Councillor Roger Harmer "We listen to our residents"

Thank you Lord Mayor, I move the amendment in my name and that of Councillor Jan. First can I say that I have been given dispensation to speak today for my declared interest as my wife is a teacher at a City Council maintained school. 

This Council is failing its residents. While the financial crisis formally hit in the Summer of 2023, the impacts are now hitting home right across the City and this budget will make them significantly worse. The bin strike is the most visible sign of it, but the cuts impact in so many ways, whether that be, litter and fly-tipping piling up well beyond the impact of the strike, potholes left for months before they are properly filled and seemingly unchecked dangerous driving rampant across much of our City. 

We have a City Centre which has had money poured into it but the benefits are failing to reach our residents, who face higher unemployment than all the other major English cities and desperate housing conditions. 

And of course this is before the new package of £150m cuts to services caused by the mismanagement of this Council by Birmingham Labour. And despite those cuts, and a Council Tax increase of well over twice the rate of inflation, we still won’t manage to set a balanced budget. Yet more assets will have to be sold off just to pay this Council’s day to day running costs. 

The causes of these failures run deep. They go far beyond the headline disasters of the Oracle implementation, now 4 years late and £100m over budget, the hundreds of millions of equal pay payments, or even the £150m wasted on an athlete's village that never hosted a single athlete. Look further into the Council and you find more and more disasters, whether it's a failure to maintain our buildings and homes or purchase efficiently or then manage the contracts we have properly.

The only positive thing to say about such endemic failure is that things can be so much better if we just start running the Council properly. What is abundantly clear is that the current Labour administration isn’t fit to do that job. They remain more concerned with their own internal squabbles and backstabbing than the interests of our City. To the extent that progress has been made in the past 18 months, its down to the Commissioners forcing it to happen. We need an administration that puts Birmingham first and party interest second and that sadly must wait until Labour is thrown out in next year’s elections.

But even before then there are changes that can be made and our amendment shows how even in these straightened circumstances, better choices can be made. Our amendment would keep our libraries open full time. The past year has shown just how much our communities value our libraries, not just as places to read and borrow books, but as local hubs, places to get advice and in many cases the last remaining building where residents can engage with the Council. 

We would also provide funding to tackle the road safety emergency, so we can, for example, put in more average speed cameras, making good on Labour’s failed promises. We will also start to develop a roof top solar programme to save running costs and also help tackle the climate emergency. And we will make a modest start to help tackle child poverty and homelessness.

But to drive the scale of improvements we need, we must change the culture of the Council. We need to become an organisation that manages and develops its staff well, that maintains its assets in good condition and replaces them in a timely manner. Where staff are empowered to do the right thing and where our communities are actively listened to and can shape the delivery of services to fit their needs. 

I’ll talk now about some of our proposals in our amendment in a little more detail. First where we have generated the savings to fund the improvements we propose.

One way is to offer staff in suitable job roles the option of moving to a 4 day week. This won’t suit most people, and clearly wouldn’t work in a number of job roles, but for some staff it would be an option they would welcome, enabling them, for example, to reduce hours ahead of retirement. For some it might reduce the tax band they are in, meaning the loss of take-home pay is significantly less than the 20% reduction in hours worked. This would be done purely on a voluntary basis but for those staff that chose to do it because they wanted to, it should improve their morale and motivation while at work, boosting their productivity in the hours they still work. 

We are only assuming a 1% take up – but this does generate a useful annual running rate saving of £600k and we believe if anything, the savings may go beyond this with time. 

We also have made a number of modest cost savings and ways of finding more income, all approved by the Commissioners, by for example reducing Council advertising and communications spend and increasing income from enhanced parking enforcement. 

We also propose offering residents in above average Council Tax rated homes a way of supporting homelessness that would enable their money to be channelled to voluntary sector providers and be far more effective than giving donations to the beggars that stand at the traffic lights of our major junctions. 

We think there is far more that can be done in the medium and long term and our amendment highlights some examples:

We support proposals being developed for a hotel room levy to generate income for our cultural and heritage sector, enabling us to actually open all our museums and galleries and Cllr Harries will speak more on this.

We believe there are huge benefits to be had by developing proper asset management plans for our buildings, vehicles and land. It seems bizarre that it needs saying but rather than waiting for things to break or contracts to expire before working out what needs to be done, we should have a virtual log book and service history for all our assets and a plan that ensures they are properly maintained and contracts are agreed ahead of time so that they are replaced at the end of their life. The waste in our refuse and street cleansing services from failing to do this is staggering and its beyond belief that after a year of consultation we still don’t know how much money needs to be spent on our library estate, in coming years, to keep it in good condition. 

