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?
Monday, June 16, 2025
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....
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.
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’.
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/
Thursday, May 29, 2025
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…
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…
Thursday, May 22, 2025
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.
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.
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