Who says the Crime Commissioner doesn't pay?

The good and worthy causes supported with taxpayers’ money by West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster are manifold. The following list contains most, probably not all, the charities and organisations he gave money to during the month of March this year.

This list includes brief snippets about what these organisations do, mainly culled from their websites. The total amount listed adds up to more than £2 million.

• Advent IM Ltd £23,650. Security consultants;

• AJB Media £36,624. Specialist supplies, professional services and public engagement;

• Avision for Empowerment £37,805. ‘We are a Community Interest Company and the driving force for the empowerment and development of people to achieve personal and professional success’;

• Anawim Women Working Together £101,297. ‘Provides trauma responsive services including holistic support and advocacy in Birmingham to empower women’;

• Barnardo’s £9,776. ‘Helping vulnerable children’;

• Birmingham City Community Football Trust £5,000. As visited recently by Chancellor Rachel Reeves;

• Black Country Women’s Aid £440,116. ‘Black Country Women’s Aid is an independent charity which has supported survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence in the West Midlands for 30 years’;

• Blesst CIC £9,936. ‘BLESST focuses on developing deprived families and young people through employability training, community safe space learning, and cultural identity’;

• Bringing Hope £36,991 ‘Bringing Hope is a charity based in Birmingham UK that works in prisons and the community with those involved in serious violence and crime’;

• Buddi Ltd £11,470, alarms for the elderly;

• Birmingham Says No £10,000, ‘We are a multi award-winning campaign aimed at tackling the pressing issues of knife crime and youth violence across the West Midlands’;

• Centre for Civil Society (Living Wage Foundation) £2,137. ‘We are the movement ensuring everyone earns a wage to meet their needs’;

• COPACC £2,495 subscription. ‘CoPaCC now has a portfolio of services, collaborating to optimise organisations to meet their governance and management challenges and opportunities’;

• Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre £6,633. ‘Specialist support for adults and children in Coventry who have been impacted by sexual violence or abuse at any time in their lives’;

• Catch 22 £74,403. ‘For over 200 years, Catch22 has designed and delivered services that build resilience and aspiration in people and communities’;

• Centre Spot CIC £3,976. ‘Centre Spot CIC is a creative social enterprise that uses Sports and Physical Activity to engage and build capacities of people, particularly young people’;

• Cranstoun £424,900. ‘Empowering people, empowering change’;

• Children Heard and Seen £11262. ‘Supporting children with a parent in prison’;

• Dare2lead £2,359. ‘Dare2Lead is a social enterprise dedicated to unlocking the leadership potential of people, organisations and communities. Our range of leadership training and motivational programmes are tailored to suit everybody, regardless of their ability or industry’;

• Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire £11,130. Unclear what the money’s for but the university offers degrees in professional policing;

• Engage Youth Empowerment Services £1,056. ‘Delivers bespoke creative projects for young people, direct family and significant others’;

• First Class Foundation £6,250. ‘We create projects and programmes that serve young people and their families across the city’;

• Global Media Group Services Ltd £2,500. ‘On-air, on Global Player and outdoor – through these platforms combined, we entertain and reach over 51 million individuals across the UK every week’;

• His Majesty’s Prison Service £12,574 for ‘targeted initiatives’;

• ICVA (subscription) £1,750. Independent Custody Visiting Association;

• Inclusive Sports Academy £5,000. ‘Delivering well-being and physical activity to audiences with special educational needs and disabilities across the West Midlands’;

• Living Xperience Connexion £12,500. ‘We develop bespoke empowerment programs for offenders and those on the periphery of offending’;

• LuxeventsUK Ltd £1,200. ‘We’re an independent, female-owned agency based in Edinburgh, and we’ve built a reputation for delivering events that are strategic, seamless and memorable’;

• Man at Work CIC £3,866. Set up ‘to deliver transformative training for professionals in supporting the healthy personal development of boys and young men, challenging sexism and fostering violence-free relationships and communities’;

• Mentoring Arts and Diverse Education CIC £740. ‘Tailored mentoring and outreach services’;

• Midland Langar Seva Society £2,050. ‘The charity now provides over 150 thousand hot meals per month alongside many other amazing projects both in the UK and abroad’;

• Networkfour £3,999.43. ‘Alleviating poverty, breaking the chains of homelessness and criminality to offer hope and transformation to people in Birmingham and the West Midlands’;

• Positive Youth Foundation £10,000. Provides ‘intensive frontline services to young people’ and supports ‘the local, regional and national youth work sector’;

• Phoenix Psychological Services £61,000. ‘An independent psychological practice specialising in trauma across the lifespan with individuals, families and organisations’;

• Prospects £70,000. ‘We guide millions of students to make the right choice’;

• Partnership Bridge Ltd £11,970. ‘Public order and safety activities’;

• Rethread Youth Ltd £22,312. ‘We are Redthread, a national charity delivering transformative youth work in hospitals and health settings’;

• Remedi – Restorative Services £100,000. ‘Remedi exist to enable those accessing our services to be the people they can and want to be, through the creative and proactive use of restorative approaches’;

• RSM UK Risk Assurance Services LLP £7,140. Internal audit;

• Recite Me Ltd £3,325. ‘From creating WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines) compliant websites to providing customised user experiences, Recite Me is here to support you to be more inclusive online through a range of accessibility solutions’;

• Red Snapper Recruitment Ltd PCC £10,000. ‘Experts in public safety’ (also agency staff for the dog unit £26,900);

