There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing over Service Birmingham’s decision to offshore 100 city council IT jobs to India.

The trade unions and Labour councillors couldn’t wait to put the boot into an outfit which is controlled by outsourcing firm Capita.

Meanwhile, deputy council leader Paul Tilsley, a member of the Service Birmingham board, was forced to defend the Indian adventure by insisting that things could be far worse.

He pointed to the 528 new jobs the company has created in Birmingham since 2006, describing this as a major achievement.

For 528 read 428, since 100 jobs are off to India. But hey, since the Government continues to provide economic aid to a nuclear-armed nation, why shouldn’t Birmingham export a few jobs to Capita’s Mumbai headquarters?

There is nothing at all sinister behind this. The decision has nothing to do with a skills shortage here in Birmingham, as the unions were claiming, and has everything to do with basic economics.

At the beginning of this year Coun Tilsley was trumpeting his hard-nosed negotiating style which resulted in Service Birmingham winning a five-year extension to its contract to modernise council IT services and run the local authority’s telephone contact centre.

What pleased Tilsley so much was the fact that he had been able to force Service Birmingham to deliver savings of £135 million over the next 10 years – equivalent to a 15 per cent cut in the £917 million the council has to pay Service Birmingham up to 2006.

Alas, the law of unintended consequences conspired to hit Tilsley hard.

Service Birmingham’s Capita masters have decreed that some of this money must be found through getting rid of jobs in Birmingham and recruiting 100 low-paid workers in India.

As Service Birmingham’s spokesman put it: “The issue is about cost. We have to save money and improve service delivery at the same time.

“This is a consequence of the new deal we signed with the council.”

Embarrassing headlines about Britain’s largest council shipping out jobs to India will only have increased the unease councillors from all political parties feel about what they see as Service Birmingham’s lack of accountability.

The council has a minority position on the board and is not able to prevent offshoring, even if it wanted to do so.

The latest controversy follows a year of embarrassing disclosures at the main scrutiny committee, where councillors ripped into poor performance at Service Birmingham’s new call centre.

There were “numerous instances where the system is currently failing customers”, a report concluded.

One of the biggest concerns is the arrangement under whereby Service Birmingham is paid according to the number of calls to the centre. So, the more calls, the more money and profit the company makes.

This hardly seems conducive toward the stated aim of encouraging a “shift change” whereby most people will be expected to communicate with the council via the internet, thereby saving money in the long term.

Councillors found no evidence of a shift change, but did uncover a trend toward “unnecessary and unnecessarily lengthy” phone calls.

The council press office approached the matter by claiming that Service Birmingham isn’t really anything to do with the council.

Earlier this year, Service Birmingham asked newspapers to stop calling Service Birmingham as a Capita-led company, even though it is.

One imagines that the council would really like Service Birmingham and Capita to remain anonymous, out of the reach of a prying media.

Fat chance of that happening.

-------------

Mystery continues to surround Birmingham City Council’s plan to clobber motorists by imposing parking charges in the evenings and on Sundays.

Regular readers will recall that the scheme to raise £300,000-a-year from hundreds of on-street city centre places was approved by the council in March.

More than three months later, the charges have still not been introduced but the reason why is far from clear.

The council’s official explanation courtesy of the press office, is that there “are no specific plans on the table”.

Behind the scenes, cabinet transportation member Tim Huxtable has been lobbied by Chamber of Commerce chief executive Jerry Blackett who not unreasonably pointed out that one of Birmingham’s greatest selling points is that it is possible to drive into the city centre and park for nothing at night and on Sunday – a huge bonus for shops, restaurants and the night time economy.

Surely, Blackett argued, it must be possible to find £300,000 from elsewhere rather than threaten the fragile recovery of city centre businesses.

According to Blackett, Coun Huxtable, who is a thoughtful man with a reputation for listening, indicated that he would consider alternative ways of finding the money.

However, the very highest sources at the council insist there has been no change of heart and that the charging scheme will go ahead.

Two possibilities occur to me. The first is that council officials rushed through the charging plan without negotiating a change in contract with the private company responsible for enforcing parking in Birmingham.

The additional cost to the company of policing on-street parking in the evenings and on Sundays is bound to be substantial.

Or could it be the case that the council’s statement “no specific plans on the table” was clumsily worded and actually referred to no specific plans to alter the parking charges plan?

Only one person can answer this conundrum.

Wake up, Tim: will we soon have to pay to park, or not? And if the answer is yes, when will this happen?