Iron Angle: Little sleep for the weary
It would be fair to describe this week’s Birmingham City Council cabinet meeting as a pretty downbeat affair, with the weight of unpopular spending decisions to come hanging over senior figures in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
Council leader Mike Whitby was absent, having jetted off to sun himself in the West Indies, so there was no-one available to make unlikely claims about Birmingham powering ahead on all fronts leaving competitors floundering.
Deputy council leader Paul Tilsley was in charge, but the old bruiser appeared unwilling to pick a fight with anyone and even failed to rise to the bait when the Working Neighbourhoods Fund fiasco was mentioned.
The overwhelming impression after six years in power is of a cabinet that, if not exhausted, is certainly tired and in need of a break. Six cabinet members – Whitby, Tilsley, Alan Rudge, Les Lawrence, John Lines and Sue Anderson – have been in office for the duration and must know in their hearts that the financial crisis facing local government in general and Birmingham in particular gives them no chance of forging forward with populist policies in the run-up to crucial elections in 2011 and 2012.
Tim Huxtable, the new cabinet member for transportation and regeneration, who is about as straight and uncynical as it is possible for a politician to be, tried to chivvy his colleagues along with a “good news story” about Service Birmingham taking on 23 apprentices. But, as honest-Tim admitted, this is a drop in the city’s unemployment ocean.
All credit to Tim, though, for his candid assessment of the council’s mishandling of the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, where £46 million targeted to tackle unemployment in the poorest wards has helped only 170 people to find jobs in just over two years.
Overall responsibility for WNF lies with Be Birmingham – chairman, Paul Tilsley. And it was Tilsley in October last year, when the difficulties in spending WNF money became apparent, who gave his backing to the council’s Constituency Employment and Skills Plans (CESPs) and Neighbourhood Employment and Skills Plans (NESPs).
Huxtable slipped the knife in rather easily for someone whose reputation for niceness is city-wide: “It is clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that NESPs and CESPs have in general not provided good value for money, although some aspects of the programme have proved to be very successful in tackling worklessness.
“The designs of NESPs and CESPs has proven bureaucratic, inflexible and does not suit the very different economic conditions which exist today compared to when they were originally conceived.”
Poor value for money, bureaucratic and inflexible. Ouch.
We waited for the inevitable explosion of fury from Tilsley, but it did not arrive. Perhaps he has given Huxtable the benefit of one of his little chats in private, but at the cabinet meeting in public all Tilsley said was to wait for the end of the three-year WNF programme before making judgments and to remember that WNF is attempting to help people who are “furthest away from the jobs market” and in some cases may never have worked in their lives. The programme has just under nine months to run, so we shall see.
With the council expecting to have to slash about £230 million from budgets over the next four years, cabinet members are sharpening their knives.
Trading Standards and Environmental Health will face a £2.3 million cutback with the loss of about 50 jobs. The planning department’s conservation service has been chopped. Grants to arts organisations will be curtailed.
There is a trend here as the council retrenches to a default position where only the services it must legally provide get any form of protection, and even then cuts will be inevitable. Expect to see more “commissioning”, buying in services from the independent and voluntary sectors, which will in turn allow the council to scale back its own workforce.
Figures for the first two months of the 2010-11 financial year tell a familiar story with the Children, Young People and Families directorate (education and children’s social services), and the Adults and Communities directorate (adult social services) already overspending their cash-limited budgets. One idea being pushed forward is to save £7 million by cutting the share of expenditure on residential care for old people to 40 per cent “in line with national best practice”.
All of this, though, is just the beginning as the obvious and less controversial ways of reducing spending are exhausted to be replaced by the really difficult decisions.
