The swathe of cutbacks proposed by Birmingham City Council will see the most radical change in public services for more than 50 years, writes Public Affairs Correspondent Paul Dale.
To describe the £320 million Birmingham City Council must save from its budget over the next four years as a mere cuts package is a little like suggesting a heart and lung transplant is nothing but minor surgery.
What is being proposed is no less than the dismantling of local government as it has existed for decades – steamrollering through the most radical changes to public services since the Welfare State came into existence 64 years ago.
Birmingham is embarking on a journey that will, by the end of the decade, have reduced the public sector to a bit-player in the direct delivery of services.
The council’s main purpose is shifting from a traditional approach of attempting to respond to every single demand for local authority services from people programmed to believe the state should provide for their every need – social care, housing, pre-school education, transport and leisure – to a very different world where the council commissions private and voluntary sector partners to provide these services.
In doing so, it is suggested, the council will use far more of its reduced budget to pay other organisations to deliver services and far less on paying an army of bureaucrats to administer services directly.
As a consequence, the council’s 24,000-strong non-schools workforce is bound to shrink dramatically. Officially, about 7,000 jobs are set to disappear from the payroll by 2015, but few doubt that the number could safely be doubled by 2025.
There were signs at this week’s cabinet meeting of the tactics the opposition Labour group intends to rely on when the full city council meets on March 1 to debate spending plans between 2011 and 2015.
Labour will claim that Birmingham’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which has been in power since 2004, is using Government-imposed public spending cuts as a smokescreen to disguise the unprecedented destruction of public services.
Actually, there is an element of truth in this although there is no evidence to back Labour’s claims that Tory council leader Mike Whitby and his colleagues are revelling in the cuts they are about to impose.
What cannot be denied is the fact that Whitby’s coalition is using the UK’s debt crisis as a catalyst to drive forward reform.
The scale of the cuts required – almost a third of the council’s revenue budget between 2011 and 2015 – made it possible for Coun Whitby and his Lib Dem deputy Paul Tilsley to justify and get political backing for changes that would have been written off as all too difficult to achieve in normal times.
It should be noted that the coalition’s leaders have been working on the broad strategy of the 2011-15 budget since January 2010, well before the General Election and the subsequent announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of huge public spending cuts.
They knew, of course, that large cuts would be coming Birmingham’s way, but they wanted to be in a position to use the financial crisis to their advantage if at all possible.
They were backed in this venture by council chief executive Stephen Hughes, who in the second half of last year embarked on a very public campaign setting out why and how the public sector would have to change if it was to survive in any form at all.
Most dramatically, Mr Hughes suggested we would have to get used to a shrunken model of local government more in keeping with the type of limited council provision that existed at the end of the 19th century.