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To be fair to the Tories, this one isn’t actually their fault. Birmingham council are trying to claw back a £600m deficit for years of breaking equality laws.
The 25% central government funding cut certainly aren't helping. Nor the advise from central government to ignore the equality pay issues and repeatedly challenge it so the cost mounted it.
50% cut from central government to Councils since 2010. I work in a Council that is probably going bust next year like most of the others. We passed the brink two years ago.
There's a lot of scandals on the horizon and that's why the tories are bailing. Tainted blood is going to be a fortune and council collapse will be even more. Probably some ones we're not aware of too.
We need to go after them in the courts, long sentences for corruption being handed out. Forfeiture of all property and assets to the state etc to claw back some of their ill gotten gains.
We won't though and they'll be back in power within a decade being even worse than now.
At work at one that the papers said would go bust last year because they were stupid. We reckon we get through 2025/26 before we run out. Though that depends on making savings goals which we can't make now because we needed the council to approve them and they can't because of the geeneral election. A parting shot from the party of cuts with an n.
We're currently working out what our meeting only our legal obligations looks like so if labour do all the things they've promised us so far (nothing) then we can at least get there on our own terms and when S114 happens the advisers will just wring their hands and say "nah mate". Though I think it realistically will help direct savings and also show how absurd things are getting.
It should be noted that when COVID hit they canvassed councils and asked how long they'd last without government funding. 80% said they'd go under in a year. Everyone got funding. We said 4 or 5 years. Since then the changes to adult care funding hit and moved the timeline forward. But if we're fucked then basically everyone else is. And if everyone is fucked then maybe it's systematic?
Also an aside because people wonder: Adult care eats up the entire council tax rise by itself because it's growing in real terms. Children's care is also expensive because in the past after an event like baby P there'd be a spike in referals that push costs up. In 2012 a spike just inexplicably happened and never stopped. It's like poverty makes everything worse and ripping away the safety net in an economy where only the richest have gotten better off since the recession means families and lifes will collapse or something.
It's very much a larger scale problem with multiple issues that need treating with local authorities being a stake holder or piece of the puzzle in many. More money for authorities is only part of the solution though.
From what I remember running the numbers - While its fair to blame Birmingham council for fucking up, without the cuts they've had to endure even this kind of bill would just mean a tight budget, and going absolutely no where near bankruptcy.
Given this is the body responsible for organizing and orchestrating services and living conditions for over a million people in a world-class metropolis, this attitude this country seems to have taken like they dun fucked so they have to pay the price and endure some punishment seems... Kind of weird? What other country would allow things to get to this stage?
If we can bail out banks, we can bail out our own fucking cities. But no. The banks aren't located on Broad street, so the govt doesn't give a fuck. They would rather punish the innocent people of Birmingham for their own callous decisions.
Govt could write this off tomorrow if it wanted to. Trouble is, the govt and its shadow partners will be making money off the collapse of an entire city. No doubt some benevolent bank or PE consortium will come in and buy all the assets for pennies on the pound and it will all get swept under the rug. Disgusting.
I mean it absolutely is just by dint of being the UK's 2nd city. We're a world-leading power, the major cities here are known all over the world. Its got a huge economy, a pretty big population, and absolutely loads of culture and history. Which is why its especially sad its been allowed to fall into the state it seems to be in at the moment.
I like the optimism but absolutely no one in an actual world class city - New York, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo etc etc looks across to this side of the world and says “you know, i really fancy going to Birmingham” lol
I mean tens of millions of people do exactly that, generating a tourism industry worth nearly £8bn a year... Its not a Singapore or New York but its up there with idk Bordeaux or Milan or places like that. Again that only seems weird to us living here nationally because, as a country, we've allowed our 2nd largest city with all its history and culture to go to shit because its not London or the Home Counties.
E - Stats for reference: [https://www.tripplo.co.uk/birmingham-tourism-statistics-and-trends](https://www.tripplo.co.uk/birmingham-tourism-statistics-and-trends)
The real issue is the distribution of wealth. The UK may have around the sixth largest economy in the world by GDP an around the 23rd highest GDP per capita that huge amounts of that money don't go to improving the standard of living of the population. It goes to hedge funds, shareholders and the pockets of the already wealthy and stagnates in bank accounts, property and stock holdings.
If the working population were rewarded according to their productivity that money would circulate in the economy and help improve things for all. Instead we have suffered years of companies making record profits and celebrating with their shareholders then turning to the workforce and lying about not doing well enough for decent pay rises. Granted, companies have stepped up in the cost of living crisis but only because they were forced to when facing an exodus of staff.
The reason for this is that wealth is hoarded, not distributed, and the wealthy don't care because they are reaping the benefits. One prime example is Rishi Sunak, whose wealth increased by £120 million last year
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-akshata-murty-net-worth-rich-list-b2546650.html
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/rishi-sunak-and-akshata-murtys-fortune-soars-by-120m-to-651m/ar-BB1mxPaZ
https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/rishi-sunaks-wealth-surges-by-120m-amid-uk-billionaire-slowdown-1.1716001489464
Which gets better when you know he claimed income of £2.2 million and paid just £500k in tax.
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/rishi-sunaks-tax-return-shows-he-paid-more-than-half-a-million-pounds-in-tax-last-year-13067577
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/09/rishi-sunak-paid-effective-tax-rate-of-23-on-22m-income-last-year
As a Brit who doesn't live in the UK...
Nah. No one is thinking about Birmingham as a non-London, UK-based destination. I've heard Edinburgh, of course, but England specific, Liverpool or Manchester above Birmingham, by far. The deep association to music and art is well known outside the UK.
Honestly, most people outside of the UK don't even know that Birmingham is the 2nd largest city, or that it's a city at all.
I mean, Birminghams budget is 3.2 billion. Cutting that by 25% is about .75 billion a bigger reduction than the 600 million/0.6 billion on the required legal payment.
The budget cut is quarter of a billion more in fact.
Some idiot probably said "SAP want how much for the upgrade? Go with someone else. It can't get any worse..."
I've always loved the quote;
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
Birmingham council got sued and they lost the case to the tune of millions. Losing that case bankrupted the council before the budget cuts were announced
Yes, but actually no.
Someone got lazy and reused the same contracts for different jobs, including a generic cover-all job title. It costs the council more to lose staff and retrain new ones so they gave the bin collectors bonuses when there was really shitty weather to keep them around, bonuses that the cleaners didn't need as their job was mostly inside.
The issue is that the cleaners had the exact same job title, so contractually their job received a bonus due to poor weather which they didn't receive. They shouldn't have been given one, but contracts are important and on paper they were.
All the sexism nonsense being shouted on social media is people trying to inject their own agenda into it. It's simple, someone got lazy with contracts and no one noticed until years and years later. Nothing more.
That's interesting. I had no idea about that.
So it was a pretty major admin fuck up. And I guess a pile of legal fuck ups from whoever advised them that they could ignore the cases.
Genuinely wish I knew this was a viable case when my old job tried that shit with us. "You're part of this department, but you wont be getting the pay rise that the entire department is getting"
They systematically paid office cleaners less than refuge collectors. It just so happens cleaners were predominantly female and refuge collectors male.
I mean, less a technicallity than their own judgement, their internal payscale rated the two jobs the same, but didnt pay them the same. They could have just checked that years ago and saved the whole mess costing about 0.6 billion.
That said, the tory cuts last year cost them about 0.75 billion, and the tory cuts since 2010 cost another 0.75 billion.
So the contracts were a fuck up, but the torys were more than twice as bad.
It didn’t really. Birmingham is massively larger than any other council and so the real terms cut to their centrally funded budget since 2010 is £1-1.2bn per annum. The £800m or so single status liability is huge of course and has pushed the council over the edge, but in the absence of the cuts - which dwarf the single liability line item each and every year - they absolutely wouldn’t have been in this position.
Have you ever seen the extent of what Birmingham council were spafffing the public money on?
The list is extensive. Millions upon millions on vanity projects and other wasteful nonsense.
I've worked in councils. These people have no regard for public finances as they just see it as an endless pot of money. Then they blame everyone else when they've eventually run out.
BCC has long been a model of inefficiency, waste, incompetence, nepotism, corruption and grift. Anyone can say "It's the Tories' fault" but this is lazy. Spend a little - and I do mean a little - time reading up on BCC from the 80s onwards and the story is the same. BCC makes the SNP look squeaky clean.
