Is Richard Parker taking road safety seriously?
Plus, Glynn Purnell is under fire
Dear Patchers — if you’re wondering why people are asking if star chef Glynn Purnell isn’t as down-to-earth as he seems, who the new chief of the fire service is following a very dramatic resignation, or when you can see this year’s major, festive play in Birmingham you’ve come to the right place. All is revealed in your Monday briefing below. Plus, we delve into the reasons why the mayor is facing criticism for his approach to tackling road deaths and injuries in today’s Big Story.
Catch Up — What you missed over the weekend
Samuel McIlhagga took a deep-dive on Saturday into the scandal-ridden, and now-closed, National College for High Speed Rail at 2 Lister Street. Subscribers can read all about how the college collapsed under financial woes, harassment, expenses for mini eggs, and spiralling senior pay packets larger than the Prime Minister. Sign up here.
Do you have any information about Birmingham’s old stock exchange that closed in 1986? Perhaps you know someone who used to dress exclusively in pinstripe shirts and braces? Email sam@birminghamdispatch.co.uk.
Talking of pinstriped shirts…our recently departed intern, Alex Taylor, went out with a barnstorming piece on Peaky Blinders cosplayers in Birmingham. He hasn’t taken his flat cap off since. Read it here.
On the topic of colleges in crisis…Head over to our sister paper The Londoner to read Miles Ellingham’s debut piece about cuts at South London’s Goldsmiths, University of London.
Editor’s note: We’re looking forward to meeting many of you at Thursday’s Dispatch event at 1000 Trades in the Jewellery Quarter. We’re ever so close to reaching our goal of 1,000 paying members — there are currently 985 of you! If you’re not in that highly prestigious cohort, help us hit our target by subscribing today.
Weather
☁️ Tuesday: Clear, then cloudy. Max 9°C.
🌥️ Wednesday: Sunny patches with a gentle breeze. Max 9°C.
☁️ Thursday: A misty morning, turning to overcast. Max 11°C.
🍃 Friday: Overcast with a light wind. Max 10°C.
☔ Weekend: More cloud. Light rain and winds. Max 9°C.
We get our weather from the Met Office.
Big story: Is Richard Parker taking road safety seriously?
Top line: The West Midlands mayor has announced two new, voluntary advisor roles to tackle road safety and to get more people walking and cycling: a Road Safety Commissioner and an Active Travel Commissioner, both paying an honorarium of £10,000 per year. Which, according to road safety campaigners, isn’t very much…
Context: Road safety in the West Midlands is a big problem. The number of people who were killed or seriously injured rose to 1,087 last year, from 991 in 2022 and 989 in 2014. New data by the Motor Insurers' Bureau shows the worst areas for uninsured driving in the UK — eight of the top 15 are in the West Midlands. WMCA data also shows that half of all road deaths and serious injuries in the region occur in areas that are in the top two deciles of deprivation — it’s the poorest residents who are being affected the most.
Chump change: Road safety campaign group Better Streets for Birmingham (BSfB) are unhappy with the two new advisory roles though. They say the positions (and specifically the £10,000 a year honorarium) “do not reflect the scale or urgency of the challenge.” Parker, however, says the work is already being done within the organisation and he doesn’t want to duplicate roles.
The fightback: The issue reached a fever pitch last year, when 11 people were either killed or seriously injured during May and June, sparking large protests in Birmingham. The authorities responded by calling a gold command, strategic meeting by emergency services, the highest level of major operation there is. According to BSfB, critical to securing this response was one person: then-walking and cycling commissioner Adam Tranter.
BSfB’s policy lead Martin Price told The Dispatch that, while the protesters were applying pressure externally, Tranter was able to push from the inside: “This is what we saw Adam do: converting that external pressure into regional actions and pushing for them to be done through the power of the Mayor.”
Changing of the guard: Tranter, who runs his own communications business and campaigns to get more people cycling, had been appointed in 2021 by Parker’s predecessor, Andy Street. He worked three days a week for £85,000 a year pro-rata, but stepped down in May when Parker was elected because he wasn’t convinced the new mayor would retain the role. In a recent interview with the Active Travel Cafe forum, he said: “I don’t think he’d thought about it, I don’t think he’s as strong on this as the former mayor.”
