Deckchairs on the Titanic?

In August 2023, Birmingham Council housing department signed a four-year contract with a Liverpool charity to buy furniture and soft furnishings worth £2,025,000.

That contract was later expanded. A lot.

I had to check the number five times but it’s still the same. The contract is now worth £32,400,000.

The recipient is the Furniture Resource Centre Ltd. This charity says, to avoid furniture poverty, every household must have ‘bed, bedding and mattress, table and chairs, sofa and/or easy chairs, wardrobe/drawers, carpets in living rooms and bedrooms, curtains or blinds, washing machine, refrigerator and freezer, cooker/oven, TV.’

I did ask the council and the Furniture Resource Centre several times what the city’s taxpayers got for this money and why it was so much more than originally planned but got no answer.

The furniture bill may be connected with the £45,111,772 Birmingham – one of the biggest landlords in Europe – is paying three companies providing temporary accommodation.

The charity End Furniture Poverty says the average payment by local councils is £220 per household. On that basis, about 145,000 Birmingham households – one third of the total for the city – would get something bought for them by the council.

In their last report, the Government commissioners called in to supervise the council say the local authority doesn’t have a grip on its spending on charities, companies and services operated in its name.

The report says, ‘The council is not equipped to properly operate these entities, understand their liabilities and extract value from them.’

It also says Birmingham’s failure to establish the true position has been slow because of ‘staff absences, lack of appropriate skills and a failure to prioritise this activity despite awareness of the significant risks involved’.

Brimful of Asha's

On March 19, Birmingham taxpayers forked out £1,048.36 to Asha’s, ‘Birmingham’s premier Indian restaurant’ (six-course menu £89.75).

This is among the many transactions carried out using city council credit cards. In March, council officers spent at least £32,500 on petrol alone – not bad for a city determined to drive the motorist off the roads.

Most petrol was bought in and around Birmingham but some payments were much farther afield, including two at the Shell service station in Penhale near Newquay in Cornwall.

There are payments to hotels – popular places include the Holiday Inn, Cambridge, the Marriott in Durham and somewhere called The Ship – Uber taxis and £125.20 to Symphony Hall on the day of the Trevor Francis Memorial Concert.

All these transactions are published online without any glossary to explain them, which makes drawing any conclusions somewhat fraught.

So let’s look at what happened in 2024. In that year, 42,560 credit card transactions were paid for by the city council. They totalled £5,825,201. Of these, at least 6,329 payments went to Amazon.

Of course, every big organisation needs to repay expenses incurred by employees in the course of their work and dishing out credit cards is a simple way of ensuring staff don’t end up out of pocket.

In March the Government launched a crackdown on the use of taxpayer-funded credit cards by civil servants. It seems the news hasn’t filtered through to Birmingham yet, though, as Cabinet Office credit card spending has risen since the alleged crackdown, perhaps that’s no bad thing.

https://order-order.com/2025/04/24/cabinet-office-taxpayer-credit-card-spending-increased-after-freeze/

Broke Birmingham's £1 million commissioners

Since last September, the commissioners running Birmingham Council have stopped publishing their minutes online. Apparently there has been ‘a slight delay’.

This is a shame because Birmingham taxpayers might then discover more about what the commissioners are doing. This is important given the bankruptcy of the council, the rise in local taxes and the fact that the commissioners themselves are adding £1 million to the city’s expenditure.

The direct cost of the commissioners over the 12 months to March this year was a little over one million pounds (£1,046,000 give or take).

Their day-rate is £1,100 though top banana Max Caller’s on £1,200. This money isn’t just for turning up, it includes hotels, subsistence and travel expenses (all necessary given that, as far as I can tell, none of them lives in Birmingham).

Then Cabinet Minister Michael Gove called Mr Caller, aged 74, out of retirement to become chief commissioner. Mr Caller is apparently ‘the man who fixes broken councils’. He’s been Chief Executive of Hackney and Barnet councils and Chair of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England.

The other commissioners are John Coughlan, ex-Chief Executive of Hampshire County Council, now director of a company called Skills for Care;

Chris Tambini, ex-Director of Corporate Resources at Leicestershire County Council;

Pam Parkes, ‘Executive Director for People and Transformation’ (what was once head of personnel) at Essex County Council;

Jackie Belton ex-Chief Executive of Bexley Council;

John Biggs the commissioners’ ‘Political Advisor’, a career London Labour politician; and

Myron Hrycyk, the only commissioner with private-sector experience, having worked at that paragon of entrepreneurialism, Severn Trent Water, apparently turning it into ‘a Digital 1st business’. Mr Scrabble at least has local connections having obtained an MBA from Birmingham University and been a member of the Midlands CBI Council.

The commissioners, appointed in October 2023 on five-year contracts, sent a report to the Government in January complaining the council was ‘budget-setting without enough urgency’, suffered from ‘highly defensive and siloed management’, key service areas remained unacceptable and, despite a few changes, the council failed to remedy the ‘deeper, cultural dysfunction that led to the Council’s failure’.

Luckily, the report also said: ‘Commissioners are working in partnership with the Council to promote a resolution to this dispute which is essential for service transformation.’

That went well then…

Bankrupt Birmingham’s bonkers budget bonanza

Bankrupt Birmingham’s bonkers budget bingeing bonanza knows no bounds, as far as I can see.