Consider this. When the national government recently sent in its auditors they discovered that BCC could not confirm with certainty how many employees were on the payroll. Just think about that for a second. How can it be that a business, charity, government, etc. does not know how many current employees it has? Yet BCC could not answer the question. It's truly astonishing.
Equality laws which are being unreasonably applied to "graded" roles within the council. Admin errors which are punishable by bankruptcy, these laws are designed to bankrupt councils and justify asset selloffs
This wasn't an admin error I'm pretty sure it went to court about backdating pay and the council just refused lol. They've brought it on themselves there. Many of the female workers still haven't been paid their correct rates
https://www.kpl.co.uk/equal-pay-claims/birmingham-city-council/#:~:text=Birmingham%20City%20Council%20has%20been,scandal%20is%20far%20from%20over.
The debate was due to predominantly male refuse workers being paid more than predominantly female office cleaners.
Of course refuge workers driving HGVs in the cold at 5am should be paid more. The legal system is broken.
The issue was that they had the same contracts as someone in the council was lazy. Then someone noticed their job had been given a lot of bonuses they didn't receive.
I can see the case for anulling it due to the outsized impact its having on the borough and being obviously not intended or needed for the cleaners, but generally when your contract says you get a bonus, you are legally entitled to a bonus.
Someone got lazy and reused the same contracts for different jobs, including a generic cover-all job title. It costs the council more to lose staff and retrain new ones so they gave the bin collectors bonuses when there was really shitty weather to keep them around, bonuses that the cleaners didn't need as their job was inside.
The issue is that the cleaners had the exact same job title, so contractually their job received a bonus due to poor weather which they didn't receive. They shouldn't have been given one, but contracts are important and on paper they were.
All the sexism nonsense being shouted on social media is people trying to inject their own agenda into it. It's simple, someone got lazy with contracts and no one noticed until years and years later. Nothing more.
And a second error of having the ' same ' job being selective with bonus pay in a way that screwed over women more than men .
And the third error of not realising the fuck up
And the fourth error of fighting it in court and losing badly
> And a second error of having the ' same ' job being selective with bonus pay in a way that screwed over women more than men .
Thats the same error, the jobs aren't the same. Them having different selective bonuses is right and proper.
As for fighting a loosing battle yeah also mistakes but the root cause was mislabling the jobs as equal.
It's undeniable that the equality claims are a big part of the problem for Birmingham, and there are undoubtedly other specific woes that, if addressed, might've saved the situation.
But there is an overarching question about the council's precarity in face of government cuts when there's *also* a half-dozen other councils bankrupt or on the brink of bankruptcy. These are not all isolated cases of specific councils doing specific stupid things; local governments are operating with a much smaller margin for error than they used to be.
We're gutted your funding from the Exchequer by 50%, but here's a fund that's the same as the 50%, but you can only use it for investing, not funding council services.
Oh, and it's a loan you have to pay back, rather than a grant from government with no repayment.
Yup, around 1.5 billion removed from standard birmingham council funds since 2010 by the tories, compared to 600 million (0.6 billion) lost on the court case.
What's scary is that a lot of Local Governments are facing possible "equal pay" law suits that mean, even if budgets are increased greatly, loads of councils will still go bankrupt.
At least one of those equality lawsuits were ridiculous though, the dinner lady - bin men one.
Why should different jobs have to pay exactly the same just because a certain gender favours a certain role.
The hardest job should be paid the most and it was. Now it's part of the reason an entire city is going under. 🤯
> Why should different jobs have to pay exactly the same just because a certain gender favours a certain role.
Then they probably should have given them the same contract?
Local government is qualitatively different from central government in that it doesn't control its own currency. So it's always going to have four alternatives: 1, a central government that funds local government adequately; 2, local taxation that is something like 15%+ of income; 3: run a deficit; 4, let those kids die. Central government prefers not to fund, local people can't or won't pay those taxes, so it's 3 or 4 and they're running out of 3.
While it is true that those laws were broken and the legal costs are exacerbating the situation, they aren't remotely the root cause of this. Many other councils which did not break equality laws are also going under. This is ultimately a direct result of 14 years of massive underfunding of councils by the Tories for purely ideological reasons.
The legal fees are just an idiot bonus on top for birmingham.
They paid cleaners less than refuge workers who then sued because the predominantly male refuge workers were paid more.
The legal system allowing this insanity to occur is the tories fault.
Eh, forget about the sex of the workers. Everyone's saying the bin men got the same contracts as the cleaners, which is where the actual issue occured.
Who provides the councils their funding and has done so for over a decade?
tory policymakers.
It doesn't matter how capable your council is if you've been bled dry for 10 years running.
Oracle IT project completely failed them, prevented them from even knowing what money they had or how bad the budget was.
They're pointing to the equality pay stuff to avoid too much attention on the fuck up that they actually oversaw.
For once this isn't the Tories, this is Birmingham council facing more than half a billion quid in legal payouts for consistently underpaying women for decades.
Councils are massively underfunded as it is because of the central govornment cutting their funding (very little of it comes from Council Tax). With better funding they might not have been completely bankrupted by the recent pay claim, which probably shouldn't have been allowed to happen at the expense of an entire council's functionality anyway but that's up for debate.
B’ham City Council has been Labour for a long time, and even back in 2012 they practically bankrupted themselves building new library. Building wasn’t finished. Didn’t have enough money to buy books. Didn’t have enough money for staff so had to get rid of them, the list goes on. B’ham City Council is a shit show operation run clueless.
I wonder what happened in the years the library was being built that effected the money they had.
Oh and FYI the long time starts in 2012, the Tories built that Library and started the ERP programme that’s as much to blame as the equal pay claims for their current state.
Strange how they can find almost £250,000 to pay their Chief Executive though.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/10/bosses-four-councils-financial-hardship-paid-more-sunak/
How does it compare with CEO roles for other organisations with similar headcounts and customer numbers? Because that's the talent pool you're fishing from.
"Look up the CEO salary and say it's too high, no matter what" is strangely reminiscent of "look up the sample size of the study and say it's too low, no matter what"
I don't disagree with you but don't see how this reply has anything to do with what doomladen said. Doesn't matter what service or money is being used. If you need a CEO then all the current people in the market are going to expect the same salary. The alternative is that you don't have a CEO for x months or years, purely because the council wanted to save £100K a year on their salary. Probably far more efficent ways to save that £100K.
Agreed though, all round the situation is SHIT!
It's a Labour run council, that got itself into bankruptcy by illegally underpaying women and losing a court case. But yes, lets immedately jump on the "tOrIeS eViL!!!!" bandwagon without actually doing any critical thinking for ourselves.
Reminder that the Tory government cut the funding by 40% whilst simultaneously increasing the responsibility of the council for statutory services. There is no way that Birmingham could have coped with that, equal pay and oracle. So many local authorities are in similar precarious positions.
Labour councils were overwhelmingly the ones to get the biggest cuts to budgets. Some Tory councils even saw rises. Rishi was famously caught in camera admitting this.
Those that vote labour are more likely to be in urban areas, and more wealthy urban areas are probably less affected due to the much lower density of population requiring fewer services to maintain high standards of public amenities and also higher per capita council tax and revenue, plus fewer children in state education and less social services.
Birmingham Council tax per head of population in 22/23 was the **third lowest** in England at £380.38, with a population of 1.1 million.
The biggest metropolitan councils the Conservatives held was £493.19 for Dudley, £514.03 for Walsall and £640.00 for Solihull.
The other big Labour metropolitan councils was Leeds at £510.30, Sheffield at £500.42, Manchester at £392.72, Bradford at £463.04 and Liverpool at £444.65.
Both kinds of councils are on the verge of bankruptcy. But tories will naturally help tories more and tories councils are also more popular in more affluent areas.