The conflict: In an open letter, BSfB urged Parker not to replace the role with one that merely advocates for road safety but challenges decision-makers “in a way that committees and officers do not.” The conflict rests on these two different ways of seeing the commissioner's role: BSfB are adamant that there should be one position that scrutinises the WMCA and holds the people making the decisions to account. Parker wants two champions for road safety and active travel, who feed into decision-making. He says it’s a more efficient use of public money. “In our view, that role was a bit disconnected for the way in which policy was developed and delivered,” he told BirminghamLive.
Rise of the walking and cycling commissioner: Walking and cycling commissioners, or active travel commissioners as they are also known, are partly a response to the demand for safer streets, and partly to the need to meet net-zero targets. They promote active forms of travel, with walking and wheeling (people using wheelchairs) at the top of the hierarchy, followed closely by cycling.
Do they work? According to rail engineer and writer Gareth Dennis, the efficacy of the roles varies a lot depending on the budget allocated by each mayor and the powers handed to them by central government. He says Westminster still “holds the levers” that determine what local governments can do to limit car traffic. He thinks the role is only useful if it is empowered by an overall transport commissioner — which the West Midlands doesn’t have — because no mode of transport “exists in a vacuum”. He said:
“Without adequate powers to limit, divert or otherwise control motor traffic, the returns for walking, wheeling and cycling infrastructure will only ever diminish, particularly in relation to safety.”
Bottom line: Parker’s decision to scale down the walking and cycling commissioner role might make sense — if the mayor and commissioner don’t have the necessary statutory powers to effect change, that money might be better spent elsewhere. However, it’s clear that Tranter was empowered by the mayor to push the dial on road safety. It’s unlikely that a commissioner with less time and money will be able to apply the same amount of pressure.
Photo of the week
Regular Dispatch contributor Josh Neicho took this photo of diya lamps, filled with mustard oil, being lit during Diwali celebrations at the Smethwick Luminaire show. It was an environmentally friendly affair by the Canal & River Trust in partnership with organisation EcoSikh and the Guru Nanak Gurdwara Smethwick, with a light display alternative to fireworks illuminating the historic Galton Bridge.
Brum in brief
🚒 The perpetually scandal-ridden West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) announced the hiring of a new chief fire officer on Saturday. Ben Brook, the current chief fire officer of the Warwickshire fire service, has been chosen to lead the organisation after numerous crises. Brook replaces interim chief Oliver Lee who left the role in October after accusing the WMFS of being “impossible to lead” (one of several LinkedIn outbursts from Lee). Once Brook is in the post, he’ll have the prospect of intensifying scrutiny into senior leadership at WMFS — as Aldridge Brownhills MP Wendy Morton calls for an independent public inquiry. The Dispatch has been following this story for months now and in October we published a long-read on the topic. We revealed previously unreported allegations of abuse towards female staff within WMFS, and investigated claims that Lee's predecessor Wayne Brown was set to be investigated for falsifying a business qualification before taking his own life in January.
🍽️ Glynn Purnell, whose flagship Michelin-starred restaurant Purnell’s closed last month, is refusing to issue refunds or transfers to customers with restaurant vouchers valued in the hundreds of pounds. Voucher holders have been directed to the restaurant’s liquidators Woods and Butchers, who have refused to issue refunds. Purnell said he could “only apologise for this difficult situation,” but one voucher holder was having none of it in The Guardian: “He’s [came] across as a down-to-earth boy from Chelmsley Wood. I thought he would understand what it was like to be an ordinary person in the street.”
🏢 Highly flammable cladding has been found on a Nuneaton building set to be converted into an educational facility for SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) students over the age of 16. A £2.7 million fund for converting the buildings on St David’s Way has been almost halved due to the cost of removing the cladding alongside other unforeseen expenses. The flammable expanded polystyrene, installed in the early 2000s, has caused the learning centre to face a £1 million shortfall.
🚋 Fancy a career change? Chris Bruce did. Bruce, who was a stay-at-home father and carer for decades, had always harboured a strong interest in trams. After years off of the job market, Bruce struck up the courage to train as a tram driver at Dudley College of Technology. He now ferries passengers between Wolverhampton and Birmingham full-time. Bruce recently won an adult learner award presented to him by actor Nicholas Bailey and West Midlands mayor Richard Parker. Bruce said of his new job: “When I was offered the job, the six-year-old in me was running around the room screaming with excitement.”
Home of the week
Fancy some Stirchley chic? This two-bed terraced house is on the market for £235,000. The house features chunky wooden countertops, a well-tended courtyard garden and a generously proportioned sitting room.
