The financial crisis at Birmingham City Council has deepened with the local authority now expecting it will have to make budget cuts of £625 million over a six year period.
Previous estimates for a savings package between 2010-11 and 2016-17 were put at £600 million – half of the core budget – and led council leader Sir Albert Bore to declare “the end of local government as we know it”.
Cllr Bore (Lab Ladywood) insisted today that the projected deficit would grow by a further £25 million, chiefly as a result of Communities Secretary Eric Pickles’s pre-Christmas announcement on local authority spending levels.
Quizzed for two hours by the main scrutiny committee, Cllr Bore and his deputy Cllr Ian Ward repeated warnings that the decommissioning of non-statutory council services would have to begin in 2014. Public consultation on which services should be jettisoned is to start this summer.
Growing tension between the council and Birmingham schools and academies bubbled over during the meeting after Cllr Bore revealed that head teachers had unexpectedly withdrawn a £4 million contribution towards council-run children’s social services and the youth service.
The money is a vital component in running the council’s new Integrated Family Support (IFS) teams – bodies consisting of police officers, teachers, GPs and social workers whose role is to identify children at risk of domestic violence, or who are likely to drift into crime, and intervene at an early stage to save huge court and social care costs at a later stage.
The IFS initiative is a major lever in an attempt to remove Birmingham children’s social services from Ofsted’s “inadequate” rating and move towards an excellence ranking. But the scheme always depended on a financial contribution from schools.
Birmingham Schools Forum, representing all schools, decided recently not to renew the grant in 2013-14, leaving the council with a difficult dilemma.
The position was made worse by the Government’s refusal to approve Birmingham’s request for a £13 million grant to pay for deputy prime minister Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat conference announcement that two-year-olds would be entitled to free nursery education, Sir Albert added.
It’s now clear that a key plank of the Labour-led council’s strategy is to examine ways of forcing schools to contribute more to children’s social care, the youth service and the careers service. Cabinet-led reviews are underway to determine which schools-based services are statutory, that the council has to pay for, and those that are discretionary that schools would be asked to fund.
Sir Albert cast doubt on the representative nature of the Schools Forum and questioned whether the body accurately presented the views of Birmingham schools. There was no transparency in the way the decision to axe the £4 million grant had been arrived at, he claimed.
Cllr Ward said “some searching questions” would have to be asked about the extent to which schools were providing careers advice to young people.
Unease among Labour’s left wing was evident at the scrutiny committee. Cllr John Clancy urged Sir Albert to tone down language around the so-called Jaws of Doom – a graph suggesting that the council will run out of money by 2017 because the burden of providing social services will be impossible to meet against annual reductions in Government grant.
Cllr Clancy said the doom analogy had created a perception that the decommissioning of services was inevitable. He urged Sir Albert to take into account the likelihood of a Labour government in 2015 which would ease the immediate financial pressure on councils.
Once services were dispensed with it would be very difficult to restore them, Cllr Clancy warned.
[...] The jaws of doom get even wider [...]
Think you’re struggling with your tenses Paul. You mean “will have had to make budget cuts” not “will have” as the Jaws of Doom dates back to 2010. Remember that Jaws IV was one of the biggest turkeys in movie history. Point of fact: the Early Intervention Grant is not needed to fund nursery education – the argument was that it has been withdrawn to pay for the extension of nursery education. In fact it emerged that most of the grant was going towards school-based projects, which might well be funded from the increasingly generous pupil premium. So that proved to be a slight red herring. That’s a fish, a shark and a turkey for you.
Over 200 million of the savings / cuts have already been achieved by the previous administration.
Councillor Clancy may be right in his assertion that a Labour Government may be returned in 2015 but there is no guarantee that a Labour administration will suddenly provide vast resources to Birmingham City Council.
There is no certainty that Sir Albert will be the leader of the council post May 2013 but if he is replaced, how will his replacement fund the services that are under threat?
As for the Jaws of doom / Graph of doom, I guess demand for services will continue to increase as the population ages and requires more social care amongst other increasing pressures on services from other age groups and funding will not match this in the medium term.
Albert’s language is both reckless and counter-productive in terms of talking about choices of decommissioning services from 2014 because that undermines the thinking that is occurring within the city council and outside as to how to mitigate and reshape services so that BCC meets its statutory requirements and still have a wider role. However Albert and his colleagues need to let others in so that a discussion can occur based on transparent information and financial figures.
This is an incredibly difficult position but to narrow the discussion to merely commission or decommission will exclude help from those who could help the city. The budget “consultation” for 2013/14 was primarily a justification exercise with some marginal tinkering occurring. That won’t be good enough for what’s ahead.
Cllr Clancy urged Sir Albert to take into account the likelihood of a Labour government in 2015 which would ease the immediate financial pressure on councils < Stick to darts. What a muppet.
@ChamberlainFile just when we thought it could not get any worse…now we will surely see the end of local gov as we know it…