Philip Parkin

The Arts Council has launched a £500,000 initiative to help turn empty shops into creative spaces. With the Local Government Association warning that high streets run the risk of becoming ‘ghost towns’ unless urgent action is taken to find other uses for recession-hit retail units, displaying local art should go some way towards maintaining or improving the vibrancy of town centres.

This kind of initiative is obviously not going to benefit the local economy in the same way that a new (rate paying) business would, and at best it’s a temporary measure, but it should at the very least help shops from falling into disrepair. And of course ‘animating the high street’ and getting art and creative enterprises out of their usual spaces is always a good thing, with a successful town centre clearly being about more than just shopping.

Applications from individuals and organisations in Birmingham should be looked on favourably, with the city fulfilling criteria such as already being in receipt of DCLG funding and having a (fledgling) network of town centre managers in place. And the kind of activity that will be funded is fairly broad, too, with the Arts Council looking to fund anything from art to recording studios to family arts workshops.

If anyone is interested in applying for a project in Sutton Coldfield town centre, please let me know.

Research by The Standards Board has found that the public believe local councillors to be more trustworthy than local MPs.

The Board’s Chief Exec, Glenys Stacey, is pleased that “trust in local politicians (has) held up favourably compared to people’s views about national politicians.” But the figures are really not that good, with 20% feeling that councillors ‘rarely or never’ tell the truth. And although the questions were asked at the height of the MPs expenses scandal, the results are clearly heading in the wrong direction:

Table: Percentage responses to: How often do you think the following types of people tell the truth?

It would be fascinating to see some examples behind the allegations of mendacity, though. I don’t think that a significant number of councillors ‘fiddle’ their expenses (the rules are strict and the amounts avaliable relatively low) and I don’t believe that they deliberately mislead residents, either. And, besides, non-executive councillors (the majority) don’t tend to be responsible for ‘pushing through’ controversial policies – they’re usually fighting on behalf of residents to counter the effects of ill-thought out legislation, ever mindful that this is the kind of stuff that gets remembered come polling day.

The debate rages on about Birmingham’s most famous carbuncle, with Andy Foster, chairman of the Friends of Central Library, continuing to make the case for its survival. 

And there does seem to be a strong ‘architectural’ argument for keeping the building.

Designed by a local architect, John Madin, the library is one of Birmingham’s key Modernist buildings and a notable example of the Brutalist style. Its ‘inverted ziggurat’ form – think upside ‘stepped’ pyramid – has attracted worldwide acclaim. 

And of course, one of its biggest problems is that it was never properly finished: it was meant to be marble-clad but the budget ran out, and plans for the landscaped gardens (with five pools!), that would have softened its design, were never followed through.

Unfortunately, however, the building seems to have long since lost the PR battle, and a lack of maintenance over the years as well as the state of neighbouring buildings means it faces imminent demolition.

But why can’t we save the building (and use it as, say, a modern art gallery, as has been suggested), open up the route from the city centre to Centenary Square and build a new library on a separate site? We desperately need a new library but does that mean we have to pull down the existing one?

We’ve demolished some wonderful Georgian and Victorian buildings in this city, because the architecture was out of favour or the properties were ‘in the way’. And we’ve ended up regretting it. As Andy Foster points out, it looks like history is about to repeat itself.

Amey has been selected as the preferred bidder to deliver Birmingham’s 25 year Highways PFI contract. The 2.7bn deal will see the company repairing and modernising:

• 2,500km of highway
• 96,000 street lights
• 1,000 traffic signal
• 850 bridges and tunnels

The company will also be responsible for any emergency activities such as winter gritting.

With public complaints about the poor state of the city’s roads increasing and a lack of cash resulting in a huge repairs backlog, most of the maintenance work under the contract (£300m) will take place over the next 5 years.

There are, though, some ‘red lines’ that the contractor cannot cross. Most noticeably, that the number of highway trees at the end of the contract must be no less than at the start and no trees can be removed without councillors’ agreement.

Birmingham is to be one of the pilot areas for the government’s new ‘Total Place’ initiative . This is, by all accounts, a Big Deal, with the council calling it ‘perhaps the most significant initiative for local areas and local government for some time’ and the Communities Secretary John Denham seeing the project as ‘potentially a chance to rewrite the future of public services’.

Over £7.5bn of public money came into Birmingham last year and the aim of Total Place is to identify where and how this money could be spent more effectively. It asks the question ‘can we do better for less’? And given the huge sum of money we’re talking about, the answer has got to be ‘yes’. With the project in Birmingham focusing on how various bodies deal with mental health problems, drug and alcohol misuse and ‘guns and gangs’ - we need to make sure that ‘we do better for less’ not just in order to save money, but also to ensure we’re providing the best service we can to some of the most vulnerable people in the city.

Whether the involvement of a non-directly elected body like Be Birmingham - and the bureaucracy and time constraints of ‘yet another government initiative’  – is the best way of achieving this, remains to be seen. And the only way we’ll have a chance of knowing if it’s worked will be if Be Birmingham publishes realistic targets – over which it has direct control – and an outside body gets to scrutinise its performance.

The government’s ‘Strengthening local democracy’ consultation paper, which includes the concept of Total Place, talks about enhancing the power and scope of councillors’ scrutiny role:

Councillors, on behalf of their citizens, should be able to scrutinise public spending provision, influence decision making and hold other service providers to account’.

Unfortunately, however,this is all happening the wrong way round. The unelected quangos have already got the power, and they’ve had it for some time. Yet only now is the consultation beginning on how to keep this power in check. And given the ongoing concern over the running of the Multi Area Agreement in Birmingham, it’s interesting to read in the consultation paper that ‘as sub-regional structures grow in power and influence, it is important that greater power is matched by clear, democratic and accountable leadership‘. It states that ‘these existing and planned sub-regional structures derive democratic legitimacy through elected councillors from their member local authorities controlling their activities‘. Not so in Birmingham, of course, where there are no elected members sitting on the Board set up to administer the MAA.

The consultation goes on to suggest that ‘committee meetings should be open to the public’ and that the council should be able to ‘scrutinise the activity of local authorities working together at the sub-regional level’.

All eminently sensible stuff, and let’s hope the government means it. Unfortunately the conversation about how to best scrutinise the unelected should have begun a long time ago.