The axe falls on Birmingham
Record budget cuts are imminent. Plus: Who remembers the day the Bullring opened?
Dear Patchers – welcome to your Monday briefing.
We hope you weren’t too devastated on Saturday morning, waking up to find your email inboxes Dispatch-free. It must’ve felt like Christmas had been cancelled. Unfortunately, journalism can be an unpredictable game. We’d spent the whole week working on a big council longread only to be sent a game-changing eleventh hour email. While we can’t say whether your weekends recovered from Saturday’s crushing disappointment, we can promise the piece — now dropping this coming weekend — will be better for it. We’ll also have an extra member’s edition of The Dispatch for you to read this week, to make up for it.
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Weather
☁️🌂Tuesday: Starts off dry but by the afternoon there will be patchy rain and a little cloud. Max 13°C.
🍃☁️Wednesday: Unsettled but mild. Spells of rain get longer and the winds stronger. Max 13°C.
☁️🌧️Thursday: More cloud and heavier bursts of rain with lighter showers later on. Max 10°C.
🍃☁️Friday: The cloud stays put and the wind makes a comeback. Max 9°C.
☂️🍃Weekend: Light rain and a moderate breeze. Max 9°C.
We get our weather from the Met Office and the BBC.
Big story: The axe falls on Birmingham
Top line: Birmingham City Council is about to release draft plans for the “largest budget cuts in local authority history”. A staggering £300m of cuts need to be made, with some of that shortfall needing to be covered by a government loan. The final budget will come to a meeting of the full council on 5 March, following public consultations — so get ready to give your opinion.
What we know already: The axe is hanging over several key areas with the following expected:
Closure of 25 of the city’s 36 libraries with plans to turn the remaining 11 into 'library and neighbourhood advice service hubs'
£112m cuts to children and families services and a 10% rise in fees
Cuts to arts and culture funding
Bin beef: The Dispatch has heard from one Labour source that there is internal wrangling over what to do about bins, with one faction in favour of moving collections to a fortnightly basis and the other staunchly committed to weekly. Apparently this is only “the tip of the iceberg”. The equal pay crisis that rocked the council has its roots in a 2017 bin workers dispute, so any changes to refuse will likely be significant — we’ll be watching closely.
Prepare to have your say: The council has a series of public consultations planned to find out what residents think of the proposed cuts to different services. One on home to school transport is already underway and can be accessed here.
Audit alarm: The Audit Reform Lab — a group of academics, consultants, and campaigners at the University of Sheffield — has warned Birmingham City Council to slow down and think carefully before making drastic changes. They say it is “in no reliable position” to set the budget because:
The accounts for 2022-23 have not yet been audited due to the botched Oracle IT system that has caused 70,000 transaction errors since March 2022.
There has been no independent value for money or impact assessment of the proposed budget cuts or asset sales.
And the full extent of the equal pay liability that heavily contributed to the council’s bankruptcy is not expected to come out until the new financial year begins. The Audit Reform Lab says:
The budget cuts announced today are the largest we’ve seen in local authority history, and will have immediate effects on vital public services.
Years of austerity and a failed IT system caused the disaster, but there has also been a wider failure in transparency and accountability.
Max the axe: Lead commissioner Max “the axe” Caller has advised from the outset that decisions, while painful, need to be made quickly. He has noted the impact of the Oracle debacle however, telling the Guardian in November that “they’ll have to start again” by taking the system out and “putting it back in, and that’s a long job”. Quite how savage will Max’s axe need to be? We’ll send you fuller details in tomorrow morning’s Brum in Brief.
Photo of the week
Brum photographer extraordinaire Verity Milligan captured this majestic shot of a tram passing in front of the library. Perhaps Dispatch readers can let me know if matching the colours of the metro to the library was intentional or not, because I have no idea. All I know is the colourscape in this image reminds me, delightfully, of a Refresher chew.
Brum in brief
The University of Birmingham has come under fire from both Jewish and pro-Palestine students for its handling of a campus protest on 7 February. The protest received national coverage, with the Telegraph alleging that students had chanted “death to Zionists”. The university subsequently put out a statement on Instagram saying it “is committed to freedom of speech” but that the protest in question was “not approved by the University”. Sources involved in the protest have strongly denied to The Dispatch that any such chant was made, with pro-Palestine groups feeling unjustly targeted by the university. Meanwhile, a number of opposing voices have complained of the university's failure to protect Jewish students on campus, given that an unauthorised protest went ahead in the presence of campus security. The Dispatch understands a police investigation is now underway. We have been following this story closely and will publish a piece on Thursday. If you have any information which you think could be useful to us, please email editor@birminghamdispatch.co.uk.