Media picks
🎧 Listen to the BBC’s six-part podcast series on the Birmingham pub bombings, released on the 1st of November. Presented by Ed Barlow, the series explores the failure of the police investigation and the subsequent lack of closure after the terrorist attack. The 50th anniversary of the pub bombings falls on the 21st of November this year.
📰 Revisit UnHerd’s 2020 essay ‘The Plot Against Mercia,’ by John Myers, director of the YIMBY Alliance. Myers explores how Birmingham and the West Midlands went from earning more, on average, in 1961 “than any other British region, including London and the South East” to deindustrialisation and deprivation. Myers points beyond the Thatcher years of the 1980s back to the late 1940s when the Labour government introduced the ‘Distribution of Industry Act’, which effectively cut off Birmingham’s economic diversification and pushed growth into the service and car manufacturing sectors, leaving the city vulnerable to recession.
📰 The Dispatch was lucky enough to attend the premiere of a new film about The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, Midas Man, at The Mockingbird Cinema last week. Local producer Trevor Beattie was a key player in getting this biopic off the ground and it features talented young Brummie actor Adam Lawrence, playing the role of unlucky former Beatle Pete Best. Read a review of the movie here.
Things to do
🎞️ Birmingham Film Festival is running from the 6th to the 17th of November: with over 200 screenings on the programme, from student shorts to full features — it’d be an ambitious cinephile who caught all of them! However, there are several shorts slated for every day this week — including one directed by The Dispatch’s own Alex Taylor. Catch Ephemera, a short film about a prolific violinist who loses her hearing, on Friday.
Tuesday
🎤 Enjoy rap, music, poetry and stand-up? Experience all four at once with The Adventures of Tawny Owl A Musical Comedy Odyssey, a show described by one audience member as “bizarre and delightful in equal measure”. The fun begins at 8 pm and tickets are available from £5.
🎭 Local legend Frank Skinner takes to the Hippodrome stage four nights this week with his 30 Years of Dirt show. To catch one of them be quick — £32 tickets are selling out.
Wednesday
✂️ Cut and paste to your heart’s content at a learn-how-to collage session with local artist Flic Blades at The Goodsyard in the Jewellery Quarter. All levels of artistic ability are welcome. Plus, you can bring your own drinks. Tickets are £10.
🎞️ Take a tour of Birmingham locations that have featured in major films and TV shows, and learn fascinating insights from guide and film buff Lee Perkins. Buy £15 tickets for the 2.5 hour tour here.
Thursday
👻 Bah, humbug — it’s the opening night of Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol at The Rep. Did you know Dickens gave his first public reading of this classic tale at Birmingham’s Town Hall? Tickets are available from £19.50.
🕯️ Listen to Chloe Barry sing hits by Adele in the magical environs of Birmingham Cathedral by candlelight. Plus, you’ll be supporting children’s charity the NSPCC when you purchase your £20 ticket.
the new mayor in my mind has yet to do something positive to move west mids forward..he talks the talk occasionally but i have yet to be convinced he can walk the walk. Andy burhnam is all over the media, houchen etc is all over the media all are doing stuff for their regions and our mayor has done??? Also the post of cycling/walking commisoner sends a message to the west mids councils that you are being measured and scrutinised... saying officers in west midlands in offices talking with councils will have the same effect??? i doubt it and also already it sends a message to the public no commisioner = not interested... so cars carry on as you were.....
Thanks for the article and also the link to WMCA's Transport Delivery Overview & Scrutiny Committee paper, which I hadn't found before. That acknowledges the need to "expand the road safety evidence base", which is something I have argued in a couple of my own Substack pieces, because it is conspicuously lacking at the moment. The road safety emergency seems to have been declared without solid evidence to support it, although some campaigners have tried to do so by changing the definition of the word "emergency".
Perhaps it is that lack of evidence that has partially contributed to Parker's inaction, because on the premise that there IS an emergency, then what he has done (or not done) in the last three months or so is not consistent with that. Certainly if there is an emergency, he should be doing more. But you don't need to declare an emergency to take what is probably the biggest step forward in the short term: enforce legislation that is already there. Your piece highlights the amount of uninsured driving going on in pockets of Birmingham - getting those drivers and vehicles of our roads would be a great start. Parker should be working with the police and other relevant parties on that immediately (as well as leading a clamp down on speeding, red light jumping, and mobile phone use, to name but three things).