The report recommends: “Authorise the strategic director of local services, in consultation with the cabinet members for green, safe and smart city, commissioning, contracting and improvement, to undertake market testing of the service to establish if a partner could deliver the service from 2014 onwards, complete the implementation of the transformation programme, and achieve further savings and efficiencies. Following completion of this market testing a further report will be brought to cabinet for consideration and decision.”
The privatisation of the refuse collection service, as this is being interpreted, was regarded as a step too far by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Indeed, even at the height of industrial problems with binmen on strike, the then cabinet member, Tim Huxtable, a Conservative, steadfastly refused to even contemplate hiving the entire operation off to a private operator.
Sir Albert has form in this area. During his previous period as council leader, 2000 to 2004, he infuriated left wing colleagues by proposing to offload council housing and old people’s homes to independent trusts and put in place a bidding process that eventually led to Amey taking responsibility for improving and managing the city’s roads and pavements.
Sir Albert’s justification in each case had a Thatcherite ring of confidence about it: “There is no alternative”. The period 2000 to 2004 happened to be just before the Labour Government allowed local councils to undertake prudential borrowing, which ironically enabled Birmingham’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition to indulge in a mini-orgy of public spending the effects of which are being felt today as the city faces up to a debt mountain.
Back then, with the quality of social services, housing and the roads at rock bottom, Sir Albert clearly felt he had to embrace unpalatable methods to deliver improvements. Voters didn’t see it in the same way, though, and he was out on his ear for eight years.
The only serious threat to the leadership of Mike Whitby occurred when right wing Conservative councillors rebelled in 2009 over what they saw as the council leader’s “municipalisation” policies. Whitby’s gut instinct generally seemed to be that of interventionism on a grand scale. Modelling himself on Joseph Chamberlain he wanted to leave a legacy, preferably in the shape of expansive and expensive public buildings.
The new library, first proposed by Labour but driven through almost single-handedly by Whitby, cost just shy of £200 million. When recession hit home in 2009 and the economy collapsed, Whitby’s big idea was to establish a municipal bank, just as his 19th century Liberal heroes had done.
Failing entirely to judge the prevailing wind, this most unlikely Conservative ploughed on with plans to build a council-run Olympic swimming pool while also offering Warwickshire Cricket Club a £20 million loan to expand Edgbaston.
And in the most unlikely boast ever by a Conservative leader, Whitby was able to wax lyrically about resuming the city’s council house building programme after a 30-year gap. Building homes for “our people”, as some Tories gleefully put it.
This approach horrified the Tory right, who put forward Randal Brew for the council leadership. Brew did not obtain enough votes, although the figures were never published, demonstrating once again that Birmingham Conservatives sit on the soft right both socially and economically.
The Whitby boom helped to push up council borrowing to £2.8 billion by March 31 this year largely as a result of an extensive council house modernisation programme. The council, which is faced with identifying £600 million in spending cuts, has now to find £232 million a year simply to repay debt.
Faced with a financial crisis of unprecedented proportions Sir Albert Bore is reluctantly proposing to decommission whole swathes of public services. Slipping through the privatisation of refuse collection, without first informing the Labour group, is the thin end of a very thick wedge and suggests a very stormy 2013 for Birmingham City Council.
“The Whitby boom helped to push up council borrowing to £2.8 billion by March 31 this year largely as a result of an extensive council house modernisation programme. ” Which was, of course, as a result of the then Labour government not supporting the modernisation programme (Decent Homes) in Birmingham because the tenants had refused to be transferred to non-council control. One might almost argue that this was punishment for voting the wrong way.