Philip Parkin

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.

The Local Government Association has called for the government to think again on funding councils for their new ‘flood role’:

The Chairman of the LGA’s Environment Board, Paul Bettison, said: “Town halls are ready to take the lead on improving flood risk management but it should be clear that they will need funding to properly protect people’s homes.” Calling on the Government to look again at its calculations he added: “When councils spend money clearing up after floods it comes from budgets for other services, so it is wrong to say that councils can pay for this new role by cutting spending on flood clear up.”

 It can sometimes be a good thing for councils to be told to ‘do more with less’ – especially if it improves efficiency and stops unnecessary spending – but I don’t buy it in this case. The Floods and Water Bill would give councils such a clear set of new responsibilities – coordinating water companies and the Environment Agency, ensuring that drainage systems work etc – that it’s got to involve the spending of some extra money somewhere.

I don’t know whether climate change will lead to more flooding in the future. But if it does – and if the effects of climate change are going to be as serious as some people predict - then I’m sure we won’t be able to deal with it on the cheap.

Decisions made in local government often come across as being complicated because they are complicated, and the use of technical language is the only way to adequately explain what on earth they’re about. And no amount of re-wording or attempts to simplify is ever going to change that. Often, though, what’s discussed seems complicated because bureaucrats and politicians have temporarily lost the ability to communicate effectively and have submitted to pressure to use jargon. And I’m often guilty of this, too. However, given the importance of some of the stuff that gets discussed in local government – and, also, bearing in mind that the overuse of jargon has been identified as one of the reasons why people are turned off politics – this ’overcomplication’ is not only frustrating, it also isn’t good for democracy.

Today’s Birmingham Cabinet Meeting, for example, had over 20 items on the agenda, most of their titles and reports written in the usual impenetrable council style. So the meeting began with an item titled the ‘Reconsideration of Decision Called-In – Multi Area Agreement for Employment and Skills’. And the agenda included the snappily titled item: ’Winning Resources: Local Area Agreement Working Neighbourhoods Fund Strategic Interventions’. Yet both these items – if you can get past the titles - were, and are, extremely important – dealing with the spending of huge amounts of money on trying to tackle perhaps the biggest problem this city faces at the moment – long term, mass unemployment. We should all, as far as we can, be trying to get away from this sort of convoluted language.

Today’s Cabinet Meeting was actually one of the most important for a long time, with decisions being made on the:

‘Highways Maintenance and Management Private Finance Initiative’ – the awarding of a £2.2bn, 25 year, highways’ maintenance contract (one of the biggest PFI contracts in the country).

‘Approval of Academies Process’ – significant progress on the setting up of 3 (controversial) new Academy schools.

‘BMG Birmingham History Galleries Project – Full Business Case’ – the awarding of a £2.9m contract to repair the roof works at the Council House Extension and the submission of a £4.8m bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the setting up of a History of Birmingham Gallery at the Museum and Art Gallery. It was also agreed to spend £874,000  to cover development work on the project.

Be Active – £9.3m to be spent on an 18 month project to increase participation in sport. All residents may now swim/use the gym at council run leisure centres completely free of charge.

There was much more discussed at Cabinet today, all of it important to residents in Birmingham and not much of it decipherable by those outside of local government. And that’s why we need to ensure our established local media survives this deep recession. After all, somebody needs to help explain what all this stuff means.

Interesting article in the Birmingham Post today about how the public sector led approach to tackling unemployment doesn’t actually appear to be making any difference. Even at the height of the ‘boom years’ unemployment in certain wards in the city was at 20%. ( And the figure was much higher if you included people on disability/single parent benefit).  With the unemployment claimant rate  in Aston currently running at 28.2% (and with the wider ’worklessness’ figure across the city at 37%) it’s obvious that we need a radical change in how we address this issue. The current approach just isn’t working.

July Unemployment Briefing

The ‘Big City Plan’, Birmingham City Council’s award winning, twenty year development masterplan, presents a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity for residents to have their say on the future direction of the city centre.

It’s also likely to start forcing us to make some tough decisions. Take the ongoing debacle over noise and the Rainbow pub in Digbeth, for instance.

According to the plan, although Digbeth has ‘limited residential, retail and office development’, the area has seen ’signficant development in the arts, media and craft industries’. It has also ‘developed a music and media industry’ and ‘has the makings of a new creative quarter’.

