leader of the Council John Cotton, and the Deputy Leader Sharon Thompson. They should share attendance at the Assemblies so that there is at least one of them at each meeting.

It is essential that citizens should have a leading role in the planning and organisation of the Assemblies, with the collaboration and support of Councillors and officers. This would be a process that will develop over time.

Richard Hatcher

24 March 2024

Richard.Hatcher@bcu.ac.uk

Link 1: this is the full version of the article: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7c695hb4fz4rt6hx9us6h/24-3-24-BCC-Public-Assemblies.pdf?rlkey=3ts8lvwtixqah7sruvzn95797&dl=0

Link2: https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/4311/the_way_forward_an_independent_review_of_the_governance_and_organisational_capabilities_of_birmingham_city_council

Link 3: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/11-key-birmingham-city-council-28786768

Labour Must Challenge Austerity and the Tories’ ‘Jigsaw of Control’

Blog 19 reports on our recent London meeting. Academics and Speakers from Local Government have their say.

EDUCATION POLITICS

MAR 15, 2024

 

Ken Jones, Emeritus Professor in Education at Goldsmith:

Sir Kevan Collins’s failure to get anywhere near the funding needed for his Covid recovery programme (see TES 8th March) is indicative of the Treasury’s attitude to education. It had no trust in schools and teachers to deliver what was necessary for their pupils and failed to see education as an investment in the future well being and productivity of children. This myopic approach to education from the Treasury threatens to undermine initiatives Labour might want to put in place and points to continued austerity across the service. Labour must challenge the Treasury’s approach.

‘One test of a Labour government’s democratic credentials will be whether it possesses the understanding and determination to undo the system elaborated since 2010. This would mean taking a hard look at Labour’s own past. The habit of regarding teachers as a policy problem and the years of progressive reform as an educational disaster were solidly established in the Blair years, even if it took a Michael Gove to turbo-charge them.

Unless the achievements of the counter-revolution are challenged and reversed, the promise which the labour movement has always seen in education – one of individual fulfilment and social emancipation – will continue to be denied.’ (Ken in Labour Hub January 2024.)

Cllr. Antoinette Bramble Deputy Mayor LB Hackney, Chair LGA Labour:

Labour Must Give More Powers to Local Authorities

Labour’s policy commission document talks of returning schools back to the ‘heart of their communities’. Antionette asserted that implementing SEA policy on bringing schools back under local authority management would take complex legislation and in the meantime legislation, which over lays the academy system and gives local authorities more powers over schools in their areas, should be implemented. Local Authorities could reduce the competition between academies and get them to work together for the community. Controlling admissions and powers to plan pupils places in their areas are essential to this. Currently, as rolls shrink in authorities like Hackney, the council is forced to close its own schools whilst academies can maintain and even expand their role. Labour legislation should establish an overarching framework which enabled LAs to intervene when schools were struggling and to investigate complaints from parents. Councils are also in a strong position to develop teacher professionalism in their areas if they were given resources to run local professional development programmes. Furthermore they could provide a forum for parents’ voices to be heard as well as other local stakeholders.

Cllr. Zena Brabazon Cabinet Member for Education LB Haringey:

Labour Must Tackle the SEND Crisis by investing in Early Years and Reforming the System

The fragmentation of the service made provision of a coherent and inclusive programme for SEND pupils impossible. The current structures were adversarial pitting parents against cash strapped local authorities who cannot give everyone what they want. Half of LAs are massively overspent on SEND. There needs to be a focus on transitions for SEND students particularly when they leave the education system at 18. At this point funding ceases. There should be a national framework which links education to adult social care.

Social problems have become medicalised by the EHCP system. Behavioural issues caused by cramped temporary accommodation and poor diet are classified as ADHT for example.

It is time to tackle child poverty and turn the clock back to Sure Start. Strong universal provision in the Early Years would reverse the demand for SEND funding later.

Anna Wolmuth No More Exclusions:

Labour Must Tackle and Give Local Authorities the Powers to Challenge, Rising Exclusions and Zero Tolerance Behaviour Regimes

Anna spoke about MATS using zero tolerance regimes to ‘flatten the grass’. Many of the ‘isolation’ sanctions were a euphemism for child abuse. Often these spaces were cubicles where pupils were expected to stare at a blank wall and complete tedious tasks. These approaches were not evident anywhere else in Europe and beyond, but had originated in American charter schools. Many behaviour regimes e.g. City of London Academies, automatically escalated sanctions so that pupils spent more and more time out of school on suspension resulting in permanent exclusion. This could start with just fidgeting in a line up. Black, disadvantaged and SEND pupils were all disproportionately affected. Schools should be able to adjust curriculum and pedagogy to meet the needs of pupils and focus on building positive relationships rather than militaristic behaviour drills. Local Authorities who often have to pick up the pieces should have powers to intervene.

