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

Birmingham's £91 million consultancy bill

Bankrupt Birmingham and its 13,000-plus employees are spending at least £91 million on consultants as far as I can make out from scrutinising the figures online.

Among these, KPMG has seven contracts worth £7.7 million, PwC has £4.6 million of contracts, Ernst & Young saw its contract worth £1.3 million as “Strategic Partner Programme Support, Early Intervention and Prevention Programme” soar to £6,311,500. Deloitte gets just £210,440 from two contracts.

PwC gets £2,497,000 as ‘a Delivery Partner for UiPath Robotic Process Automation’. This will supposedly save the council £5.5 million though this doesn’t take into account these fees or the £1.9 million worth of redundancy costs involved. Using robots instead of people is good because, “software robots can do it faster and more consistently than people, without the need to get up and stretch or take a coffee break”.

Grant Thornton has an audit contract worth £1.6 million. Originally it was a mere £252,000.

The city’s rubbish is uncollected because of a strike by binmen. Unite union says the cuts would deprive 150 people of £8,000 a year each. If that’s true, the council would save £1.2 million a year.

Maybe one of the many consultancy firms employed by the city council might suggest other ways of saving money.

For instance, American consultancy Oliver Wyman which gets £1,480,000. The company says, ‘We guide clients through high-stakes decisions and transformative moments so they can adapt, grow, and thrive. Our edge? The power of perspective — driven by deep industry insight, specialized expertise, and a spirit of true collaboration.’

Next: The cost of lawyers.