The plan also makes reference to the unique urban structure of the city centre - there are distinct quarters around  a modestly sized ‘core’ and over the next 20 years it’s likely that these surrounding quarters will grow in importance. Everyone who lives in the city knows what to expect in the Jewellery Quarter, for example, or in Eastside.

And Digbeth, of course, is the interesting and edgy part of town. It’s not Broad Street but neither is it the leafy suburbs. And whether it was quieter five years ago than it is now is largely irrelevant. Why, then, did the council, when granting planning permission for new flats in the area, not look ahead and make sure that the developers fitted the new blocks with a level of sound proofing suitable for living in the middle of the second largest city in the country?

The Home Secretary has announced that councils ‘might in future’ face restrictions on their use of covert surveillance measures. Some councils have been misusing their powers under RIPA , apparently, to snoop on parents lying about their home address in order to get their children into a preferred school, or on residents putting their bins out on the wrong day etc.

It seems obvious to me that these powers should only be used for offences that would result in a prison sentence and that council leaders should always be the ones authorising their use. The hypocrisy of the government in blaming councils for snooping in this way is breathtaking. This is a government, after all, that has given the UK the dubious honour of being the most watched state outside of China and Russia, with over 4million CCTV cameras, one for every 14 people. And of course, given our hugely over-centralised system, councils have no choice but to do the government’s bidding. Contact Point, for example, the new ‘national children’s database’, which will include the personal details of every child in the country, is a Labour government creation and councils have no choice put to put it into place.

As part of the city council’s scrutiny process, whereby decisions made by the executive and outside bodies are reviewed by backbench councillors, I’ve been working with colleagues investigating the ‘effectiveness of employment strategies’. The city, like the rest of the country, oversees the spending of hundreds of millions of pounds every year to try and get people (back) into work. The review started about 18 months ago, and even then, at the height of the boom years, the unemployment rate in certain inner city wards was 20% and the ‘worklessness’ rate  was 30%. (‘Worklessness’, incidentally, is a word that has been around since the 1880s but is being increasingly used by bureaucrats to mean ‘economically inactive’, so it includes anyone who isn’t working, whether they are in receipt of Job Seekers Allowance or not. I was determined never to utter the word but gave up after it started cropping up everywhere).

The report came to full council this week, and it would have been obvious to anyone with the patience to wade through it that there are some serious problems in the way that unemployment is currently being addressed. Firstly, there is far too much complexity and bureaucracy involved. The report pointedly referred to the ‘complex web of interlinked programmes and funding streams’ around the issue. That’s being far too kind. Nationally there are no less than 4 different government departments involved in tackling unemployment. Below them there’s Job Centre Plus, the Learning and Skills Council, AWM (our redevelopment agency), and the local authorities, and beneath them sit the City Region (the ‘greater Birmingham councils’ group) and local strategic partnerships. Coordination between these partners is often poor, focus constantly shifts so that we now talk about priority ‘super output areas’ rather than priority wards, and quangos change, with the LSC, for example, soon to be abolished and replaced by two new organisations. What doesn’t change however is the fact that there is a multitude of different agencies involved in tackling this issue, and all of them are helping to spend what amounts to hundreds of millions of pounds. And, if we take ‘closing the gap’ – between those wards with the highest unemployment and the city average – as being the measure of success, then it looks as though none of this effort and money is actually making any difference. Unemployment may have come down in the priority areas, but, when the report was started, it was coming down across the whole of the city.

This isn’t to say that employment strategies aren’t getting some people into work, however. Many of the agencies we spoke to as part of the review claimed to have helped people into work. However, as no tracking of these individuals has taken place, we can’t be sure whether people finding work are being counted more than once – are lots of agencies claiming success with the same people, for example. Also, because of this lack of tracking we have no idea whether people finding work actually keep their jobs and are still there 3, 6 or 12 months later. And we don’t even know if those helped into work were the long term unemployed or the recently unemployed who may well have found a job fairly quickly anyway. This lack of tracking, which is put down in the case of Job Centre Plus, for example, to concerns over data protection, means that we have no effective way of knowing whether the various unemployment strategies are working.

Finally, initiatives to tackle unemployment have traditionally been far too centralised. This results in uniform, nationally focused programmes and also, as the Local Government Association suggests, a ‘democratic deficit’ in relation to overseeing public expenditure. There should be proper consultation, then, with councillors, at constituency level, on the detail of local plans. And unless schemes can demonstrate their effectiveness then we should stop throwing public money at them.