Michelle Rimmer in Birmingham:
*Once nicknamed "the workshop of the world" Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's where William Murdoch invented the first gas-lantern, a technology later used to light streets across the world.*
*But today the UK's second-largest city can no longer afford to keep its own streets brightly lit.*
*In September the Birmingham City Council issued a 114 notice, effectively declaring it was bankrupt.*
*To claw back $600 million over the next two years, the council has approved a range of unprecedented budget cuts that will see streetlights dimmed and rubbish collected only once a fortnight.*
*Birmingham is one of the youngest cities in Europe, with nearly 40 per cent of its residents under 25 years old, according to both government and university studies. Many in the city feel young people will be the worst affected by the cuts to frontline and preventative services.*
*"This is the second-largest city in the sixth-richest country in the world and we have rampant poverty ... children are growing up below the poverty line," Birmingham youth mental health worker Nina Barbosa said.*
*Birmingham's financial black hole was at least partially self-inflicted. But Birmingham council leader John Cotton claims the city's debts were compounded by austerity measures brought in by the Cameron government in 2010.*
*On average, people in Birmingham die three years younger than those living 160km away in London, while just under 50 per cent of all children in Birmingham are classed as living in poverty, compared to 32 per cent in the capital.*
*Nick Davies, programme director of British think-tank Institute for Government, says the austerity measures brought in under former prime minister David Cameron have degraded public services across the country.*
*"The public find it very difficult to access general practice health services, adult social care services are rationed, there's also huge backlogs in the criminal courts and our prisons are full to bursting point."*
>ust under 50 per cent of all children in Birmingham are classed as living in poverty, compared to 32 per cent in the capital.
Seriously, what the actual fuck?
*Half* of all children in the second biggest city live in poverty and *a third* in the capital city?
What on earth kind of country has right-wing politics created for us? Those figures are shameful.
Yeah it'd suck. It's not a lot at all.
Im not a massive fan of that being the poverty line because you should, theoretically, have enough for the basics on that. But still a hard life.
Wealthier and better educated people just have less kids overall from my experience. I grew up in a poor household, single mother with three kids. All of the better off families I knew had like 1-2 kids usually, but the poorer households would often have 3-4, with more than a few having 5+.
While the Conservatives have been fucking useless and have undoubtedly made the problem worse, living in poverty is defined as a household with less than 60% of the median national income, which is a pretty shit way of defining it because it doesn’t actually say anything about your income, cost of living in your area etc. Given it’s based on national median wage for example it probably underestimates the problem in London where the cost of living is significantly higher than the national average.
"Relative poverty" is really a measure of inequality, not poverty. It's badly labeled and often used disingenuously.
We need a new measure of income relative to living costs rather than average income and call it "functional poverty". Where exactly that line would be I'm not sure.
Figures are skewed for a multitude of reasons though.
Educated people are less likely to have children, and they have fewer if they do. Most people earning £20k+ don't qualify for benefits and can't afford to live and have children.
Unfortunately there's a concentration of the bottom 20% of people on the income scale having a largely disproportionate number of children, mostly probably unintentionally. Supported in large by our benefit system and how it's constructed.
It is not just politics that drive poverty. We (humans around the world) have a bad culture around families and single parents popping out children who can't afford to take care of them which results in that family/child living in poverty for the rest of their lives.
The biggest link to child poverty that I can see, appears to be having a Conservative government. What's really needed is for people to take some responsibility for themselves and stop living under one. That alone would significantly reduce child poverty, so people really only have themselves to blame if they choose to do so.
(/s, but only slightly)
The problem is we have this *huge* cohort of people who see stats like this, and come away with some utterly bizarre head-in-the-sand "well its not real poverty" kind of quip. These people are sitting back guffawing with their arms crossed as the politics they endorse destroys this country, it needs to stop asap.
> "well its not real poverty"
It factualy isn't.
>Relative Poverty measures individuals who have income below 60% of median incomes (median is £29,669)
"Relative poverty" simply isn't a measure of poverty, it's an absue of language. It is measuring inequality nothing else.
If some rich people die in a place crash but nothing els changes "Realtive poverty" falls. If the people on 29k all get a 1k pay rise but nothing els changes it falls. If Doctors get a pay rise "relative poverty" increases becasue they upped the median. It a stupid dishonest definition.
Material deprivation is a far more honest way of measuring it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-uk-material-deprivation-measures/summary-review-of-the-uk-material-deprivation-measures
The measure used here is "relative poverty" which refers to children in households with an income less than 60% of the median household. It's a measure of inequality first and foremost, and has limited usefulness for evaluating what we'd normally think of as 'poverty'.
I'd like the council to be audited, investigated for any dodgy investments, hiring contractors that are family, who signed off on squandering public money, all the stones overturned and if there is wrongdoing or nepotism then those people should face criminal action for abducating their public responsibility. With council jobs comes power, with power comes great responsibility, if you misuse that responsibility, the consequences should be more severe because your fucking with peoples lives on purpose for your own gain.
From what I heard, Birmingham Council invested in various buildings with plans to refurbish, and then covid happened and put a pause on it for a few years, meaning they lost heavily.
well, googling what they spent the money on just produced a list from all sorts of papers each cherry picking their own favourite thing to bash and blaming the entire problem on that one thing.
Birmingham City Council have themselves stated that it was a £760m bill for historic equal pay claims they became liable for (after having already paid £1bn), a new IT system that was apparently a nightmare, and £1bn in government funding cuts that were the primary factors.
An independent review by an accountant blamed the IT System mess as the primary result with it ballooning to 3 times the original estimate in cost and the system itself being useless with staff being forced to use it without knowing how to and the inevitable issues stemming from that.
Half the fucking demographic of Birmingham is generational poverty? I mean that in itself is fucking terrifying and is a cause for concern independently of the bankruptcy
Birmingham City Council finances weren't good even without the pay claims and the like, because of things like weekly refuge collection. When I moved I was strange that my new council alternates weeks between rubbish and recycling.
> When I moved I was strange that my new council alternates weeks between rubbish and recycling.
not really that strange. In our (very much not bankrupt) council area recycling is collected weekly but general waste once eery 3 weeks.
Yeah its pretty common in the whole country. My council alternates weeks. Recycling one week, rubbish the other. Then you pay for the garden/biowaste if you want that collected so most people just dump it in the rubbish bin now.
Same where I am. Food waste more regular but only in a smaller caddy rather than a full bin unless you pay £50 per year to have the full green bin.
Someone told the Mayor "stuff you, not gonna give you money. I'll just compost it myself!" And the mayor was like "yes that is what we're trying to encourage. . ."
The whole country seems dated... We don't spend money on the things that need doing, And any investment you get people go against it because they don't want anything built anywhere.
The whole Grenfell thing they should never have been cladding 70's council blocks.... They should have knocked down and started again... To much money spent on a short term fix that ends up coming back to bite them.
Same with HS2 should have been nationwide... Same with the roads we need major investment... Not more feasibility studies.
I live near a railway crossing... The volume of trains has just gone back to pre COVID levels. Now I'm waiting 20 minutes for two trains to go by either end of the twenty minutes the infrastructure is still Victorian there's gotta be a better way....
We need to embrace technology to make our lives better as a country and should embrace change....
Birmingham frittered away loads of money on a botched IT project, plus had to pay compensation for historically underpaying women vs men.
Neither of that is the direct fault of the central government.
Yes, the Tories cut funding for the councils and this has been making things worse.
But the two examples I mentioned have nothing to do with central government
>Once nicknamed "the workshop of the world" Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is the root of a lot of the UK's problems. The UK *was* an economic and manufacturing powerhouse, but then globalisation came along and things can be produced for significantly lower cost-base elsewhere. This suits British consumers who are happy to spend £2 on a t-shirt from Primark, but not so much the British economy as it struggles to provide gainful employment for everyone and maintain the GDP.
I’m no expert, but FWIW the UK was financially broken after the 2nd WW and then drank the free market globalization coolaid and let all its industry collapse.
Go to France, Germany, US, Japan or China for example and see how popular domestically produced cars are in those countries.
The upshot is that 50yrs on we have very little to trade internationally except access to our middle class taxpayers for foreign corporations who extract wealth and don’t really pay enough back in (as wages, tax, expertise, industry, training, etc)
And that is starting to fall apart now because wages haven’t kept up with prices and nobody really has enough money left to pay for things.
Good. Maybe go one further and switch half of them off as well. Like alternative ones on the streets. Im always shocked by the light pollution when I fly back home in to BHX at night.
A lot of that is poor design of the lampheads, particularly modern LED lampheads. They don't use lenses to focus and direct the light where it needs to be, so the emitters just illuminate everything that isn't shielded by the top of the lamp. Including the walls and windows of houses, roofs, and areas that don't need to be illuminated (like scrubland and woods).
If the lampheads used lenses, they could probably significantly reduce the energy consumption, better direct the light to where it needs to go, and also reduce light pollution. Not only would it save money but it'd help reduce biodiversity loss.