Diane Reay Professor of Education Cambridge University, SEA President:

Labour must end the confusion of multiple routes into teaching which is damaging recruitment and hand back responsibility for teacher education to universities

The current mainly school-based programmes deny teachers the professional knowledge in philosophy, sociology and psychology they need to understand their role. Teaching must return to being an unequivocally graduate based profession with universities taking responsibility for PGCE and three to four year B.Ed programmes. Teachers should be actively engaged in their learning not simply handed down lesson plans form Oak Academy. The mechanised routines and conveyor belt nature of teacher training is causing a lack of confidence in new entrants. One fifth are leaving after a year and Diane’s research revealed high levels of distress. There was a lack of diversity in new entrants because the removal of bursaries was a barrier to many potential working-class entrants. Labour should restore them. Teacher education should not just be about subject knowledge and behaviour but should focus too on the child and the social context of education. Universities could run more and better professional development programmes. Excessive pay given to MATS leaders should be capped to help fund this. Money flows upwards from the chalk face to the bureaucrats in MATS and Labour should ensure this is reversed.

Cllr. Alexa Collins Buckinghamshire and Comprehensive Future Activist:

Labour should stop selection by ability at 11 and open up remaining grammar schools to all pupils

Alexa made a plea for the abolition of the 11 plus and pointed out that pupil outcomes overall in selective areas were lower than in comprehensive ones. Only 20 % of pupils passed the 11 plus and it was not the forensic measure of intelligence its designers claim. The private sector runs primary or prep schools which boast about their success rates in the 11 plus. State primaries are not allowed to coach for this test or publish success rates. (Such schools thrive in London too getting pupils into grammar schools on its fringes). Alexa also commented on how league tables were designed for a mainly comprehensive system. When they are applied to grammar schools and the accompanying secondary moderns they reinforce the idea that secondary moderns are not worth the candle. Labour should finish the comprehensive project so that opportunities in selective areas are not denied to late developing pupils and comprehensive schools in adjacent authorities are not undermined.

Suzanne Beckley NEU Ofsted Commission:

Labour should remove OFSTED from school inspections altogether and introduce reviews based on self-evaluation

Suzanne was concerned that the so called ‘big listen’ being conducted by the new HMCI would not result in fundamental change. She referred to the report of the NEU commission on OFSTED which had produced the Beyond OFSTED report. She argued the pressure put on staff in schools and the one-word judgements they currently use were no longer acceptable after the Ruth Perry tragedy. Instead school performance reviews should have self- evaluation at its heart. This process should be led by an external school improvement partner.  OFSTED would have a new role in evaluating partnerships and the work of trusts. Until these fundamental reforms have been implemented the NEU calls on school leaders and local authority staff to boycott working for OFSTED.

Conclusion

All attendees and speakers agree that the education service is now starved of resources and dominated by a regressive Conservative ideology. Radical reform is needed. The list above is not definitive and in some areas the SEA would argue we need to go further. Curriculum and assessment are huge topics which were not covered and we welcome Labour’s commitment to a curriculum review and we hope to have an input into that. If Labour were to implement what our speakers have demanded it would make a huge difference. It would signal the government is handing back autonomy to the sector , trusting teachers, and instituting a more humane socially equitable service.

These are the policies we need in Birmingham. There will be opportunities to raise them as the Education conference season approaches and in Birmingham Council meetings including the approaching annual report on School Performance. And for more from the SEA read:

‘A socialist manifesto for education and beyond’ by James Whiting and Ian Duckett

https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/forum/vol-66-issue-1/article-9882/

“How Birmingham city council’s ‘equal pay’ bankruptcy provided cover for ongoing Oracle IT disaster”

That’s the title of a new article by James Brackley, an accountancy expert at Sheffield University. He argues that the real cause of Birmingham Council’s huge Budget deficit and the cuts it is making is not the Equal Pay issue, it’s the Oracle IT fiasco. (Link 1)

Birmingham started using the Oracle system, which runs the Council’s accounts, in April 2022. (Link 2) Since then it has resulted in more than 70,000 transaction errors in collecting Council tax and business rates.

