Birmingham fucked - how's your council?

[Butchers Blind]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-68483264

Birmingham City Council has signed off a wave of cuts to services ahead of a 21% rise in council tax over two years.

The largest local authority in Europe has declared itself effectively bankrupt and needs to make £300m in savings.

Massive cuts ahead for public services with the poorest and those in need hardest hit.
So, how's it in your area?

[Mr_Simnock]

as far as I know

fine

[bgmnts]

Did read those figures earlier and eyes popped out of my head. Brum be fucked poor bastards.

My council has seemingly done alright and claim to shield services from cuts. Although of course I live in South Wales so it's barely worth funding and maintaining anyway.

[TrenterPercenter]

Yep this was announced all last week it carnage.  They cut brutally and are selling everything not nailed down.  20 out of 30 libraries going, 100% removal of funding for the Arts in 2025.

I think I mentioned before the last 3 years I've been working on a regional youth mental health strategy.  I'd tendered and been approved and then boom all gone.  Now I'm giving up a day just to keep another person in employment until we can try and win/find some money from somewhere.

Gotta love the Tories.

[Cleveland Steamer]

Nottingham. In the shitter. Has been for a while though.

[FeederFan500]

Came across this earlier, suggesting the equal pay dispute is not the sole reason for this as has been suggested and said many times in media coverage.

https://theconversation.com/how-birmingham-city-councils-equal-pay-bankruptcy-provided-cover-for-ongoing-oracle-it-disaster-224416

[bgmnts]

Gotta love the Tories.

Isn't this due to the council - majority Labour for over a decade - being abysmally run and fucked up?

Fuck tories as a principle rule obviously.

Edit - oops https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-67053587

[lauraxsynthesis]

My library's only stayed open for the past 10 years because a couple of elderly Communist women run it as volunteers. For this borough it's been a steady crumbling since 2010 rather than a massive drop in a short time. We have a big and active voluntary sector running itself on tuppence ha'penny and without that there would be thousands more people with little access to things like food. No end in sight of course. There has been a sudden increase in the last month in unfamiliar men who seem very unwell taking drugs and begging aggressively in the railway stations which is new. I surmise that either a local service has just shut down or a service further away has dumped people here.

[TrenterPercenter]

Came across this earlier, suggesting the equal pay dispute is not the sole reason for this as has been suggested and said many times in media coverage.

https://theconversation.com/how-birmingham-city-councils-equal-pay-bankruptcy-provided-cover-for-ongoing-oracle-it-disaster-224416

Yep IT system to blame as well.

[Butchers Blind]

It is very depressing thinking those vital services that are there to help the most vulnerable are being stripped to core making it almost impossible for them to provide the care.
Labour keeping quiet cos they know it's fucked too.

[TrenterPercenter]

It is very depressing thinking those vital services that are there to help the most vulnerable are being stripped to core making it almost impossible for them to provide the care.
Labour keeping quiet cos they know it's fucked too.

The Tories are just about to give away a £8bn tax break to everyone.  Labour would not be doing this because they would want to keep their councillors in office, that's the difference here.

[Ferris]

My mum worked as a librarian in Birmingham running programs for vulnerable kiddies but retired last year, thank fuck.

Undervalued service run by underpaid staff providing an underfunded (but monumentally vital) bit of programming for people who don't vote tory? She'd be axed to fuck, mate.

[ersatz99]

At least the £570m Curzon Street station for HS2 being built will boost the city's fortunes.

[WhoMe]

Our council has been basically loan sharked by the government for £54 mil, £3 mil a year interest and very murky conditions on what is required to unlock all the funding.
BBC article
Some of the highest council tax in London, going up 5% next month. The high proportion of young and old people in the borough is fucking us as the funding received is way short of what's required to provide statutory care services for those groups.
We probably only even got this tide-over loan as it's a Tory area.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Came across this earlier, suggesting the equal pay dispute is not the sole reason for this as has been suggested and said many times in media coverage.

https://theconversation.com/how-birmingham-city-councils-equal-pay-bankruptcy-provided-cover-for-ongoing-oracle-it-disaster-224416

An interesting point from that article is that, according to the author, the problems with the IT project mean that the council doesn't have an accurate idea of how much money it has and/or is going to need in the future. So it isn't clear how much they really need to cut. I don't know if there's anything else they could do but it's a pretty fucked-up situation to be in.

I don't know anything about this IT project apart from what that article says, so can't really judge how much it's to blame. But it does make sense that Birmingham council's budget problems would be at least partly due to factors specific to Birmingham, because the equal pay thing is affecting all councils. Birmingham may have the biggest liability in absolute terms but that's because it's the biggest council, so it also has more income and assets to help pay for the equal pay claims. Other councils have also declared section 114 quasi-bankruptcy, or come close, but I think that's mostly been down to problems specific to each council, like Woking's failed property investments.

[Icehaven]

Birmingham librarian here, although fortunately my role is funded separately so I'm not in scope for redundancy.
Birmingham council departments are each assigned to different directorates and 5 or 6 specific directorates have been singled out for cuts and redundancies, and what's been particularly interesting is how over the last couple of years libraries have been shunted between a couple of different directorates, first we were moved into Children and Families, and then Adult Social Care, and strangely enough both of these are in the group of directorates now in the firing line. A couple of months before all this kicked off we were supposed to be going into an entirely new directorate (can't remember what it was going to be called, Here Today Gone Tomorrow probably) but that never happened, but clearly the intention for some time has been to make sure when the shit hit the fan the services they want to cut to the bone were all conveniently grouped together.

Meanwhile various other departments which are seemingly going to go untouched absolutely take the piss in terms of value for money, efficiency and actual usefulness to the public. This is anecdotal but still, my colleague's neighbour is in some kind of "corporate support" role and works from home, and apparently he spends most of his mornings taking a stroll around the local park and, if it's nice out, most of the afternoon in the garden. The IT guy who came to fix our computers last year was a bit annoyed he had to actually come to our office because he usually works from home and as he cheerfully told us would never do a job which wasn't wfh now as he couldn't imagine when he'd get his housework done. They're both employed by the council and are probably on salaries equivalent to about 10 librarians. A few weeks ago we found out my colleague's neighbour is the IT guy's boss, so there's obviously a really conscientious work culture in that department!