Iron Angle: Hard Lines for job cuts
Some people have in the past likened pugnacious Birmingham cabinet housing member John Lines to a rottweiler.
Personally, I think this is a little unfair on rottweilers who are actually capable of learning more than one trick.
Coun Lines’ five years in charge of the city’s housing stock puts me in mind of the restoration of the French Bourbons in 1814 (Kings of France, not the biscuits, John) and Napoleon’s much repeated bon mot that they had “forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”
Lines’ problem is that he seems to be permanently angry. Railing against Labour, anyone slightly to the left of Margaret Thatcher, and of course against journalists who veer away from the world as John Lines sees it.
How he manages to work with the Tories’ Liberal Democrat coalition partners is beyond all understanding.
The relationship is particularly mysterious since Lib Dem councillors were the driving force in a successful campaign several years ago to prevent Coun Lines from becoming Lord Mayor on the grounds that he wasn’t considered a suitable candidate for the job.
Like most angry people, he doesn’t appear to listen and seems to have little more than a passing interest in the facts, unless the facts suit his case.
His personal attack on me at this week’s cabinet meeting, at a venue where he knew council rules prevented a verbal response, was par for the course.
But his assertion that an article by me predicting job losses in the housing department was rubbish appears to be totally untrue.
As he launched into his tirade, a council press officer and officials from council leader Mike Whitby’s office realised the stupidity of his claim.
For there in front of him, on a table, lay a copy of the 2010-11 council business plan, where on page 79 in a list of proposed “efficiency savings” there is a proposal to save £1.2 million from the Housing General Fund from a “reduction in employees due to Government grant reductions”.
It is possible, I suppose, that Coun Lines has not read this and that none of his officials have dared draw his attention to the proposal.
I prefer to think that his outburst was symptomatic of growing concern around the cabinet table that an administration that prides itself on “robust fiscal responsibility” is teetering on the edge of serious trouble.
Things aren’t yet as bad as the financial basket case that Whitby, Lines and Co inherited from Labour in 2004, but the next two years could be the turning point as government public spending cuts begin to bite.
Council chief executive Stephen Hughes is adamant that the squeeze will amount to a harsher onslaught on councils than anything Margaret Thatcher managed, which explains why he is urging councillors to bite the bullet and begin shedding jobs at an unprecedented rate.
Mike Whitby has a difficult presentational job to achieve, drawing a fine line between frankness about the dire position Birmingham finds itself in while still remaining reasonably upbeat about the city’s recovery plan.
His little homily to the cabinet did not, frankly, cut the mustard. Deciphering the message into plain English, airbrushing out the global city with a local heart nonsense and the constant references to the fourth estate extrapolating figures crudely, Coun Whitby must know in his heart that estimates of some 7,000 council jobs to go over the next decade are not wide of the mark.
In the council business plan, the one that Coun Lines seems not to understand, estimates by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants, not a body prone to making wild claims, predict that the council’s cash shortfall could be £150 million by 2019-20.
Add this to the requirement to find £75 million savings next year and problems in identifying more than £40 million of savings for this year, and it hardly takes a genius to work out that an organisation like the council, where most money is spent on paying the wages of its workforce, will have to axe jobs if its resources are cut.
But Whitby is right about one thing. These are not panic measures, however much the unions might like to suggest the opposite. The job losses that we have already heard of, up to 2,000 next year and the likelihood of more to come, are part of a well thought through plan to slash the size of Britain’s largest local authority.
It’s the sort of small government concept you might suppose Conservatives would be rather proud of.