Brackley reports that the auditors stated on January 31 this year that: “No budget monitoring reports have been provided to Directorates during 2022-23 or 2023-24”. He quotes the chief financial officer who said on February 27 this year that “Reliance could not be placed on the most basic of financial information from the system, with Directorates unable to receive monitoring reports which reflected the true in-year financial position”.

Did the council jump before it was pushed?

Brackley argues that the Council leadership has chosen to place the blame as much as possible on the Equal Pay issue, with the aim of claiming that it is Trade Union leaders who bear the responsibility for forcing the Council to make the cuts. He suggests that if the Council had based the S114 notice on the Oracle issue it could have led the Government to underwrite the deficit and delay it till 2025-6, when “a new, nationwide funding settlement for local government would have been a real possibility”. This suggests, says Brackley, that “the council may have effectively jumped before it was pushed”.

Why did the Council’s Finance and Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee keep silent?

The cause of the failure of Oracle doesn’t lie with the system but with how it has been operationalised by the Council. If so, the blame lies with the senior finance officers of the Council, and the Council leaders to whom they were responsible.

But blame also lies with the Council’s Finance and Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee for its complete failure to hold the Council to account – which is supposed to be its role – over the development of the financial crisis in recent years. Where was its forensic examination, critique and proposals on the Oracle fiasco? Or the Equal Pay issue? It chose to keep silent until the news went public last summer. Why? Either they didn’t know about it, which is gross incompetence on their part, or they knew but chose to keep silent, which is a betrayal of the citizens of Birmingham.

Now the members of the Finance and Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee should be held to account. They are Labour Councillors Alex Aitken, Raqeeb Aziz, Jack Deakin (who is the Committee Chair), Rashad Mahmood, and Hendrina Quinnen, Tory Councillors Meirion Jenkins and Ken Wood, and LibDem Councillor Paul Tilsley.

RH 10 March 2024

Link 1: James Brackley’s article is in The Conversation on 5 March. The Conversation is “the UK’s daily newsletter where you can read news analysis from academic experts. It is delivered every morning, Monday to Saturday, bringing you all our latest content written by academic researchers working with our team of professional editors. As a registered charity, free from interference from advertisers, politics, big business or billionaire owners, we focus on the facts, without fear or favour.” https://theconversation.com/how-birmingham-city-councils-equal-pay-bankruptcy-provided-cover-for-ongoing-oracle-it-disaster-224416

Link 2: Just some information about Oracle. Oracle designs, manufactures, and sells both software and hardware products and offers services such as financing, training, consulting, and hosting.

Larry Ellison is co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle. He owns 42.4% of the company. As of March 2024, he was listed as the eighth-wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $130 billion.

On August 23, 2022, Oracle was hit with a class action lawsuit, which alleges that Oracle has been operating a “surveillance machine” which tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people.

In February 2023, the company announced it was going to invest $1.5 billion in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a part of the ongoing tech investment in the country.

“There is a major public accountability crisis emerging at Birmingham City Council.”

“The Council will vote through huge cuts at the Council meeting on 5 March before they have been formally audited.”

This quote and others below are from James Brackley, Audit Reform Lab, Sheffield University. His article “Local Authorities ‘At A Cliff Edge’: Birmingham City Council’s Accountability Crisis” was published on 7 February 2024 and summarised in his talk at Birmingham University on 22 February. In his article he says “The equal pay liability, which has led to the proposed fire sale of £500m worth of assets, has yet to be formally audited.”  “Getting these accountability questions resolved before voting on cuts [at the Council meeting on 5 March] is absolutely paramount.” (Link 1 for this and following quotes)

“No reliable position” from which to set the budget

Brackley writes that

“the same auditors have concluded that there is presently “no reliable position” from which to set the 24/25 budget, where £300m of cuts have been mooted. There has been as yet no independent value for money or public interest assessment of either the asset sales or budgetary cuts. And furthermore, there is no independent assurance that these cuts will not simply increase costs somewhere else in the budget. The Council is believed to be at a financial cliff edge. But rushed budgetary cuts and unplanned fire sales would be imprudent before a true financial position is known and the impact of cuts properly assessed.”

