Iron Angle: Gradgrind and Hard Times

Nov 19 2010 By Paul Dale

When appointed chief executive of Birmingham City Council in 2005, Stephen Hughes was rather cruelly dismissed as a boring number cruncher by many on the left of the political spectrum. One official described his new boss as Mr Gradgrind, after the headmaster in Dickens's Hard Times who liked facts to be beaten into children.

The first mistake they made about Mr Hughes was to dismiss him as a mere accountant who had somehow managed to weasel his way to the very top of Britain’s largest public body. He is, in fact, a Cambridge-educated economist, which must be a very dangerous combination for the notoriously wasteful word of local government.

The second mistake was to assume that Mr Hughes would be the meek yes man to Tory council leader Mike Whitby. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. If anyone is looking like a yes man, it’s certainly not Mr Hughes who is leading from the front on the issue of how Birmingham City Council can deliver £330 million of spending cuts over the next four years and keep essential services intact.

While Coun Whitby and his Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition colleagues give every impression of startled rabbits trapped by the glare of car headlights, the chief executive is stepping up to the mark and telling it the way it is.

Addressing a Be Birmingham summit last week, Mr Hughes stunned the audience of usual suspects by suggesting that local government would have to return to its Victorian and Edwardian roots, where very few services were run directly by councils. There can hardly have been a more succinct definition of what the Government’s Big Society actually means.

He went on: "We have to work with the public to explain that in the past 2,000 years in this country, that's how it happened. Only in the past 100 years have we become so dependent on the state."

Oh, Evelyn Waugh, you should be in Birmingham today, for it was the great novelist who complained that the Conservatives' biggest fault was a failure to turn back the clock a single minute. Waugh, who died in 1966, would not recognise the vast array of expensive public services today. He would, though, appreciate a move to allow those services to be run either by the private sector, at a profit, or by well-meaning but unpaid volunteers.