City Council's recession plan goes missing
Mystery continues to surround the whereabouts of Birmingham City Council’s recession rescue package.
Cabinet regeneration member Neville Summerfield was supposed to take the wraps off a major series of initiatives to help stricken firms weeks ago.
But he fell silent, and the baton was passed to council leader Mike Whitby.
A press release, with the catchy title ‘A downturn is no time for complacency’ was prepared for the January 12 cabinet meeting, quoting Whitby promising to do his best to get the new Municipal Bank of Birmingham operational by the end of 2009.
Strangely, the item was pulled from the cabinet agenda at the last minute and has not been heard of since.
And they accuse Gordon Brown of dithering.
-----
Angry complaints from punters who could be bothered to turn up for a consultation meeting on Birmingham’s Big City Plan.
A council coach packed with bumpf spelling out the 20-year vision was sitting in Highgate when the driver was ordered to go immediately to Aston Science Park in order to meet with council leader Mike Whitby who wanted to have his picture taken to accompany some glossy PR leaflets
Officials could only watch in horror as the coach, containing information about the plan, zoomed off leaving bemused citizens in its wake.
My man down with the grass roots is unamused: “Representatives of community groups arrived to find no bus and no information and consultation had to be put on hold for about two hours while Whitby was photographed.
“The response of Coun Whitby’s office has been to blame the consulting officers for failing to wait in Highgate while the bus was at Aston, despite the fact that all of the consultation equipment was on the bus and the officers would have had to stand on the street with no shelter or facilities.”
Big City Plan consultation misses the bus, eh?
----
Reports for local authority meetings are the driest documents ever produced by humankind, with pages of jargon-heavy text through which journalists wade to find the real story
Now Centro, the West Midlands Passenger Transport Authority, has hit on a novel idea to brighten up the relentless tedium of a report into, say, bus stop policy – the inclusion of smiley faces.
The joyful little motifs helpfully indicate that an item is ‘good news’ and are intended to evoke a positive response from the press.
WMPTA member Coun Keith Linnecor, however, thinks grumpy faces would be more appropriate.
He said: “I didn’t see many smiley faces when using the bus on January 2.
“Far from it, since paying passengers had just realised they had been ripped off by the bus companies with 10 per cent fare hikes in many cases.”
----
Veteran Birmingham Tory councillor Len Clark remains king of the soundbites. His reaction to the proposed city monorail service: “If Walt Disney can build one, so can we.”
