By Maureen Wade, (Chair, Birmingham UNISON retired members section, personal capacity)
Birmingham City Council has announced the largest local authority budget cuts in history. Jobs and services will be devastated. Funding for services will be cut by nearly £300 million over two years, with the worst sectors hit being Children, Young People & Families (£51.5 million) and Adult Social Care (£23.7 million).
There will be around 600 redundancies, weekly bin services scrapped, and local Council Tax bills will rise by 21 per cent – all adding to the cost of living crisis. The City Council has also asked the government for permission to ‘capitalise’, or to borrow £1.25 bn from the government, to be paid back by the sale of Council assets, like Birmingham’s iconic Central Public Library.
The Tories have been quick to blame Labour, the local trade unions, and just about everyone else, except themselves. But these are the results of years of national government underfunding.
Birmingham has lot a billion pound in funding since 2010
The underlying problem for Birmingham, and for many local authorities of all political hues, has been one and a half decades of Tory cutbacks. Since 2010, Birmingham City Council has lost a total of £1bn in funding. What we see now are the consequences of failed policies carried out by the right wing Labour Council leadership over the years, as they have meekly accepted the cuts handed down from above.
This crisis came to a head however because of successive right wing Labour leaderships trying to fight against the council trade unions in their ‘Single Status’ equal pay dispute, rather than work with them to resolve it. It has wasted huge amounts of money hiring barristers to challenge the unions in the courts.
The trade unions had repeatedly warned the City Council they were stoking up trouble for the future by allowing discriminatory pay practices to continue, and despite earlier significant warnings from previous successful equal pay claims. The Council should have been setting aside between £100-250 mn each year from 2020, because everyone knew the law was on the side of the unions and a ‘big bill’ for an equal pay settlement was coming down the road.
National Labour leadership made only cosmetic changes
Instead, the Council leadership went into ostrich-mode, ignored the problem, and even took on the huge costs of the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Back in 2022, when asked about the looming financial threat, the then Council Leader, Ian Ward, told us all that a Single Status settlement would only cost about £75mn. Meanwhile, the Council’s other ‘little’ problem at the time, the Oracle IT system, had gone over budget by ‘only’ £18mn.
Cllr Ward was ousted, in what only can be described as a coup, orchestrated by the national Labour leadership (see Left Horizons article here), and we discovered that in fact the Single Status settlement would be more like £760mn, while Oracle was in fact £80mn over budget.
But even this does not reflect the real reason for Birmingham’s crisis. Birmingham is in good company. As the Tories’ have continuously chiselled away at local authority budgets, six other local authorities have gone bankrupt since 2021, with warnings that as many as 26 more could face the same fate.
When the Labour leadership took ‘executive action’ against Cllr Ward in 2023, all they did was to carry out cosmetic changes, replacing one right wing Labour Council leadership with another. And that was it. There was no action plan, no policies put forward, no solutions offered.
Trade union campaign beginning next month
The Labour leadership should be organising all Labour councils – especially after the recent electoral gains – into a united campaign of protests, demonstrations and, if necessary, civic disobedience, against the Tory attacks on local government, and to fight to restore the billions that have been stolen from local communities. Meekly accepting them and wringing hands will do nothing to help desperate working class families facing a cost of living crisis and the collapse of services.
Some council unions have begun a fightback – UNISON, Unite and GMB have called a demonstration and rally for Saturday 2 March at 12 noon, and there will be a protest outside the next City Council budget meeting on Tuesday 5 March from 5pm onwards. Both of these are outside the Council House in Victoria Square.
[Picture above: UNISON members lobby Birmingham City Council after news of the impending financial crisis broke last year].