The failure of the Oracle IT system

The new Oracle IT system cost around £60m more than was budgeted and caused a backlog of 70,000 transaction errors by the end of 2023. “As of September 2023 this had been reduced to just over 9,000 transaction errors, but still accounted for a net value of over £73m” and with “the council incurring £500k per month on manual work-arounds”. The Council Director of Finance “confirmed that work to correct these errors was ongoing but would not be ready in time for the current budgetary cycle.”  The external auditors consequently concluded that:

“The Council is not yet in a position to report full year outturn for FY 2022/23 and is several months from having an auditable set of accounts for FY 2022/23. The Council has been operating during FY 22/23 and 23/24 without an effective budgetary control mechanism in place […] There is no reliable forecast outturn for FY 23/24, or a reliable baseline cost position against which to set the 24/25 budget.” 

The auditors also highlight major control deficiencies and possible fraud risks over the cash and accounts payable system in the Council; and describe problems related to a “high staff turnover”, “high levels of fatigue” and a “deep dissatisfaction with the senior management culture”.

“In addition to the Council having no baseline budget position for either 23/24 or 24/25, the auditors also noted delays in the assessment of the equal pay liability, such that the actual extent will not now be known until FY 24/25. Importantly, this will be after the City has been forced to push through £500m of asset sales and the largest in-year budget cut any authority has ever made.”

In addition to the above, the latest papers show that there has been no independent value for money or impact assessment on the proposed cuts and assets sales. 

“Financial mismanagement is deep rooted within Birmingham City Council”

This devastating admission actually comes from within the Council itself – from Fiona Greenway, the Director of Finance, in the Birmingham City Council Report to Cabinet 27 February 2024, Appendix 1: Draft Report under Section 25 of the Local Government Act 2003:

2.4 Financial mismanagement is deep rooted within Birmingham City Council, with overreliance on the use of reserves, growing liabilities, imprudent estimates in relation to financial planning, a historical inability to deliver savings, and a number of open prior year accounts back to 2020. Alongside this, the flawed implementation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system (Oracle) has eroded the fundamentals of prudent financial management, resulting in a lack of financial clarity in decision making.

2.7. Delivering this budget will be extremely challenging. Alongside the very difficult choices that impact residents, there will need to be a significant culture change within the Council. Over the past few years, there has been poor organisational leadership and culture, including inadequate financial management and controls with a lack of focus on the short and medium term financial sustainability of the Council. There has also been a demonstrated lack of ability to deliver transformation programmes across the Council. This will require new ways of working and, where possible, additional skills and capacity across the Council.

(The next post on BATC will follow this up by looking at how the culture of Birmingham’s Labour Council is so completely failing the people of Birmingham.)

“City-wide consultation has been minimal”

“The city-wide consultation has been minimal – consisting so far of a survey asking residents to rank Council services by order of priority, with no detail about the proposed cuts or asset sales. The finance team have also repeatedly missed crucial deadlines. It now looks nigh on impossible that a meaningful statutory consultation on the 24/25 budget will take place. We would therefore recommend that the DLUHC and the Commissioners support the Council in stepping back from what was described by the Council’s Audit Committee as a financial “cliff edge”.”

The Council will vote on the Budget proposals on 5th March. “Getting these accountability questions resolved before voting on cuts is absolutely paramount.”

Summary of recommendations to the Council

James Brackley and his colleague Adam Leaver, both at the University of Sheffield, have made the following recommendations to the Council:

“Financial crisis at Birmingham City Council: Part 2 – understanding the section 114” (Link 3)

(1) Provide a full assessment of whether cuts outlined in the 2024/25 budget consultation risk putting the council in a position in which they are breaching their statutory duties to vulnerable people.

(2) To assess the medium and long term costs created by these cuts to the Council, the NHS, and the wider local economy.

(3) In relation to the sale of assets the Council should provide a full value for money and public interest case, and not engage in asset sales simply to underwrite transfers between reserves.

And from Part 1 to this blog:

(4) Request an assurance statement on the equal pay liability, along with full disclosure of how the amount has been calculated and what audit work has been performed. (Link 2)

Council unions begin the fightback

UNISON, Unite and GMB have called a demonstration and rally for Saturday 2 March at 12 noon, and there will be a protest outside the next City Council budget meeting on Tuesday 5 March from 5pm onwards. Both of these are outside the Council House in Victoria Square. (Link 4)

Richard Hatcher Birmingham Against the Cuts 28 February 2024

Richard.Hatcher@bcu.ac.uk

Links

Link 1. https://auditreformlab.group.shef.ac.uk/accountability-crisis-at-bcc/

Link 2. https://auditreformlab.group.shef.ac.uk/downloads/financial_crisis_of_bcc_part_1.pdf

Link 3: https://auditreformlab.group.shef.ac.uk/downloads/financial_crisis_of_bcc_part_2.pdf

Link 4: Birmingham City Council to implement devastating cuts. By Maureen Wade, (Chair, Birmingham UNISON retired members section, personal capacity) BATC 26 February.