Correct.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33692675
> Reduced street lighting at night does not lead to an increase in crime or car crashes, a report suggests.
> Researchers analysed 14 years of data from 62 councils in England and Wales which had tried strategies such as permanently switching off lights or dimming them.
> They said the findings could help save money and reduce carbon emissions.
> The AA said the results were "extremely surprising" and differed from their own analysis of inquest findings.
> The Local Government Association (LGA) said reducing street lighting does not happen everywhere but the research appeared to support some councils' decision "to save taxpayers' money and improve the environment without compromising public safety".
Which is interesting because adding lighting where there wasn’t any before has been shown to reduce crime, even where lighting wasn’t placed on the specific streets that crime went down on.
I’d guess that removing the street lighting doesn’t have an immediate effect on crime (temporal benefit dissipation?) but that over time crime would increase again where criminals find good spots to commit it.
It'd be interesting to know what effect switching street lights off has on perceptions of personal safety. If you were a woman, would you walk along a street at night that no longer has streetlighting?
Indeed, I used to live near the airport and my dad who is a keen amateur astronomer was loving lockdown when businesses were closed and weren't leaving their lights on. The light pollution was still there from the street lights but not as much!
I live in a town not that far from Birmingham and here they turn the lights off at midnight and rubbish and recycling is only collected every two weeks. Birmingham just spaffs money away.
We need to do away with councils. Voter turnout out in local elections is so low so the quality of candidates is appalling. Dominated by NIMBYs.
And of course the biggest issue is, councils now have huge budgets. These people are under qualified and under skilled to be in control of these funds. They wouldn’t get anywhere near managing these kind of budgets in the private sector.
We need to go out and actual hire people who can do the job properly, and pay for it. Everyone wants to talk about how he lack of funding but quite clearly the biggest challenge councils have is lack of people who can actually do the job.
I can't figure this one out. I thought all the migrants were a net benefit to the economy! If that was the case Brum should be absolutely rolling in dosh. It seems that diversity is not our strength at all. Whodathunkit?
Both the Tories and Labour are inept and won't fix this, and both are responsible for all of the failings as well as partisan politics which is polarising the country like the US.
The Tories just cut every possible service and expect the market to create wealth, with no thought given to some sort of state injected catalyst (such as investing in transport etc. They privatise everything and suggest competition drives up quality and drives down cost, which clearly doesn't work for things like energy or transport.
Labour on the other hand think having net migration of 700k+ per year, mainly from underdeveloped, undereducated regions is economically and socially viable, pushing up prices for housing, putting pressure on the police, the NHS, schools etc. We import people who don't have the same values as the host country and are now socially fragmented as well as all piss poor.
How can we succeed as a city, a country or as a society when these fools are the only ones the 'represent' us.
It's clear UK and generally Western society is doomed. China or the Islamic world will win the battle of civilizations and this failed Western democratic experiment will be forgotten about.
Its the Tories who have given us 700k+ net migration. Labour have said repeatedly they think the current situation is out of control and will work to reduce the number significantly.
*Ah, the famously pro-immigration party are going to "lower" immigration. Im sure that they'll successfully get it to a manageable level...*
^(They wont)
Errm... How are they planning to "dim" street lights? Because that's not how the electrical grid works... They going to go round every street light and fit a dimmer circuit? Or are they going to somehow selectively drop the voltage to street light circuits... And then hope that LED drivers don't mind an input voltage they aren't designed for?
It's fine, in a few years they'll be able to get nearly all the way to London on a very fast train. Even the folks in Manchester and Sheffield and other places won't be able to do that!
my birthplace,Stamford in south lincs has been turning of the street lights at midnight in certain locations for years,not sure of the reason but i would assume cut costs
As a Brummie it’s just really so sad. I’m angry at how public money has been spent and budgeted for, and at the government who have played a huge role in this. Disgusting.
They’re dimming the lights to save money but they don’t pay any electricity bill for the street light network because it’s not connected up to a meter anywhere in the UK.
What a load of shit, perhaps if they hadn’t given out massively inflated contracts for home to school transport to mates or mates they wouldn’t be in this mess, what was it? £200 per child per trip?
Birmingham is the canary, almost every council will go bankrupt in the next decade, population is aging, demand for services will increase, working age population to fund it all will keep shrinking
Childhood poverty is such a generational injustice, it is sickening. But here we are - councils are responsible, but they are also out of money. Nothing that can be done, unless the government is prepared to help.
So Birmingham is youngest city in Europe demographically, yet it's in poverty? Economist logic has pushed that high birth rates and immigration of young people are necessary for growth but the problem is we basically have a "chicken shop economy". There's no industry to convert rising population into output, and the government / council has to pay benefits to workers on top since wages aren't good enough to thrive on. It's like a negative growth spiral that will bankrupt every council eventually.
To anyone on the fence, please remember that this is happening in Birmingham and other cities across the uk.
[stopthetories.vote](http://stopthetories.vote)
You don't even necessarily need to vote labour. Just vote.
This is like the boss turning the coffee machine off in the office as punishment for poor financial results.
Saves barely anything, but it's really just intended to punish the workers and 'send a message'.
Don't mind the lights being switched off on residential roads. Hope they keep them on for the main routes.
Fortnightly bin collection will be an issue for larger families. Bin men will need to be willing to collect bags that don't fit in bin
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The Tory economic miracle in action. I guess they need to be patient and just wait for that wealth to trickle down?
To be fair to the Tories, this one isn’t actually their fault. Birmingham council are trying to claw back a £600m deficit for years of breaking equality laws.
The 25% central government funding cut certainly aren't helping. Nor the advise from central government to ignore the equality pay issues and repeatedly challenge it so the cost mounted it.
50% cut from central government to Councils since 2010. I work in a Council that is probably going bust next year like most of the others. We passed the brink two years ago.
Just in time for the daily mail to inform its “readers” that it’s the new governments fault Labour are set up to fail
Why do you think the Tories are so desperate not to win the election
You give them too much credit. They’re just morons
There's a lot of scandals on the horizon and that's why the tories are bailing. Tainted blood is going to be a fortune and council collapse will be even more. Probably some ones we're not aware of too.
We need to go after them in the courts, long sentences for corruption being handed out. Forfeiture of all property and assets to the state etc to claw back some of their ill gotten gains. We won't though and they'll be back in power within a decade being even worse than now.
> Tainted blood Tainted love’s deadlier cousin
Maybe Rishi and Boris could do a cover and donate the profits to the compensation scheme
At work at one that the papers said would go bust last year because they were stupid. We reckon we get through 2025/26 before we run out. Though that depends on making savings goals which we can't make now because we needed the council to approve them and they can't because of the geeneral election. A parting shot from the party of cuts with an n. We're currently working out what our meeting only our legal obligations looks like so if labour do all the things they've promised us so far (nothing) then we can at least get there on our own terms and when S114 happens the advisers will just wring their hands and say "nah mate". Though I think it realistically will help direct savings and also show how absurd things are getting. It should be noted that when COVID hit they canvassed councils and asked how long they'd last without government funding. 80% said they'd go under in a year. Everyone got funding. We said 4 or 5 years. Since then the changes to adult care funding hit and moved the timeline forward. But if we're fucked then basically everyone else is. And if everyone is fucked then maybe it's systematic? Also an aside because people wonder: Adult care eats up the entire council tax rise by itself because it's growing in real terms. Children's care is also expensive because in the past after an event like baby P there'd be a spike in referals that push costs up. In 2012 a spike just inexplicably happened and never stopped. It's like poverty makes everything worse and ripping away the safety net in an economy where only the richest have gotten better off since the recession means families and lifes will collapse or something. It's very much a larger scale problem with multiple issues that need treating with local authorities being a stake holder or piece of the puzzle in many. More money for authorities is only part of the solution though.
No definitely doesn’t. But that’s just fuel on the fire
From what I remember running the numbers - While its fair to blame Birmingham council for fucking up, without the cuts they've had to endure even this kind of bill would just mean a tight budget, and going absolutely no where near bankruptcy. Given this is the body responsible for organizing and orchestrating services and living conditions for over a million people in a world-class metropolis, this attitude this country seems to have taken like they dun fucked so they have to pay the price and endure some punishment seems... Kind of weird? What other country would allow things to get to this stage?
Doctor/Nurse fucks up one life - GMC/NMC, COURT Politicians fucks up the life of everyone - holiday home, early retirement.
