Iron Angle: Mike Whitby’s six-hour wobble
There was so much good news to be discussed at this week’s Birmingham City Council cabinet meeting that poor old Neville Summerfield, who owns the copyright on “this is a good news story”, was left on the sidelines.
The cabinet member for regeneration could only sit forlornly and nod in silent agreement with his colleagues as a tide of stupendous news was rolled out.
First, there was the quarterly performance monitoring report, which showed that 84 per cent of improvement targets were being met.
Unfortunately, the 16 per cent not being delivered represent the more serious challenges facing the council. These include safeguarding and assessing adults at risk of abuse, hospital bed blocking, direct payments for social services clients, appalling staff sickness figures and mixed progress on the business transformation project.
So, while it is good that the council has completed the Highgate Park play area, started building the new library, improved Birmingham’s standing as a place for gay employment and completed the second phase of the Eastside Combined Heat and Power scheme, there are rather more pressing issues that could not be described as satisfactory.
Most of the good news came from cabinet housing member John Lines, who in a, frankly, scary performance, changed from Mr Angry to if not quite Mr Nice then Mr Fairly Pleasant.
It was the usual stuff about how he had transformed rotten, failing council housing left by the previous Labour administration into homes fit for “our people”, whoever they are.
You can’t actually argue with that. Love him or loathe him, Lines has performed brilliantly and it seems certain that all 68,000 council houses and flats in the city will meet the government’s decent homes standard by the end of the year – an extraordinary transformation since 2004.
This being the first cabinet meeting since the end of the Khyra Ishaq manslaughter trial and the publication of a Family Court judgment severely criticising the council for failing the seven-year-old girl, you would have thought the agenda might have included a reference to such an awful tragedy.
But a discussion would not have fitted in with the good news agenda.
Children’s director Tony Howell was not at the cabinet, having decided to take a holiday following all the stresses and strains of the Khyra Ishaq case. Children’s cabinet member Les Lawrence was present, and perhaps he was privately fortified to learn that the leader of the council, Mike Whitby, is still publicly supporting him.
I wouldn’t get too carried away if I was Les, however, since it took a long time to draw the briefest of statements from Coun Whitby, who having been asked by this newspaper to say whether he still had confidence in Coun Lawrence and Mr Howell, took six hours to respond.
Good grief. Wars have been won and lost in less time. God knows how long he might have taken to say something had we asked a supplementary.
And when he did reply, Coun Whitby confined himself to a brief one line in directly addressing the question.
He could have said something like “of course I have confidence in the two, they are dynamic public servants who surely will lead the children’s department on to finer things in this great global city with a local heart”, but what he actually said was: “I have confidence in Les Lawrence and Tony Howell.”
Six hours to state publicly that he supports the children’s director and cabinet member. A Whitby wobble, perhaps?
Moves are underway among council spin doctors to re-build the reputation of Coun Lawrence and Mr Howell by offering a media interview with the pair.
Unfortunately, there appears to be almost as many conditions attached to the format of said interview as the General Election debates between Brown, Cameron and Clegg. In particular, it must be a platform to enable them to explain the raft of improvements they have put in place in children’s social services.
Mike Whitby knows he has to get to grips with children’s services, and it is difficult to see how anyone can have confidence in the department while Lawrence and Howell remain in charge.
Some people are attempting to take comfort from the fact that Mrs Justice King’s highly critical condemnation of social services and the education department in her Family Court judgment has not been picked up in the national media. Cold comfort, indeed.
Meanwhile, several Tory and Lib Dem councillors have let it be known privately that they think it is time for Coun Lawrence and Mr Howell to go.
Lawrence could be replaced by no-nonsense veteran Len Clark, who is 70 , but that’s not much older than Churchill when he became prime minister.
Or, what about the nuclear option? John Lines is just the man to sort out children’s social services and replace hand-wringing with action, surely?
