Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Fetch the comfy chair

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin with news that the West Midlands Police have spent £67,000 so far this year with a company called Back Care Solutions.

If you find that staggering, you may need to sit down when you learn that, in March, the police paid £497,000 to Abbott Toxicology, who test officers and recruits for drugs and booze.

A cursory glance at Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster’s on-line spending declarations for the first four months of the year show has been splashing the cash.

He’s given £45,000 to the West Midlands Anti-Slavery Network while The St Giles Trust, which helps people ‘held back by poverty, unemployment, the criminal justice system, homelessness, exploitation and abuse to build a positive future’ has had £739,000.

Many payments are relatively small sums: Birmingham LBGT has been given £40,000; Birmingham Pride got £2,000; Relate’s had £88,000; Sikh Women’s Aid £39,000; the New Testament Church of God’s was blessed with £3,200; the Romanian Community Centre, £4,000; Women in the Shade, £2,000; and Edu-k-fun, £2,160.

The commissioner obviously believes in the transformative power of sport having given Streetgames UK, £20,000 and Support through Sport Youth, £3,678; the Andrew Simpson Sailing Foundation, £3,080; Sporting Spirit, £3,859; Guardian Ballers £2,400 and Streetgames £20,000.

Mr Foster’s membership of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners cost taxpayers £49,695, his taxis £7,000, his earnings £100,000.

Happily, he’s got more money than ever to spend, having put up local taxes by £13.95 (6.5 per cent, 5p below the legal limit) but even with a budget of £984 million, he’s not happy. He blames ‘central government’ for the police being 800 officers short even though the force claims crime fell six per cent in year to March.

Maybe. Still, His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary’s most recent assessment gave the force no ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ ratings, two ‘adequates’, three ‘requires improvements’ and three ‘inadequates’.

The inspector said: ‘I have serious concerns about how well the force investigates crime, protects vulnerable people and manages offenders and suspects. We have highlighted these problems in previous inspection reports, but the force’s performance has declined.’

Fetch the comfy chair.

Friday, June 20, 2025

The rubbish keeps piling up in Birmingham

It really does look as if the Birmingham Commissioners, appointed by the Government to sort out the chaos that is the city council, are digging their heels in as far as settling the bin strike is concerned.

They have ‘instructed’ – note the word ‘instructed’ as it proves the commissioners now run the city – to stick with its ‘best and final offer’ made to the unions via ACAS.

In a waffly notice issued recently, the commissioners say: ‘Bringing this action to an end by lawful and financially prudent means is fundamental to resolving outstanding issues and prospective legal action in relation to the equal pay issue. In this matter time is of the essence.

‘Commissioners have concluded that the best and final offer, which takes all of these matters into account and provides an agreed framework for the implementation of a modernised waste collection service delivering in addition recycling and food waste collection on a best value basis, and which Commissioners have been briefed on, is required to be submitted via ACAS by no later than close of play Friday 30th May 2025 and is essential.

‘If this offer is accepted the Council can proceed to implement it following a report to Cabinet which sets out the financial implications. If not, Cabinet should consider a full report on the next steps that can lawfully be taken. The Council is instructed accordingly.’

This instruction was issued after the Unite union claimed the commissioners had sabotaged by the commissioners.

https://www.unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2025/may/birmingham-bin-strike-escalates

Monday, June 16, 2025

A run-away disaster for Birmingham and Britain?

The cost of Birmingham Council’s Oracle computer disaster may be as much as £343.5 million – even higher than the worst estimates.

Uncollected business rates were supposed to add up to £12.5 million but, in reality, the figure is £140 million, according to Lib Dem Paul Tilsley, the city’s longest serving councillor.

He told a meeting back in March: ‘That (Oracle) system didn't work and it has left us with a bill. We don't know how much but certainly, as far as business rates, £140 million as a starter.'

I asked this week if the figure was accurate and he told me: ‘I would never quote an inaccurate figure.’ I also asked the council but, as usual, they didn’t respond.

The original Oracle budget was £19 million. The official cost is now £131 million. A union-sponsored report by Sheffield University’s audit reform lab added extra costs supposedly caused by the Oracle disaster: £12.5 million in business rate bad debts; £4 million council tax deficit; and £69 million written off in budgeted savings that never happened. That all comes to £216.5 million.

But – and it’s a big but – if Coun Tilsley is right and the business rate deficit is £140 million, that makes the Oracle cost at least £343.5 million. The £140 million represents one third of the city’s budgeted business rate revenue for the current financial year.