• Rockc CLC £3,500. ‘At ROCKC, we’re on a mission to raise awareness around gang culture and violent crime through the powerful combination of art and education’;

• Round Midnight Ltd £14,000. ‘We are Virtual Decisions. We create engaging VR content that allow difficult decisions to be safely simulated, improving outcomes and saving lives through experiential VR learning’;

• Sarbat Wolverhampton £3,620. ‘We promote diversity and inclusion thus integrating the local community. We deliver these through a range of activities which includes multi sports projects, community engagement activities and education’;

• St Regis CofE Academy £4,700. Probably related to Wolverhampton police cadets;

• Titan Film and Hire Ltd £2,168. Public engagement;

• Unite and Uplift Together CIC £4,708. ‘We are on a mission to ensure everyone regardless of age, gender, social economic class, sexuality and disability have access to professionally organised support programs in a safe environment so they achieve their full potential for themselves, their communities and society as a whole’;

• Safer 2gether £33,945. ‘A venture launched to support practitioners from all sectors, navigate the ever evolving and complex safeguarding landscape’;

• Safer Now £2,150. ‘SaferNow exists to close the gaps between what organisations within children and adolescent safeguarding arenas can do, and what our communities require of us’;

• The Feast Youth Project £3,000. ‘Our desire is to bring together teenagers from different faiths and cultures to build friendships, explore faith and change lives’;

• The Mentoring Project £2,500. ‘We are dedicated to supporting change in the outcomes for Children’;

• Trailblazers Mentoring £4,000. ‘A UK charity which provides 1:1 mentorship and practical support to people in prison and post release’;

• Victim Support £60,275. ‘Provides specialist practical and emotional support to victims and witnesses of crime’;

• Weapons Surrender Ltd £13,474. ‘We offer a complete ‘start to finish’ service to the Police, public, local authorities, government bodies and supporters of anti-knife crime’;

• West Midlands Media Ltd £1,950. IT support;

• YMCA Black Country Group £17,000. ‘Everyone should have a fair chance to discover who they are and what they can become’;

• Zoe Lodrick Ltd £883.84. Sexualised trauma specialist.

And they say there ain't no sanity clause

Once upon a time a Government employed KPMG to tell them what they wanted to hear. KPMG duly obliged, announcing that a high-speed railway line from London to the provinces would generate £15 billion a year, mainly in the Midlands and the North.

That was in 2013 and it’s taken more than a decade for us to wake up and realise it was all just a dream.

But if you turn back to the KPMG report ‘HS2 Regional Economic Impacts’, you will see it is littered with disclaimers suggesting, to the cynic, especially in hindsight, that the firm didn’t really believe its own conclusions.

The report declares: ‘Any party other than HS2 Ltd that obtains access to this report or a copy (under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, through HS2 Ltd’s Publication Scheme, or otherwise) and chooses to rely on it (or any part of it) does so at its own risk.’

It says: ‘We accept no responsibility for the consequences of this document being relied upon by any other party, or being used for any other purpose, or containing any error or omission which is due to an error or omission in data supplied to us by other parties.’

And it goes on: ‘Whilst KPMG LLP has undertaken the analysis in good faith, no warranty, expressed or implied, is made in respect of the accuracy, completeness or appropriateness of its assumptions, calculations or results. No reliance may be placed upon the analysis by any party, except where specifically referred to in an agreed KPMG LLP letter of engagement. All users are accordingly advised to undertake their own analysis and due diligence before making any decision or entering into any commitment based on the information in this report.’

It also points out, further distancing the firm from what its report says: ‘The project has been peer-reviewed by an advisory panel of independent experts set up by HS2 Ltd.’ And they say there ain’t no sanity clause….

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/05/hs2-report-overstated-benefits-expert

Pity they didn’t read my reports

In 2013, I wrote:

When it comes to a sensible, reasonable, rational assessment of whether the thing will provide value for money, though, our politicians fall back on a variety of reports.

These are commissioned by the Department for Transport and paid for by the Department for Transport so it rarely comes as a shock when they are widely trumpeted as proving the case for HS2.

I actually took the trouble to read the last one all the way through. The truth is I could not make head or tail of it. When it descended into rocket science, I knew I was lost.

In 2015:

Nobody really knows how much HS2 will cost when it’s finally opened. The official figure is now apparently £43 billion and Labour has said it would withdraw its support if the bill rose to more than £50 billion.

But it is said that in the corridors of power it is widely accepted that the bill will eventually come in at something like £73 billion.

It’s clearly the case with HS2 that the simplest way of estimating the cost is to think of a number – any number – and then double it.

There is no chance it will bring any added long-term prosperity to the West Midlands. Just as the true cost of HS2 is pure guesswork, so is its ability to create jobs. But whenever its backers come up with a number, halve it if you want something like the true picture.

And in 2016:

It’s probably unlikely the Birmingham to London high-speed trains will actually derail when they hit a top speed of 223 mph. Because the might never go that fast.

Research by engineer Prof Peter Woodward warns that at such a high speed there could be ‘significant issues’ with track instability.

The HS2 company says it’s taken into account the fact that its trains will run about 40 mph faster than the rest of the world’s high-speed trains and there’s nothing to worry about.

Let’s hope so because speed of travel is one of the key arguments for building the line in the first place. If trains can’t actually go as fast as advertised then, even if they don’t crash, the whole financial case for this infinitely costly (latest guesstimate now £55.7 billion) line will certainly run into the buffers.

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.

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

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?

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....

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.

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/