For a council which has put up the local tax by a third in five years and is supposedly obliged to spend money on essential services only, because it’s broke, it seems incapable of drawing in its horns.
I have spent a bit of time looking at the online spending statistics it is obliged to make public. I’ve tried several times to get explanations for some of the costs involved, both from the council and from the recipients of its largesse. Without any success.
So here is a random list of items the council is spending our money on:
· £285,000 to the Professional Squash Association who are holding the British Open at the Birmingham Rep this month;
· £1 million on mobile phones;
· £622,788 on air quality sensors;
· £14,333 building a tortoise exhibit;
· £10 million on Neighbourhood Network Schemes for the elderly;
· £252,000 on breastfeeding advice;
· £2 million on family weight-loss programmes;
· £7.5 million for ‘Bring It On Brum!’, a scheme promising to ‘deliver Doorstep Sport to bridge the inequality gap’ and ‘address the holiday experience gap for children and young people from low-income households’;
· £127 million over ten years with the Brighton-based charity Change Grow Live which helps drug addicts and alcoholics via four “free and confidential hubs”;
· This is separate from the Aquarius Action Project’s £3.9 million. Its mission “is to support people to overcome the harms caused by alcohol, drugs and gambling by providing responsive and effective services”;
· £5 million protecting women from domestic violence;
· £100,000 to Grassroots Suicide Prevention;
· £33,000 alleviating headaches among the Pakistani community;
· £2.6 million trying to stop Brummies from smoking.

You just can't get the staff these days

In the first two months of this year, Birmingham City Council paid no less than £13.8 million to Hays Specialist Recruitment.

This money came from the council’s human resources and financial divisions while elsewhere the city paid out £2 million for agency teachers during the spring term as well as £2 million in January and February with Extra Personnel Ltd on ‘waste operations’.

Recruitment certainly doesn’t come cheap. Birmingham’s last finance chief, Fiona Greenway, lasted less than two years before her job went to Carol Culley, an old chum of Joanne Roney, the council's new managing director.

Ms Greenway worked from May 2023 to March this year. The recruitment firm which brought her to Birmingham, Gatenby Sanderson Ltd, was paid £470,272. I assume the lion’s share of this went to Ms Greenway but who knows? When asked, the recruitment firm wouldn’t say.

Other ‘human resources’ costs include £101,067 for a ‘content creator’; £336,544 to Birmingham Children’s Trust for ‘staff advertising expenses’ on top of the monthly £15,159 salaries for ‘Counter Extremism Programme & Prevent’; £280,024 on an ‘interim director street scene’; and £261,140 to take on Mr Paul Tullett as ‘equal pay programme lead’.

Obviously I did try asking Hays and the council about their arrangements but, again, they didn’t bother to get back to me. Alas, when I looked to see what jobs Hays might have on offer at the moment, its Birmingham Council website says: ‘There are currently no jobs available.’

https://webmicrosites.hays.co.uk/web/birmingham-city-council

The 'communities' charge - no whites

As part of its ‘deep engagement’ strategy to hold focus groups to ‘increase awareness on community experiences of health inequalities’, Birmingham City Council is spending £1.2 million.

Last month, it agreed contracts worth £589,226.5 with some of the 13 ‘communities’.

Its Pakistani Deep Engagement Partner, ‘The Delicate Mind’, gets £55,578 and says it will ‘critically examine structural inequality and how this exacerbates poor mental health we also explore the intersection between faith, identity and masculinity and how this effects mental health and wellbeing’.

Legacy West Midlands, which gets £89,851.50, ‘delivers sports, arts, heritage and youth programmes for the benefit of the whole community, including marginalised and underrepresented groups’.

Christians get £85,455; the Caribbean community £89,999; Bangladeshis £89,851.50 while Soft Machines Ltd, the scheme’s ‘academic support partner’, is being paid £57,390 and consultants Deepcx Insights Ltd receive £39,954.

The Somali Deep Engagement Partner, Allies Network, a community interest company, is being paid £89,998.99. On the council’s website, it talks about the opening hours at its Balsall Heath office and warns: ‘Please only attend if you are a black, African or Arab woman, family or elderly person.’

This is all chicken feed, of course, compared with the £1.5 million the council spends trying to persuade its citizens to give up smoking, the £4 million that goes on helping gamblers and alcoholics not to mention the £5,250,000 devoted to human resources training.

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/directory_record/424484/allies_network_cic

Next: You just can’t get the staff (especially teachers and dustmen).

Somebody's cleaning up in Birmingham

Bankrupt Birmingham council is paying out legal fees of more than £1 million a month to a variety of solicitors and barristers.

In February alone, the council paid at least £1.5 million, including £685,411 to Bevan Brittan LLP.

In the first three months of the year, legal fees came to £3,648,861. Oddly, the figures for March do not say who the recipients might have been.

In April, the city entered into contracts with three law firms providing advice on the provision of affordable housing. Bevan Brittan and Trowers & Hamlins are getting £166,666.70 each while Browne Jacobson will receive £551,274.20.

Three property agencies, Savills, Lambert Smith Hampton and Avison Young (UK) Limited are to be paid £83,333.33 as part of the same initiative which aims to replace bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless families with houses.

Meanwhile, as the bin strike drags on, the poor local taxpayers will at least have new wheelie bins to chuck their rubbish in.

Their cash-strapped council has kicked off the new financial year by signing a contract worth £8,867,500 with IPL Plastics (UK) Ltd for the supply of Wheeled Recycling Bins, Food Caddies and Containers. Somebody’s cleaning up.

Next: Snow white