And it makes you wonder if this represents something worse than just an incompetent local authority failing to chase up bad debts – a flight of rate-paying businesses out of Birmingham.

The council claims the number of businesses in the city rose by 255 (0.7 per cent) last year but as 89 per cent of them are micro-businesses, that doesn’t mean much. Manufacturing was down 2.7 per cent, construction down 4.3 per cent, hospitality down 1 per cent and transport down 4.9 per cent. Retail business rose 1.2 per cent representing 21 per cent of all the businesses in the city.

But the one big increase was a 6.6 per cent rise in public service ‘enterprises’ (surely a contradiction in terms).

The dreadful possibility has to be that the city is enduring an irreversible decline in genuine private-sector wealth-creating businesses. If that’s true, we may soon see a decline in the other growth-sector, professional services (up a modest 0.3 per cent) not to mention a further fall in business rate revenue.

And you do have to wonder: Is Birmingham’s parlous state representative of the state of the country as a whole?

Friday, June 13, 2025

Sue me, sue you blues

What a litigious city Birmingham must be. In the last two years, the bankrupt council paid more than £27 million to our learned friends.

Bevan Brittan, which received £8.6 million, is the largest single lawyerly recipient of Birmingham taxpayers’ money.

They say on their website, ‘We have advised Birmingham City Council for many years on a series of major projects and transactions, all of which we have secured through tender.’

The city’s cash is widely spread, however, and sometimes we are not allowed to know who gets it. On April 7, the city solicitor paid out £211,320 in legal fees. This is reported under the heading ‘redacted personal data’. I wonder who got all that dosh?

In the first five months of the year, £431,427 of redacted legal fee payments were made to anonymous beneficiaries.

(Talking of redacted, I note Birmingham Law Society redacted its International Lawyer of the Year Award 2014 from its honours board. It went to Phil Shiner, struck off three years later for making false claims against British soldiers in Iraq.)

The barristers at St Philips Chambers don’t do badly. They earned £743,527 in the last two years.

These chambers (I always think they deserve an apostrophe but apparently not) were the professional home of the Recorder of Birmingham, Judge Melbourne Inman, the man who sentenced Twitter criminal Lucy Connolly to 31 months imprisonment.

Watch his judgment here....

Monday, June 09, 2025

It doesn't half pay at the WMCA

In March, the West Midlands Combined Authority spent £4.5 million on consultants, a step up from the first two months of the year when its 1,226 staff paid almost £3.7 million for ‘consultants, external advice, legal advice and professional advice’.

It’s not just going to lawyers, accountants, engineers and so on.

Recipients include a digital marketing expert, a communications specialist, an artist and an actress who ‘works with the The Laban-Malmgren System of Character Analysis, the Stanislavski Method and live improvised music to discover and awaken inner lives and physical responses’.

Birmingham Hippodrome theatre got £10,000 (How to put on a decent panto? Oh no it wasn’t).

Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt offers ‘unparalleled knowledge of creative health at the intersection between practice, policy and evidence’.

Good Afternoon Experiences Ltd got £9,100. They ‘conceptualise and lead the creative direction of playful installations and experiences and games that incorporate creative technology, play or interaction.’ Well, it’s more interesting than bus shelters.

But then, the West Midlands Combined Authority has an embarrassment of riches which it can’t spend fast enough.

In the 2023-24 financial year, it had £591.9 million to spend on the Midland Metro, railways, social housing decarbonisation and so on. Alas, it only managed to get £386 million out the door.

A proper business would be delighted to spend £215.3 million less than planned but in the public sector it’s a disaster. How do you justify your unending demand for more money when you can’t get rid of what you’ve already got?

And they’re plainly understaffed, having paid £250,000 to Hays Specialist Recruitment in January, £286,000 in February and £534,297.83 in March.

As for staff, like a good employer, they’ve paid £1,484 to Back Care Solutions, £1,913 to Posturite and £7,740 to New Leaf Health to help them hit their ‘workplace wellbeing goals’.

They’ve also set aside £1 million to pay for untaken holiday entitlement.

The Labour Party doesn’t do badly either. The authority paid £16,998.57 in January and another £8,258.62 in February to the Labour Party to cover the employment costs of people seconded to work in the office of Mayor Richard Parker.

Luckily, Mayor Parker has secured more money from the Government with a £1.2 billion budget this year which ‘includes £389m as part of the government's Integrated Settlement, which gives the authority power, funding and responsibility for local priorities’. And that’s before the billions to allow Blues fans to get to their new football ground by tram.

Thursday, June 05, 2025

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’.

Monday, June 02, 2025

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/