See these recent articles on Birmingham Against The Cuts:

• The Council’s Scrutiny Committees have failed to hold the Council leadership to account. We need citizen participation in Scrutiny, and Citizen Assemblies. BATC January 25
• Support the campaign to stop the cuts wrecking Birmingham’s youth services, BATC February 11.
• Birmingham City Council to implement devastating cuts. By Maureen Wade, (Chair, Birmingham UNISON retired members section, personal capacity) BATC February 26.

Birmingham City Council to implement devastating cuts

By Maureen Wade, (Chair, Birmingham UNISON retired members section, personal capacity)

This article was published on 21 February in Left Horizons, a website ‘run and managed by socialists who are active members of the Labour Party and Trade Unions’. 
https://www.left-horizons.com/2024/02/21/birmingham-city-council-to-implement-devastation-cuts/

Birmingham City Council has announced the largest local authority budget cuts in history. Jobs and services will be devastated. Funding for services will be cut by nearly £300 million over two years, with the worst sectors hit being Children, Young People & Families (£51.5 million) and Adult Social Care (£23.7 million).

There will be around 600 redundancies, weekly bin services scrapped, and local Council Tax bills will rise by 21 per cent – all adding to the cost of living crisis. The City Council has also asked the government for permission to ‘capitalise’, or to borrow £1.25 bn from the government, to be paid back by the sale of Council assets, like Birmingham’s iconic Central Public Library.

The Tories have been quick to blame Labour, the local trade unions, and just about everyone else, except themselves. But these are the results of years of national government underfunding.

Birmingham has lost a billion pounds in funding since 2010

The underlying problem for Birmingham, and for many local authorities of all political hues, has been one and a half decades of Tory cutbacks. Since 2010, Birmingham City Council has lost a total of £1bn in funding. What we see now are the consequences of failed policies carried out by the right wing Labour Council leadership over the years, as they have meekly accepted the cuts handed down from above.

This crisis came to a head however because of successive right wing Labour leaderships trying to fight against the council trade unions in their ‘Single Status’ equal pay dispute, rather than work with them to resolve it. It has wasted huge amounts of money hiring barristers to challenge the unions in the courts.

The trade unions had repeatedly warned the City Council they were stoking up trouble for the future by allowing discriminatory pay practices to continue, and despite earlier significant warnings from previous successful equal pay claims. The Council should have been setting aside between £100-250 mn each year from 2020, because everyone knew the law was on the side of the unions and a ‘big bill’ for an equal pay settlement was coming down the road.

National Labour leadership made only cosmetic changes

Instead, the Council leadership went into ostrich-mode, ignored the problem, and even took on the huge costs of the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Back in 2022, when asked about the looming financial threat, the then Council Leader, Ian Ward, told us all that a Single Status settlement would only cost about £75mn. Meanwhile, the Council’s other ‘little’ problem at the time, the Oracle IT system, had gone over budget by ‘only’ £18mn.

Cllr Ward was ousted, in what only can be described as a coup, orchestrated by the national Labour leadership (see Left Horizons article here), and we discovered that in fact the Single Status settlement would be more like £760mn, while Oracle was in fact £80mn over budget.

But even this does not reflect the real reason for Birmingham’s crisis. Birmingham is in good company. As the Tories’ have continuously chiselled away at local authority budgets, six other local authorities have gone bankrupt since 2021, with warnings that as many as 26 more could face the same fate.

When the Labour leadership took ‘executive action’ against Cllr Ward in 2023, all they did was to carry out cosmetic changes, replacing one right wing Labour Council leadership with another. And that was it. There was no action plan, no policies put forward, no solutions offered.

Trade union campaign beginning next month

The Labour leadership should be organising all Labour councils – especially after the recent electoral gains – into a united campaign of protests, demonstrations and, if necessary, civic disobedience, against the Tory attacks on local government, and to fight to restore the billions that have been stolen from local communities. Meekly accepting them and wringing hands will do nothing to help desperate working class families facing a cost of living crisis and the collapse of services.

Some council unions have begun a fightback – UNISON, Unite and GMB have called a demonstration and rally for Saturday 2 March at 12 noon, and there will be a protest outside the next City Council budget meeting on Tuesday 5 March from 5pm onwards. Both of these are outside the Council House in Victoria Square.

What is Birmingham Council’s biggest neighbourhood development plan – and who control it?