The birds of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens are heading to a new home. The switch up is a result of the organisation reconsidering its animal welfare and conservation practices, and choosing to focus on horticulture. "We know that the birds have been a well-loved part of the gardens by many visitors, families, and staff for many years," a statement read.
Indoor paintballing could come to Walsall shopping centre in plans which would give the partially-empty mall a new lease of life. The venue would be open 5-11pm Monday to Fridays and 9am-7pm weekends, with a maximum of 50 players, but the council’s planning committee won’t make their decision until April. Quick personal note: I played my first paintballing game last September with an awful hangover. There was such an irritating man on my team that I shot him in the back at close range and had to have a quiet time out on the floor by a tree. C’est la vie.
Home of the week
This three-bedroom, Victorian chapel conversion in Staffordshire has beautiful arched windows and stained glass. Plus, you can get into Birmingham in under an hour. It’s available for £455,000.
Media picks
🎧 Deep-thinking Irish podcaster Blindboy chats to Carl Chinn in his recent episode about the Brummie professor’s expert subject: The History of the English Working Class. For readers who aren’t familiar with Blindboy, real name David Chambers, this profile from last year by Rachel Connolly in the New York Times is a good place to start. He and Chinn met last summer and hit it off, then met for a conversation that lasted eight hours. “Carl is one of the most knowledgable and passionate people I’ve ever fucking met”, he says.
🎞️ I can’t remember how this clip of BBC news footage of the opening of the Bullring in 2003 came to my attention but it gave me nostalgic whiplash of Proustian proportions — I spent many a Saturday mooching about the shopping centre as a pre-teen. But the video is also filled with pathos. From today’s vantage point, with retail having largely moved online and Birmingham in the grip of a financial crisis, hearing the city’s former-leader Sir Albert Bore announce that The Bullring will be “one of the largest and most vital pieces of the jigsaw in this city’s continuing renaissance” seems a little hubristic.
📰 This story about how Aston Villa players lost the 1982 European cup at a pub in Hopwas, only for it to show up in Sheffield hours later, is the stuff of footy lore. Players had taken the trophy out with them so fans could have their photo taken with it — many popping home to fetch film cameras, as these were the days before smart phones — when it disappeared. It turned out Fox Inn regular Adrian Reed had pinched it and taken it home. “My recollection is that Adrian turned up one night holding the European Cup,” his flatmate recalls. “They had had a few drinks, and unfortunately the European Cup fell down the stairs, and incurred a few dints and a twisted handle.” The full details on how the cup ended up in Sheffield are, to this day, a little hazy. But it makes for an entertaining read!
Things to do
Tuesday:
📖Birmingham-born writer Nathalie Olah will be chatting about class, money, power, and ugliness as well as her latest publication Bad Taste with the lovely people at Voce Books.
🍶Learn from renowned sake expert, Erika Haigh, who will take you on a journey through five varieties of the rich Japanese rice wine. 7.30pm, tickets £12.50.
Wednesday:
🩰Sir Peter Wright’s acclaimed ballet The Sleeping Beauty opens at the Hippodrome at 7.30pm. Tickets here from £25 — watch out for spinning wheels.
🎸Sensual pop-makers The 1975 are bringing their Still… At Their Very Best tour to the Resorts World Arena. Lock up your daughters, etc…Tickets from £59.30.
Thursday:
🧑🏫 Aston University’s latest inaugural lecture by AI expert Professor Abdul Sadka is about how research in the 21st century is measured by how well it helps solve society’s problems and improve business. It’s free, it starts at 6.30pm and you can attend in-person or online.
🍸 It turns out that objectively the best cocktail in the world has its own day this week — National Margarita Day kicks off at Flight Club with their month-long menu of twists on the classic Mexican drink.
Thanks for info about concert at Quaker meeting house- wonderful hour, closed my eyes and felt I was in the Court of Henry V111 !
£112m cuts to children and families? Beyond horrendous.
More cuts to arts (like there's anything to cut?).
Who gives a damn about bins? Most other cities manage fortnightly collection with no issues.