Birmingham city council "effectively bankrupt"

[adam2]

The amount spent on diversity programs seems to be a growing area of concern.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68477450

[adam2]

Latest reports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-b ... m-68483264

[BritDownUnder]

Perhaps there needs to be central government legislation to specify what councils can and can not spend their ratepayers money on.

Recently I was at a Hotel in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and was full of all kinds of people visiting the country; military advisors, united nations people and foreign aid workers. The hotel was five star and cost about USD300 a night and in the morning four-wheel-drives complete with security teams would pull up to the well guarded entrance and collect the do-gooders.

Point is that a lot of money spent on good causes gets diverted on "administrative costs".

[RenewableCandy]

*cough* I.T. system that didn't work:

https://theconversation.com/how-birming ... ter-224416

We have conducted extensive documentary analysis of cabinet and audit committee papers, financial plans, annual reports and other key documents from the past two years. We have also observed public meetings since the section 114 notice. Our investigations show that the initial announcement did not tell the full story.

We have found that the spiralling budget deficits cited in the section 114 notice have little to do with the equal pay issue. Instead, they are the result of a disastrous implementation of a new Oracle IT system, which is compounding a decade of austerity cuts that had already left services severely overstretched.

[BritDownUnder]

I heard a snippet on a news program that 80% of council money is spent on some kind of social program or other - presumably council housing and aged care is in that. That description is a wide brush but if true leaves very little for other services like transport and infrastructure spending.

[Ralphw2]

A huge amount is spent on children with special education needs and child social care, yet they still provide terrible service, because they are forced to pay private contract companies, who employ undertrained staff on very low wages. Staff turnover in these jobs is huge. The councils also employ people to actively avoid meeting their legal responsibilities, like paying a barrister to defend themselves at an appeal tribunal who then gives no evidence in the case , which they lose, because my daughter got legal aid to collect the evidence the council should have collected themselves.

[Mark]

A huge amount is spent on children with special education needs and child social care, yet they still provide terrible service, because they are forced to pay private contract companies, who employ undertrained staff on very low wages. Staff turnover in these jobs is huge. The councils also employ people to actively avoid meeting their legal responsibilities, like paying a barrister to defend themselves at an appeal tribunal who then gives no evidence in the case , which they lose, because my daughter got legal aid to collect the evidence the council should have collected themselves.

Agreed. I think the vast amount spent in this area is not widely understood.
LAs closed many of their homes thinking it was a cost saving, but what we've ended up with is a much worse service at a far bigger cost...
Also, the numbers neurodiverse people in the system seems to be skyrocketing, but that's another conversation...

Councils would help themselves if they were more open and transparent about what money they get in, and how much is spent on each different service... People would be surprised about how little goes on stuff like potholes...