By far it’s the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Strategy – EBIGS. East Birmingham has over 309,000 residents. The East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Programme covers parts of 5 parliamentary constituencies: Erdington, Hall Green, Hodge Hill, Ladywood and Yardley. It includes 20 Wards, centred on Alum Rock, Small Heath, Ward End, Bromford and Hodge Hill, Heartlands, Shard End, Glebe Farm and Tile Cross. (Link 1) These include some of the poorest areas of Birmingham.

Birmingham Council has just announced huge cuts across its services and programmes. These will impact East Birmingham like everywhere else, but East Birmingham is also different because at the same time it is receiving new funding from two sources: the East Birmingham/North Solihull Levelling Up Zone and the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

This article has two aims. The first is to offer a summary of the many activities that the East Birmingham programme is engaged in, tackling issues of business and community development, employment, training and climate change . These are on a much larger and more ambitious scale than in any other area of Birmingham, yet remain unknown to many Birmingham citizens. There are actions here which may be relevant to other areas (such as the major redevelopment of the Ladywood Estate).

 The second aim concerns the question of citizen participation in this ambitious programme. There is ample evidence of community engagement at street level. But what about at the policy-making level, and in particular at Board level, where sit the representatives of the major players in the EBIGS? What voices do citizens have there?

Project development and delivery  

According to the Programme Update to the Board in October 2023 (Link 2):

The first phase of the Programme commenced in August 2021 with the aim of being both to secure immediate “quick wins”, and to begin the process of unlocking the longer-term and more extensive benefits that can be progressed by building the Council’s capacity alongside that of the community and other stakeholders to collaborate in the delivery of inclusive growth. During the past two years significant progress has been made and it is now anticipated that the Programme will enter a new and larger phase of delivery during 2024, enabled by the establishment of the East Birmingham Impact Coalition and the potential designation [now agreed] of East Birmingham and North Solihull as a Levelling Up Zone.

The core programme register currently includes five live projects. (Link 2: Project Register)

• Pocket Parks … this project will deliver improvements to 1-3 local green spaces as pocket parks and/or local growing space via community-led activity.

• Youth Employability – A locally designed scheme of employment support, focussed on innovation in earlier employer support in schools for successful careers for East Birmingham young people

• Green Infrastructure Action Plan. This work will progress the approach set out in the East Birmingham Green Infrastructure Vision document

• Fast Followers. This project will fund a Net Zero Innovation and Delivery Officer [and] other specialist support for community and technical support, and careers and jobs promotion.

• DIATOMIC Inclusive Innovation Network – the aim of this £160k work package is to establish an Inclusive Innovation Network with a cohort of businesses run by members of excluded communities (both ethnic minorities and women) in East Birmingham.

Further project activity being mobilised includes:

• Bordesley Green First and Last Mile improvements (see Link 2: Appendix 2)

• Ward End Green Skills Hub Phase 2: building on the local engagement and capacity building set out below, this project will seek to bring Ward End Park House into new use as a key local asset.

• Improvements to 1-3 local green spaces as pocket parks and/or local growing space via community-led activity.

• ‘Partnerships for People and Place’ funded – A locally designed scheme of employment support, focussed on innovation in earlier employer support in schools for successful careers for East Birmingham young people

• Green Infrastructure Action Plan

• Fast Followers. This project will fund a Net Zero Innovation and Delivery Officer who will work with the Council’s East Birmingham Development Team and with our partners: University of Birmingham, Tyseley Energy Park and Places in Common to support businesses in the Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District, in their journey to net zero

• Meadway Phase 3: The scope of this phase of work will be to develop an overall Outline Business Case for the redevelopment of the site.

Key milestones this period have included:

• Closedown of EB018: Asset Led Delivery Vehicle Phase 2 which has delivered services including economic modelling in support of the Levelling Up Zone proposal and engagement with Government.

• Completion and closedown of Tyseley Community commons project (an element of EB010: Cole Valley Country Parks). The project has delivered significant improvements to ecology, hydrology and amenity at the Cole Valley at Tyseley. Further activity will be progressed to explore the potential for a community management and stewardship approach.

• Completion of the building phase of the Dolphin Centre phase 2 project (exclusive of snagging) with the Norton Hall team set to return to the building in phases during July, August and September.

