Roger Harmer summarises the lack of progress made by the Council throughout 2024

I want to pick up the comments (in 7.1.4) of the Leaders report concerning the progress made since April 2024. 

Taken as a whole on first reading this section gives a positive impression of good progress, yet the truth is that the position of the Council remains critical and too much of the progress towards balancing the books is being made by slashing services rather than by moving to more efficient and cost effective ways of delivering them. 

The first bullet rather oddly says the 24/25 budget was approved since April, when of course it was approved as it has to be, before April, but leaving that aside it makes the assumption, wholly inaccurate of course that approving a budget ensures its delivery. As we know from painful experience its not the approval of a budget that does this but hard work and graft through the year. 

What's more even if we do hit the 24/25 budget savings, that still leaves us a long way from balancing our budget.

The second bullet says we have approved a plan. Well as we all know if approving plans and strategies were the way to have a well run Council we wouldn’t have the severe problems we have now. But sadly they aren’t. 

The third bullet then says that the reimplementation of the Oracle programme is underway. So the bullet doesn’t say this but let’s be clear, this is a programme that went live in April 2022, but failed so badly that we are having to effectively start again and reimplement it at a massive cost to Council taxpayers of over £100m in direct costs and lost savings and it won’t be up and running, if all goes to plan until April 2026. 

Then there is mention of progress on Equal Pay, again putting right the failure year after year of this administration to tackle unfair pay and a byzantinely complicated pay and grading system.

Then we are told we have a plan to improve the Procurement Operating Model with a focus on strategic contract management. Well procurement has been so shockingly bad that improving it isn’t a challenge. I mean it is amazing, here we are well into the second year of our financial crisis and we are crowing about developing a plan for better procurement! We should be well into delivering that plan and discussing what has been saved so far and what the next objectives are. 

And finally there is mention of a Birmingham Vision to support the Council to deliver better outcomes for citizens. Well where to you start with that. First off of course is the point made before that we desperately need to move on from the idea that visions or strategies or plans will do this. But more fundamentally, the past mismanagement of this Council, be it paying its staff unfairly, mismanaging Oracle implementation, failing to procure effectively and so on is leading to such savage cuts that the idea that we are going to be delivering better outcomes for citizens in the coming year is laughable. Is a 10% increase in Council Tax a better outcome, are slashed street cleansing services going to lead to cleaner streets are reduced opening hours for our Libraries and reduction in youth services a better outcome for our young people. 

I have to say that the only better outcome this litany of failure is going to lead to is the ending of Birmingham Labour’s control of this Council in 2026. 

Thank you Lord Mayor.