A key priority for us would be to develop ways in which local communities can consistently shape how services are delivered in their area. As we regularly hear, we are the biggest unitary Council in Europe and so we need to work particularly hard at engaging with our communities.  That means giving them the ability to influence how things are done and tweak them to fit local conditions. The centre knows best, is hardwired into how Labour runs our City and this must change. 

And we must improve our decisions by seeing Scrutiny as a way to help develop them, not as a formal part of the process that has to be endured. We should ensure that Scrutiny committees can take their leadership from the best suited Councillors right across this Chamber and not see their role as a pay off for voting the right way in a leadership election past or future. 

Turning to how we would spend the money we generate, our key proposal regards our community libraries. We would provide funding to allow our hub libraries to be open 6 days a week instead of 4 and our other libraries to be hope 5 days a week instead of 3. We are listening to our residents who say they value our libraries and want them to stay open full time. To the Labour Councillors who have been campaigning to keep their libraries open, I say, you can vote for our fully costed, Commissioner approved amendment today and keep them open full time. 

I’ve mentioned before the wide variety of functions libraries perform and the we are happy to add the NAIS service to that long list. But to do that and then only have them open half the week is a disservice to our communities and a waste of valuable assets. One suspects if Labour were to stay in power there will be another report soon pointing to a decline in their use and that many must close permanently. Our vision is of busy thriving libraries open when you need them, not just when you get the right day. 

And libraries are so important in tackling child poverty. Close to Acocks Green library in my ward are hundreds of families living in temporary accommodation, if you can call 3 and half years temporary. For children living with their families in one room, the opportunity to go to the library to do your homework and have some peace and quiet is invaluable and we should not be denying them that or limiting it to half the week. 

We also find funding to help tackle the road safety emergency. We’ve been calling this out for years, indeed well before the last Council elections and this Labour Council has failed to act, beyond the performative act of declaring a road safety emergency, despite promising a tripling of average speed cameras in their last manifesto. They claim its all too difficult and requires co-operation by the Combined Authority and Police. The Warwick Road that runs through my ward is just one of many that suffers speeding and the resulting crashes. No  sign of average speed cameras there. Yet a short way down the same road in Solihull, with the same Combined Authority and the same Police force, average speed cameras are shortly to be installed. We will provide extra funding for this work, so that when we finally replace our massively out of date 2016 Road Safety Strategy, who’s action plan expired years ago, with the new Road Harm Reduction Strategy, which is still being consulted on, it has funding to back it up. 

We would develop a programme of roof top solar, this wouldn’t be done on the normal dash to spend when some spare money appears but we would have a  a consistent budget, steadily working the way round our estate installing solar panels with an initial priority given to our libraries. We have consistently advocated this approach and been ignored despite the declaration of a climate emergency. Had this been done even shortly after that declaration, we would now benefiting from a significant financial benefit, given current high energy prices

Labour say the problems they face are faced by every Council in the country, and clearly it is a difficult time for local government nationally, but their failures to manage the resources we have make us exceptional and not in a good way. Due to their failures we face severe and worsening relative disadvantage. In January claimant count unemployment in Birmingham was 14.5% compared with Manchester next highest among the core cities at 8.7% and Liverpool which used to be similar to us, at 7.8%. As we move through their supposed golden decade, we see Labour’s model of prioritising the city centre to encourage investors simply isn’t working. Instead residents are ignored and more and more of the jobs go to those commuting into the City from outside. The Ladywood regeneration scheme, which ignores the voices of the local community, is sadly likely to continue that trend of failure and waste, unless the model is changed. 

Time and time again Labour’s promises turn to dust. Just two and a half months ago, speaking about the equal pay situation Cllr Cotton said and I quote: “I think the framework agreement is a significant step in the right direction, and marks the start of a new era of progressive and productive industrial relations built on trust and mutual respect.”  Well on the streets of our City those words ring hollow now. 

Lord Mayor, Labour’s time running this City is coming to a close, their last 14 months starting with rubbish piling up on the streets. Once the residents have thrown them out, we must come together to rebuild our Council and our City. It can be done, it must be done.

Thank you Lord Mayor.