Community wealth building, engagement and neighbourhood working 

The Programme team are engaged on an ongoing basis with stakeholders and communities across the East Birmingham area. Specific areas of focus include:

• Ward End

Activity continues in Ward End in collaboration with the community-led Ward End Partnership. In addition to tackling local issues of concern, such as derelict building, access to local allotments, and the creation of a pocket park, work is now underway to collaboratively explore options for the renovation of Ward End Park House as a community asset which will support local needs such as skills, employment and the local economy.

• Bromford Regeneration

The Programme Team continues to work with local stakeholders to support community aspirations and to facilitate joined-up engagement around the various activities currently underway in the area, including Environment Agency flood mitigation measures, City Council housing renewal, housing retrofit and improvement projects.

The Impact Coalition has been further progressed through the co-ordination and alignment of partnership development and engagement activity including:

• National Trust: current activity includes co-funding of the Green Infrastructure Delivery Plan and Pocket Parks projects and further development of a draft MoU setting out an approach to future collaboration.

• University Hospitals Birmingham: wide-ranging discussions are in progress regarding UHB as an Anchor organisation within East Birmingham, with significant potential for collaboration around careers and recruitment as an initial priority.

• Tyseley Strategic Alliance: current activity includes the DIATOMIC and Fast Followers projects (detailed below) and mobilisation of a new phase of feasibility activity which seeks to identify and refine opportunities to progress the development of Tyseley as the city’s green energy and innovation quarter.

• Severn Trent Water: STW continued their commitment to employment support for East Birmingham, hosting a call-to-action event on 27^th September which showcased a recent report The Good Jobs Project by ReGenerate. The report calls for corporations to target their workforce recruitment at areas of deprivation to gain talent and a representative workforce.

• East Birmingham Employment and Skills Collaboration: The group has met twice since August [2023], and has considered the evidence of the barriers to employment gathered by JCP and the DEMOS report, and also the persistence of low skills levels (data from WMCA), and established 3 working groups to tackle what it sees as some underlying conditions which are preventing local people from responding to service offers and support:

  • English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL): this is a task and finish group to feed in the region-wide consultation and review of ESOL currently being undertaken by WMCA.
  • Informal working: this is a longer-term working group to consider the promotion of employment rights and real living wage in the area.
  • Gangs and drugs: this is led by a small number of partners who feel they have remit to support this issue that blocks progression, it is being explored whether it is feasible to create a working group, or better to network with other bodies set up to tackle this issue. The Programme Team are also seeking additional funding for projects supporting increasing household income … and developing the plan for the use of SPF People and Skills funding when this becomes available in April 2024; the plan centres around the creation of Good Jobs Hub services in the area.

• Schools engagement: The schools engagement work with primary and secondary schools has concluded in the first phase, resulting in a set of key themes expressing the levelling up priorities of local schools. This is the subject of a full agenda item and will include an update on the Partnerships for People and Place pilot that the Programme team delivers in partnership, and which is entering a second phase.

New sources of funding: the East Birmingham/North Solihull Levelling Up Zone and the UK Shared Prosperity Fund

In 2023 two further sources of funding for East Birmingham were announced. In March, as part of the Deeper Devolution Deal, the WMCA proposed 6 Levelling Up Zones, which enable the region to retain Business Rates growth over the next 25 years, worth around £500 million. One of the LUZs is East Birmingham and North Solihull. BCC says

 “…the Council has worked with Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council and West Midlands Combined Authority to develop and progress proposals for a joint approach for East Birmingham and North Solihull which will drive investment and co-ordinated intervention to improve residents’ quality of life and their economic opportunities. The concept is to combine investment into infrastructure and development with comprehensive public service improvement and to maximise the impacts of all of this work through bespoke governance and delivery arrangements.

A key enabler for this approach is the proposal to establish “Growth Zones” for East Birmingham and North Solihull which would allow the designation of local (employment-oriented) sites where 100% of business rates could be retained within a 25-year window.“

The UK Shared Prosperity Fund

“Birmingham City Council has secured £27 million from the government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) to help level up Birmingham citizens’ pride in the places they live, empower local leaders and communities, and create a stronger social fabric and better life chances.

East Birmingham community groups and businesses will be able to apply for grants for projects related to the three pillars below in the coming weeks.

Communities and place pillar aims

• Strengthen our social fabric and foster a sense of local pride and belonging by investing in activities that enhance physical, cultural and social ties through capacity building and social infrastructure support.
• Build resilient, healthy and safe neighbourhoods through investment in quality places that people want to live, work, play and learn in.

Supporting local business pillar aims

• Create jobs and boost community cohesion through investments that build on existing industries and institutions.
• Promote networking and collaboration through interventions that bring together businesses and partners within and across sectors to share knowledge, expertise, and resources.
• Increase private sector investment in activities that increase economic growth.