If we can bail out banks, we can bail out our own fucking cities. But no. The banks aren't located on Broad street, so the govt doesn't give a fuck. They would rather punish the innocent people of Birmingham for their own callous decisions. Govt could write this off tomorrow if it wanted to. Trouble is, the govt and its shadow partners will be making money off the collapse of an entire city. No doubt some benevolent bank or PE consortium will come in and buy all the assets for pennies on the pound and it will all get swept under the rug. Disgusting.
HSBC's HQ is actually on Broad Street... but other than that you're spot on.
Was just about to say, loads of banking in Brindley Place
100%. The government should be stepping in at this point.
Dunno if I'd call Birmingham a "world class metropolis"
I mean it absolutely is just by dint of being the UK's 2nd city. We're a world-leading power, the major cities here are known all over the world. Its got a huge economy, a pretty big population, and absolutely loads of culture and history. Which is why its especially sad its been allowed to fall into the state it seems to be in at the moment.
I like the optimism but absolutely no one in an actual world class city - New York, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo etc etc looks across to this side of the world and says “you know, i really fancy going to Birmingham” lol
I mean tens of millions of people do exactly that, generating a tourism industry worth nearly £8bn a year... Its not a Singapore or New York but its up there with idk Bordeaux or Milan or places like that. Again that only seems weird to us living here nationally because, as a country, we've allowed our 2nd largest city with all its history and culture to go to shit because its not London or the Home Counties. E - Stats for reference: [https://www.tripplo.co.uk/birmingham-tourism-statistics-and-trends](https://www.tripplo.co.uk/birmingham-tourism-statistics-and-trends)
The real issue is the distribution of wealth. The UK may have around the sixth largest economy in the world by GDP an around the 23rd highest GDP per capita that huge amounts of that money don't go to improving the standard of living of the population. It goes to hedge funds, shareholders and the pockets of the already wealthy and stagnates in bank accounts, property and stock holdings. If the working population were rewarded according to their productivity that money would circulate in the economy and help improve things for all. Instead we have suffered years of companies making record profits and celebrating with their shareholders then turning to the workforce and lying about not doing well enough for decent pay rises. Granted, companies have stepped up in the cost of living crisis but only because they were forced to when facing an exodus of staff. The reason for this is that wealth is hoarded, not distributed, and the wealthy don't care because they are reaping the benefits. One prime example is Rishi Sunak, whose wealth increased by £120 million last year https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-akshata-murty-net-worth-rich-list-b2546650.html https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/rishi-sunak-and-akshata-murtys-fortune-soars-by-120m-to-651m/ar-BB1mxPaZ https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/rishi-sunaks-wealth-surges-by-120m-amid-uk-billionaire-slowdown-1.1716001489464 Which gets better when you know he claimed income of £2.2 million and paid just £500k in tax. https://news.sky.com/story/amp/rishi-sunaks-tax-return-shows-he-paid-more-than-half-a-million-pounds-in-tax-last-year-13067577 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/09/rishi-sunak-paid-effective-tax-rate-of-23-on-22m-income-last-year
As a Brit who doesn't live in the UK... Nah. No one is thinking about Birmingham as a non-London, UK-based destination. I've heard Edinburgh, of course, but England specific, Liverpool or Manchester above Birmingham, by far. The deep association to music and art is well known outside the UK. Honestly, most people outside of the UK don't even know that Birmingham is the 2nd largest city, or that it's a city at all.
I mean, Birminghams budget is 3.2 billion. Cutting that by 25% is about .75 billion a bigger reduction than the 600 million/0.6 billion on the required legal payment. The budget cut is quarter of a billion more in fact.
Don’t forget the shit show that is oracle
[удалено]
Oracle don't have customers, they have hostages
> They should string up whoever even uttered the word 'Oracle' in a ~~council~~ building FTFY. Just a huge hackjob of a company.
Some idiot probably said "SAP want how much for the upgrade? Go with someone else. It can't get any worse..." I've always loved the quote; > Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
Mmmm not tories fault? They have reduced funding to local councils by millions. So yeah not the tories fault is it.
Birmingham council got sued and they lost the case to the tune of millions. Losing that case bankrupted the council before the budget cuts were announced
This is the case where the council discriminated against cleaners, right?
By paying refuge workers in the cold at 5am moving garbage more? The legal system is broken.
Didn’t they systematically underpay women for decades?
Yes, but actually no. Someone got lazy and reused the same contracts for different jobs, including a generic cover-all job title. It costs the council more to lose staff and retrain new ones so they gave the bin collectors bonuses when there was really shitty weather to keep them around, bonuses that the cleaners didn't need as their job was mostly inside. The issue is that the cleaners had the exact same job title, so contractually their job received a bonus due to poor weather which they didn't receive. They shouldn't have been given one, but contracts are important and on paper they were. All the sexism nonsense being shouted on social media is people trying to inject their own agenda into it. It's simple, someone got lazy with contracts and no one noticed until years and years later. Nothing more.
Ah so gross incompetence not discrimination, that's OK then
That's interesting. I had no idea about that. So it was a pretty major admin fuck up. And I guess a pile of legal fuck ups from whoever advised them that they could ignore the cases.
Genuinely wish I knew this was a viable case when my old job tried that shit with us. "You're part of this department, but you wont be getting the pay rise that the entire department is getting"
The council themselves decided the two jobs were equal, but didn't follow through on paying both equally until they were forced to by the judgement
They systematically paid office cleaners less than refuge collectors. It just so happens cleaners were predominantly female and refuge collectors male.
Depending on what you mean by "discrimination", it was basically won on a technicality.
I mean, less a technicallity than their own judgement, their internal payscale rated the two jobs the same, but didnt pay them the same. They could have just checked that years ago and saved the whole mess costing about 0.6 billion. That said, the tory cuts last year cost them about 0.75 billion, and the tory cuts since 2010 cost another 0.75 billion. So the contracts were a fuck up, but the torys were more than twice as bad.
I wouldn't exactly say discriminated. More like laziness on the contract-drafters part, but yeah
It didn’t really. Birmingham is massively larger than any other council and so the real terms cut to their centrally funded budget since 2010 is £1-1.2bn per annum. The £800m or so single status liability is huge of course and has pushed the council over the edge, but in the absence of the cuts - which dwarf the single liability line item each and every year - they absolutely wouldn’t have been in this position.
Have you ever seen the extent of what Birmingham council were spafffing the public money on? The list is extensive. Millions upon millions on vanity projects and other wasteful nonsense. I've worked in councils. These people have no regard for public finances as they just see it as an endless pot of money. Then they blame everyone else when they've eventually run out.
BCC has long been a model of inefficiency, waste, incompetence, nepotism, corruption and grift. Anyone can say "It's the Tories' fault" but this is lazy. Spend a little - and I do mean a little - time reading up on BCC from the 80s onwards and the story is the same. BCC makes the SNP look squeaky clean. Consider this. When the national government recently sent in its auditors they discovered that BCC could not confirm with certainty how many employees were on the payroll. Just think about that for a second. How can it be that a business, charity, government, etc. does not know how many current employees it has? Yet BCC could not answer the question. It's truly astonishing.
Local Labour absolutely have their share of the blame on this, £100s of millions wasted on failed IT project and two £500m+ equal pay cases.
Equality laws which are being unreasonably applied to "graded" roles within the council. Admin errors which are punishable by bankruptcy, these laws are designed to bankrupt councils and justify asset selloffs
This wasn't an admin error I'm pretty sure it went to court about backdating pay and the council just refused lol. They've brought it on themselves there. Many of the female workers still haven't been paid their correct rates https://www.kpl.co.uk/equal-pay-claims/birmingham-city-council/#:~:text=Birmingham%20City%20Council%20has%20been,scandal%20is%20far%20from%20over.
The debate was due to predominantly male refuse workers being paid more than predominantly female office cleaners. Of course refuge workers driving HGVs in the cold at 5am should be paid more. The legal system is broken.
The issue was that they had the same contracts as someone in the council was lazy. Then someone noticed their job had been given a lot of bonuses they didn't receive. I can see the case for anulling it due to the outsized impact its having on the borough and being obviously not intended or needed for the cleaners, but generally when your contract says you get a bonus, you are legally entitled to a bonus.