People and skills pillar aims from April 2024

• Upskill the working population to support work progression by targeting adults with no or low level qualifications and low maths skills.
• Reduce levels of economic inactivity through investment in intensive life and employment support tailored to local need.
• Support people furthest from the labour market to overcome barriers to work by providing cohesive, locally tailored support including access to basic skills.
• Fund gaps in local skills provision through national employment and skills programmes to support people to progress in work.

One of our planned projects is to fund an employment hub for East Birmingham. Details will be available soon.”

 How the EBIGS is run

The EBIGS is governed by the Programme Board. It meets quarterly. The Board brings together many powerful organisations and individuals involved in East Birmingham. It is chaired by Liam Byrne, MP for Hodge Hill. It includes 5 Councillors: Majid Mahmood and Diane Donaldson (Bromford & Hodge Hill), Saddak Miah (Garretts Green), Mariam Khan (Alum Rock), and John Cotton as Leader of the Council.

The Board also includes 6 senior officers of BCC: Deborah Cadman, Chief Executive; Richard Brooks, Director – Strategy, Equality & Partnerships; Paul Kitson, Strategic Director – Place, Prosperity & Inclusive Growth; Graeme Betts, Director Adult Social Care; Helen Harrison, Assistant Director Public Health; and Ian MacLeod, Director Inclusive Growth. The WMCA is represented by Ed Cox, Executive Director for Strategy, Economy & Net Zero (which pretty well covers everything).

There are also representatives on the EBIGS Board of some key public and private sector organisations: the Children’s Trust, the Integrated Care Board, TfWM, the Federation of Small Businesses, Tyseley Energy Park, the Principal of South & City College , HS2 (2 representatives), University Hospitals Birmingham, the Department of Work and Pensions Service Leader, the CEO of the Washwood Heath Multi-Academy Trust, and a representative of Birmingham TUC.

So this is a board which represents the most powerful people in local government, public services and business in East Birmingham. But what about local citizens and local community organisations? When the EBIGS was launched in 2021 it published a document on “The role of the community”:

The publication of this draft document for consultation has been the first step of a continuous process of engagement through which residents of East Birmingham will be empowered not only to shape and influence the strategy and decide how it is to be delivered, but also to play a leading role in that delivery. (p7) (Link 3)

The powerful make the decisions on the Board, community members are excluded

But in reality the “residents of East Birmingham” are not “empowered …to shape and influence the strategy and decide how it is to be delivered” because they are not included in the Board. The Board has the various Councillors and the MP but it does not have even a single member of the local community. Furthermore, the Board meetings are not open to observers. They do not even publish attendance. Board papers are published after each meeting and the BCC website says “You can request a copy of board papers by contacting the East Birmingham Programme Team”. All the papers for the 4 meetings in 2023 have been posted on Liam Byrne’s website.

In September 2023 Birmingham Council published a new 19 page policy document – ‘Powered by People: Putting the public at the heart of everything we do’ – with an Introduction by Councillor Sharon Thompson, the Deputy Leader. (Link 4) It lists 5 ‘Public Participation Principles’ including the following: “Build the voices of the public into governance structures so that people are part of all decision-making processes, including service commissioning, design and delivery, in a demonstrable way.” This repeats what the EBIGS documents said in 2021. Will ‘Powered by People’ be ignored in the same way?

Two ways to really “Build the voices of the public into governance structures” in East Birmingham

• Citizens’ representatives on the EBIGS Board

Open up the EBIGS Board to citizens’ representatives with the right to speak and with at least indicative votes.

• Hold open Citizens Assemblies

Hold regular Citizens Assemblies, perhaps every month or every two months, open to all, where Councillors attend to answer questions and take proposals for policies and actions. A small steering group could receive proposals and organise agendas.

Richard Hatcher 20 February 2024

Richard.Hatcher@bcu.ac.uk

Links

1. https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20008/planning_and_development/2814/east_birmingham_inclusive_growth_programme
2. East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Programme: Programme Update to Board October 2023. https://www.liambyrnemp.co.uk/_files/ugd/a93c7f_414439a3e37e4dc093c51263847b4888.pdf
3. East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Strategy 2021. https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/19118/east_birmingham_inclusive_growth_strategy_2021
4. ‘Powered by People: Putting the public at the heart of everything we do‘  https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/28294/corporate_famework_for_public_participation_in_birmingham