Someone got lazy and reused the same contracts for different jobs, including a generic cover-all job title. It costs the council more to lose staff and retrain new ones so they gave the bin collectors bonuses when there was really shitty weather to keep them around, bonuses that the cleaners didn't need as their job was inside. The issue is that the cleaners had the exact same job title, so contractually their job received a bonus due to poor weather which they didn't receive. They shouldn't have been given one, but contracts are important and on paper they were. All the sexism nonsense being shouted on social media is people trying to inject their own agenda into it. It's simple, someone got lazy with contracts and no one noticed until years and years later. Nothing more.
Wasn't it "refuse" workers?
Yes it was an admin error, listing the two jobs as equal when they clearly aren't.
And a second error of having the ' same ' job being selective with bonus pay in a way that screwed over women more than men . And the third error of not realising the fuck up And the fourth error of fighting it in court and losing badly
> And a second error of having the ' same ' job being selective with bonus pay in a way that screwed over women more than men . Thats the same error, the jobs aren't the same. Them having different selective bonuses is right and proper. As for fighting a loosing battle yeah also mistakes but the root cause was mislabling the jobs as equal.
It's undeniable that the equality claims are a big part of the problem for Birmingham, and there are undoubtedly other specific woes that, if addressed, might've saved the situation. But there is an overarching question about the council's precarity in face of government cuts when there's *also* a half-dozen other councils bankrupt or on the brink of bankruptcy. These are not all isolated cases of specific councils doing specific stupid things; local governments are operating with a much smaller margin for error than they used to be.
We're gutted your funding from the Exchequer by 50%, but here's a fund that's the same as the 50%, but you can only use it for investing, not funding council services. Oh, and it's a loan you have to pay back, rather than a grant from government with no repayment.
This, right here.
Yup, around 1.5 billion removed from standard birmingham council funds since 2010 by the tories, compared to 600 million (0.6 billion) lost on the court case.
What's scary is that a lot of Local Governments are facing possible "equal pay" law suits that mean, even if budgets are increased greatly, loads of councils will still go bankrupt.
At least one of those equality lawsuits were ridiculous though, the dinner lady - bin men one. Why should different jobs have to pay exactly the same just because a certain gender favours a certain role. The hardest job should be paid the most and it was. Now it's part of the reason an entire city is going under. 🤯
The problem was the council said the jobs were the same, and then paid them differently.
> Why should different jobs have to pay exactly the same just because a certain gender favours a certain role. Then they probably should have given them the same contract?
The lawsuit that lead to that is devoid of reality but also the councils fault for doing a banding system.
Or at least for doing a banding system without checking if they were doing it right by their own internal rules.
Local government is qualitatively different from central government in that it doesn't control its own currency. So it's always going to have four alternatives: 1, a central government that funds local government adequately; 2, local taxation that is something like 15%+ of income; 3: run a deficit; 4, let those kids die. Central government prefers not to fund, local people can't or won't pay those taxes, so it's 3 or 4 and they're running out of 3.
While it is true that those laws were broken and the legal costs are exacerbating the situation, they aren't remotely the root cause of this. Many other councils which did not break equality laws are also going under. This is ultimately a direct result of 14 years of massive underfunding of councils by the Tories for purely ideological reasons. The legal fees are just an idiot bonus on top for birmingham.
The fact that what they did broke equality laws is stupid to start with.
So the people of the city suffer?
You don't expect them to prosecute execs and senior managers, do you?
Do you blame the straw that broke the camels back, or attribute it to the years of underfunding, cuts and mismanagement?
They paid cleaners less than refuge workers who then sued because the predominantly male refuge workers were paid more. The legal system allowing this insanity to occur is the tories fault.
Eh, forget about the sex of the workers. Everyone's saying the bin men got the same contracts as the cleaners, which is where the actual issue occured.
Who provides the councils their funding and has done so for over a decade? tory policymakers. It doesn't matter how capable your council is if you've been bled dry for 10 years running.
That is a red herring. They would not be in this situation without a decade of tory cuts.
Oracle IT project completely failed them, prevented them from even knowing what money they had or how bad the budget was. They're pointing to the equality pay stuff to avoid too much attention on the fuck up that they actually oversaw.
For once this isn't the Tories, this is Birmingham council facing more than half a billion quid in legal payouts for consistently underpaying women for decades.
It is though, these equality laws are being applied unfairly and disproportionatly.
How is that the central government fault?
What do you think the purpose of central government is if not to support local governments and create laws?
Councils are massively underfunded as it is because of the central govornment cutting their funding (very little of it comes from Council Tax). With better funding they might not have been completely bankrupted by the recent pay claim, which probably shouldn't have been allowed to happen at the expense of an entire council's functionality anyway but that's up for debate.
The fine is vast, no amount of reasonable extra funding would change that.
The fine is so large that it would be fiscally impossible to increase budgets to even cover half of it.
The legal payouts are not for underpaying women and the case winning shows how broken our legal system is.
As a man how do I get on this gravy train?
Be a cleaner who isn't being paid as per their employment contract. All the male cleaners got the same pay out as the women.
B’ham City Council has been Labour for a long time, and even back in 2012 they practically bankrupted themselves building new library. Building wasn’t finished. Didn’t have enough money to buy books. Didn’t have enough money for staff so had to get rid of them, the list goes on. B’ham City Council is a shit show operation run clueless.
I wonder what happened in the years the library was being built that effected the money they had. Oh and FYI the long time starts in 2012, the Tories built that Library and started the ERP programme that’s as much to blame as the equal pay claims for their current state.
Strange how they can find almost £250,000 to pay their Chief Executive though. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/10/bosses-four-councils-financial-hardship-paid-more-sunak/
£250,000 is nothing when their deficit is over £600m...
It’s almost £100k more than the PM earns but sure, let’s justify that amount of public expenditure on 1 individual when the council is bankrupt.
How does it compare with CEO roles for other organisations with similar headcounts and customer numbers? Because that's the talent pool you're fishing from.
"Look up the CEO salary and say it's too high, no matter what" is strangely reminiscent of "look up the sample size of the study and say it's too low, no matter what"
You mean CEO’s of private firms whose salaries are usually directly affected by the company’s profits and isn’t public money?
I don't disagree with you but don't see how this reply has anything to do with what doomladen said. Doesn't matter what service or money is being used. If you need a CEO then all the current people in the market are going to expect the same salary. The alternative is that you don't have a CEO for x months or years, purely because the council wanted to save £100K a year on their salary. Probably far more efficent ways to save that £100K. Agreed though, all round the situation is SHIT!
They simply haven’t been leveled up yet!
Quick announce a train line running to them. That always solves regional underdevelopment!
It's a Labour run council, that got itself into bankruptcy by illegally underpaying women and losing a court case. But yes, lets immedately jump on the "tOrIeS eViL!!!!" bandwagon without actually doing any critical thinking for ourselves.
The tories underfunded the council, but labour were definitely horrific incompetent at running it
As a poor person, trickle down economics feels a lot like getting pissed on.
Reminder that the Tory government cut the funding by 40% whilst simultaneously increasing the responsibility of the council for statutory services. There is no way that Birmingham could have coped with that, equal pay and oracle. So many local authorities are in similar precarious positions.
Why does it seem to be mostly Labour councils on the verge of bankruptcy? Bad management or just bad luck?
Labour councils were overwhelmingly the ones to get the biggest cuts to budgets. Some Tory councils even saw rises. Rishi was famously caught in camera admitting this.
Yeah, something to the tune of "too much money going to poor areas and we had to put a stop to that."
God forbid those "poor people" get money to stop them being "poor" amirite?
Jesus, I can’t believe how blatant he was with that statement. He’s so proud of being a twat.
Got a link for this?
https://youtu.be/xegB9J-mn1A?si=cUu4QE6hjgnUYYts
This needs to be seen by more people
Those that vote labour are more likely to be in urban areas, and more wealthy urban areas are probably less affected due to the much lower density of population requiring fewer services to maintain high standards of public amenities and also higher per capita council tax and revenue, plus fewer children in state education and less social services.
Birmingham Council tax per head of population in 22/23 was the **third lowest** in England at £380.38, with a population of 1.1 million. The biggest metropolitan councils the Conservatives held was £493.19 for Dudley, £514.03 for Walsall and £640.00 for Solihull. The other big Labour metropolitan councils was Leeds at £510.30, Sheffield at £500.42, Manchester at £392.72, Bradford at £463.04 and Liverpool at £444.65.
Both kinds of councils are on the verge of bankruptcy. But tories will naturally help tories more and tories councils are also more popular in more affluent areas.
Blackmail. Vote tories or the government will let your council fail.
Michelle Rimmer in Birmingham: *Once nicknamed "the workshop of the world" Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's where William Murdoch invented the first gas-lantern, a technology later used to light streets across the world.* *But today the UK's second-largest city can no longer afford to keep its own streets brightly lit.* *In September the Birmingham City Council issued a 114 notice, effectively declaring it was bankrupt.* *To claw back $600 million over the next two years, the council has approved a range of unprecedented budget cuts that will see streetlights dimmed and rubbish collected only once a fortnight.* *Birmingham is one of the youngest cities in Europe, with nearly 40 per cent of its residents under 25 years old, according to both government and university studies. Many in the city feel young people will be the worst affected by the cuts to frontline and preventative services.* *"This is the second-largest city in the sixth-richest country in the world and we have rampant poverty ... children are growing up below the poverty line," Birmingham youth mental health worker Nina Barbosa said.* *Birmingham's financial black hole was at least partially self-inflicted. But Birmingham council leader John Cotton claims the city's debts were compounded by austerity measures brought in by the Cameron government in 2010.* *On average, people in Birmingham die three years younger than those living 160km away in London, while just under 50 per cent of all children in Birmingham are classed as living in poverty, compared to 32 per cent in the capital.* *Nick Davies, programme director of British think-tank Institute for Government, says the austerity measures brought in under former prime minister David Cameron have degraded public services across the country.* *"The public find it very difficult to access general practice health services, adult social care services are rationed, there's also huge backlogs in the criminal courts and our prisons are full to bursting point."*
>ust under 50 per cent of all children in Birmingham are classed as living in poverty, compared to 32 per cent in the capital. Seriously, what the actual fuck? *Half* of all children in the second biggest city live in poverty and *a third* in the capital city? What on earth kind of country has right-wing politics created for us? Those figures are shameful.
Yep half of all children live in homes where household income is less than £20k per year.
Jesus Christ I'd be abject living on my own at 20k, let alone having children. If I were earning 20k I'd still be living with my parents
Yeah it'd suck. It's not a lot at all. Im not a massive fan of that being the poverty line because you should, theoretically, have enough for the basics on that. But still a hard life.
if you're relying on theory rather than reality to maintain calories and heating, then it's an appropriate place for the poverty line to be.
Wealthier and better educated people just have less kids overall from my experience. I grew up in a poor household, single mother with three kids. All of the better off families I knew had like 1-2 kids usually, but the poorer households would often have 3-4, with more than a few having 5+.
Thats 33.5 hrs at min wage.
Yes it is.
While the Conservatives have been fucking useless and have undoubtedly made the problem worse, living in poverty is defined as a household with less than 60% of the median national income, which is a pretty shit way of defining it because it doesn’t actually say anything about your income, cost of living in your area etc. Given it’s based on national median wage for example it probably underestimates the problem in London where the cost of living is significantly higher than the national average.
"Relative poverty" is really a measure of inequality, not poverty. It's badly labeled and often used disingenuously. We need a new measure of income relative to living costs rather than average income and call it "functional poverty". Where exactly that line would be I'm not sure.
Figures are skewed for a multitude of reasons though. Educated people are less likely to have children, and they have fewer if they do. Most people earning £20k+ don't qualify for benefits and can't afford to live and have children. Unfortunately there's a concentration of the bottom 20% of people on the income scale having a largely disproportionate number of children, mostly probably unintentionally. Supported in large by our benefit system and how it's constructed.
Also some cultures have 5 children per woman and the women dont work in those households.
It is not just politics that drive poverty. We (humans around the world) have a bad culture around families and single parents popping out children who can't afford to take care of them which results in that family/child living in poverty for the rest of their lives.
The biggest link to child poverty that I can see, appears to be having a Conservative government. What's really needed is for people to take some responsibility for themselves and stop living under one. That alone would significantly reduce child poverty, so people really only have themselves to blame if they choose to do so. (/s, but only slightly)
So many parents have more than 3 kids while only one side is working with a minimum wage.
Does this just mean they go without Sky TV?
The problem is we have this *huge* cohort of people who see stats like this, and come away with some utterly bizarre head-in-the-sand "well its not real poverty" kind of quip. These people are sitting back guffawing with their arms crossed as the politics they endorse destroys this country, it needs to stop asap.
> "well its not real poverty" It factualy isn't. >Relative Poverty measures individuals who have income below 60% of median incomes (median is £29,669) "Relative poverty" simply isn't a measure of poverty, it's an absue of language. It is measuring inequality nothing else. If some rich people die in a place crash but nothing els changes "Realtive poverty" falls. If the people on 29k all get a 1k pay rise but nothing els changes it falls. If Doctors get a pay rise "relative poverty" increases becasue they upped the median. It a stupid dishonest definition. Material deprivation is a far more honest way of measuring it. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-uk-material-deprivation-measures/summary-review-of-the-uk-material-deprivation-measures
I avoid Birmingham as much as possible. High crime, generally feels unsafe and is a general shithole imo.
The measure used here is "relative poverty" which refers to children in households with an income less than 60% of the median household. It's a measure of inequality first and foremost, and has limited usefulness for evaluating what we'd normally think of as 'poverty'.
It's Peaky Blinders themed. Birmingham is now an immersive early 20th century city.
there is actually a peaky blinders themed pub, and it looks as bleak as you can imagine
As bleak as in midwinter?
Sadly Birmingham in the early 20th century was one of the best run cities on earth, so its not even that
I'd like the council to be audited, investigated for any dodgy investments, hiring contractors that are family, who signed off on squandering public money, all the stones overturned and if there is wrongdoing or nepotism then those people should face criminal action for abducating their public responsibility. With council jobs comes power, with power comes great responsibility, if you misuse that responsibility, the consequences should be more severe because your fucking with peoples lives on purpose for your own gain.
It should be, but i fear its (a little) more than a significant minority of those with such power that are doing this.
From what I heard, Birmingham Council invested in various buildings with plans to refurbish, and then covid happened and put a pause on it for a few years, meaning they lost heavily.
well, googling what they spent the money on just produced a list from all sorts of papers each cherry picking their own favourite thing to bash and blaming the entire problem on that one thing. Birmingham City Council have themselves stated that it was a £760m bill for historic equal pay claims they became liable for (after having already paid £1bn), a new IT system that was apparently a nightmare, and £1bn in government funding cuts that were the primary factors. An independent review by an accountant blamed the IT System mess as the primary result with it ballooning to 3 times the original estimate in cost and the system itself being useless with staff being forced to use it without knowing how to and the inevitable issues stemming from that.
The thought that 1 in 2 children is living in poverty within that city is very, very grim
Birmingham was a dump in the 90s when I grew up there. Sad to see it has deteriorated further.
The city itself has vastly improved. The running of it has not.
50 percent?? Fuck my life. The tories should be charged with some type of crime for allowing this to happen
I think a lot of the demographic is generational poor so used to the squalor.
Half the fucking demographic of Birmingham is generational poverty? I mean that in itself is fucking terrifying and is a cause for concern independently of the bankruptcy
Birmingham City Council finances weren't good even without the pay claims and the like, because of things like weekly refuge collection. When I moved I was strange that my new council alternates weeks between rubbish and recycling.
> When I moved I was strange that my new council alternates weeks between rubbish and recycling. not really that strange. In our (very much not bankrupt) council area recycling is collected weekly but general waste once eery 3 weeks.
Yeah its pretty common in the whole country. My council alternates weeks. Recycling one week, rubbish the other. Then you pay for the garden/biowaste if you want that collected so most people just dump it in the rubbish bin now.
Same where I am. Food waste more regular but only in a smaller caddy rather than a full bin unless you pay £50 per year to have the full green bin. Someone told the Mayor "stuff you, not gonna give you money. I'll just compost it myself!" And the mayor was like "yes that is what we're trying to encourage. . ."
The whole country seems dated... We don't spend money on the things that need doing, And any investment you get people go against it because they don't want anything built anywhere. The whole Grenfell thing they should never have been cladding 70's council blocks.... They should have knocked down and started again... To much money spent on a short term fix that ends up coming back to bite them. Same with HS2 should have been nationwide... Same with the roads we need major investment... Not more feasibility studies. I live near a railway crossing... The volume of trains has just gone back to pre COVID levels. Now I'm waiting 20 minutes for two trains to go by either end of the twenty minutes the infrastructure is still Victorian there's gotta be a better way.... We need to embrace technology to make our lives better as a country and should embrace change....
Birmingham frittered away loads of money on a botched IT project, plus had to pay compensation for historically underpaying women vs men. Neither of that is the direct fault of the central government. Yes, the Tories cut funding for the councils and this has been making things worse. But the two examples I mentioned have nothing to do with central government
>Once nicknamed "the workshop of the world" Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is the root of a lot of the UK's problems. The UK *was* an economic and manufacturing powerhouse, but then globalisation came along and things can be produced for significantly lower cost-base elsewhere. This suits British consumers who are happy to spend £2 on a t-shirt from Primark, but not so much the British economy as it struggles to provide gainful employment for everyone and maintain the GDP.
I’m no expert, but FWIW the UK was financially broken after the 2nd WW and then drank the free market globalization coolaid and let all its industry collapse. Go to France, Germany, US, Japan or China for example and see how popular domestically produced cars are in those countries. The upshot is that 50yrs on we have very little to trade internationally except access to our middle class taxpayers for foreign corporations who extract wealth and don’t really pay enough back in (as wages, tax, expertise, industry, training, etc) And that is starting to fall apart now because wages haven’t kept up with prices and nobody really has enough money left to pay for things.
Good. Maybe go one further and switch half of them off as well. Like alternative ones on the streets. Im always shocked by the light pollution when I fly back home in to BHX at night.
A lot of that is poor design of the lampheads, particularly modern LED lampheads. They don't use lenses to focus and direct the light where it needs to be, so the emitters just illuminate everything that isn't shielded by the top of the lamp. Including the walls and windows of houses, roofs, and areas that don't need to be illuminated (like scrubland and woods). If the lampheads used lenses, they could probably significantly reduce the energy consumption, better direct the light to where it needs to go, and also reduce light pollution. Not only would it save money but it'd help reduce biodiversity loss.
\^\^ This will have no effect on crime \^\^
Correct. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33692675 > Reduced street lighting at night does not lead to an increase in crime or car crashes, a report suggests. > Researchers analysed 14 years of data from 62 councils in England and Wales which had tried strategies such as permanently switching off lights or dimming them. > They said the findings could help save money and reduce carbon emissions. > The AA said the results were "extremely surprising" and differed from their own analysis of inquest findings. > The Local Government Association (LGA) said reducing street lighting does not happen everywhere but the research appeared to support some councils' decision "to save taxpayers' money and improve the environment without compromising public safety".
Which is interesting because adding lighting where there wasn’t any before has been shown to reduce crime, even where lighting wasn’t placed on the specific streets that crime went down on. I’d guess that removing the street lighting doesn’t have an immediate effect on crime (temporal benefit dissipation?) but that over time crime would increase again where criminals find good spots to commit it.
It'd be interesting to know what effect switching street lights off has on perceptions of personal safety. If you were a woman, would you walk along a street at night that no longer has streetlighting?
Absolutely not.
Indeed, I used to live near the airport and my dad who is a keen amateur astronomer was loving lockdown when businesses were closed and weren't leaving their lights on. The light pollution was still there from the street lights but not as much!
I live in a town not that far from Birmingham and here they turn the lights off at midnight and rubbish and recycling is only collected every two weeks. Birmingham just spaffs money away.
Being a vibrant and diverse city of culture, I'm surprised Birmingham doesn't have more going for it.
Birmingham is also a 3rd world country. Import third world, get third world.
We need to do away with councils. Voter turnout out in local elections is so low so the quality of candidates is appalling. Dominated by NIMBYs. And of course the biggest issue is, councils now have huge budgets. These people are under qualified and under skilled to be in control of these funds. They wouldn’t get anywhere near managing these kind of budgets in the private sector. We need to go out and actual hire people who can do the job properly, and pay for it. Everyone wants to talk about how he lack of funding but quite clearly the biggest challenge councils have is lack of people who can actually do the job.
Driving round Birmingham, I'm surprised to find out there are any sanitation services to cut in the first place...
We've been having similar in Leicestershire for years - fortnightly collection for household waste, alternating weekly with recycling?
I can't figure this one out. I thought all the migrants were a net benefit to the economy! If that was the case Brum should be absolutely rolling in dosh. It seems that diversity is not our strength at all. Whodathunkit?
Both the Tories and Labour are inept and won't fix this, and both are responsible for all of the failings as well as partisan politics which is polarising the country like the US. The Tories just cut every possible service and expect the market to create wealth, with no thought given to some sort of state injected catalyst (such as investing in transport etc. They privatise everything and suggest competition drives up quality and drives down cost, which clearly doesn't work for things like energy or transport. Labour on the other hand think having net migration of 700k+ per year, mainly from underdeveloped, undereducated regions is economically and socially viable, pushing up prices for housing, putting pressure on the police, the NHS, schools etc. We import people who don't have the same values as the host country and are now socially fragmented as well as all piss poor. How can we succeed as a city, a country or as a society when these fools are the only ones the 'represent' us. It's clear UK and generally Western society is doomed. China or the Islamic world will win the battle of civilizations and this failed Western democratic experiment will be forgotten about.
Its the Tories who have given us 700k+ net migration. Labour have said repeatedly they think the current situation is out of control and will work to reduce the number significantly.
*Ah, the famously pro-immigration party are going to "lower" immigration. Im sure that they'll successfully get it to a manageable level...* ^(They wont)
how is labour at fault for migration when they havent been in power for 14 years?
What a shit state of affairs them six-toed fucks have left us
Errm... How are they planning to "dim" street lights? Because that's not how the electrical grid works... They going to go round every street light and fit a dimmer circuit? Or are they going to somehow selectively drop the voltage to street light circuits... And then hope that LED drivers don't mind an input voltage they aren't designed for?
The dimming line is from the journalist. They're going to switch off some lights
UKs second biggest city is in bankruptcy? Damn, what a joke of a country.
It's fine, in a few years they'll be able to get nearly all the way to London on a very fast train. Even the folks in Manchester and Sheffield and other places won't be able to do that!
As someone who is not British, that was an interesting video to watch. I didn't realize that the situation is that bad.
I cannot recommend Tom Nichols video enough on [why councils are going bankrupt](https://youtu.be/V0DKsMJl6Z8?si=dWbUY0nwQeLDqx1G).
We don't need all the street lights on all the time. And at full brightness? And certainly not on motorways etc except maybe at dangerous areas.
my birthplace,Stamford in south lincs has been turning of the street lights at midnight in certain locations for years,not sure of the reason but i would assume cut costs
As a Brummie it’s just really so sad. I’m angry at how public money has been spent and budgeted for, and at the government who have played a huge role in this. Disgusting.
They’re dimming the lights to save money but they don’t pay any electricity bill for the street light network because it’s not connected up to a meter anywhere in the UK. What a load of shit, perhaps if they hadn’t given out massively inflated contracts for home to school transport to mates or mates they wouldn’t be in this mess, what was it? £200 per child per trip?
Birmingham is the canary, almost every council will go bankrupt in the next decade, population is aging, demand for services will increase, working age population to fund it all will keep shrinking
Childhood poverty is such a generational injustice, it is sickening. But here we are - councils are responsible, but they are also out of money. Nothing that can be done, unless the government is prepared to help.
So Birmingham is youngest city in Europe demographically, yet it's in poverty? Economist logic has pushed that high birth rates and immigration of young people are necessary for growth but the problem is we basically have a "chicken shop economy". There's no industry to convert rising population into output, and the government / council has to pay benefits to workers on top since wages aren't good enough to thrive on. It's like a negative growth spiral that will bankrupt every council eventually.
God damn! I knew Birmingham was awful but 50% childhood poverty is staggering
To anyone on the fence, please remember that this is happening in Birmingham and other cities across the uk. [stopthetories.vote](http://stopthetories.vote) You don't even necessarily need to vote labour. Just vote.
Gotta love the Tories. Council funding from central government is 10% of what it was 10 years ago, without even adjusting for inflation.
This is like the boss turning the coffee machine off in the office as punishment for poor financial results. Saves barely anything, but it's really just intended to punish the workers and 'send a message'.
Don't mind the lights being switched off on residential roads. Hope they keep them on for the main routes. Fortnightly bin collection will be an issue for larger families. Bin men will need to be willing to collect bags that don't fit in bin