The ‘pincer manoeuvre’: How secretive leadership and warring staff led Birmingham to the abyss
The ‘pincer manoeuvre’: How secretive leadership and warring staff led Birmingham to the abyss
A narrative has emerged about how this city went bankrupt. Is it true? For months, we have been speaking to senior figures across the city, and today, two of them speak out on the record
By Ed King, Kate Knowles and Joshi Herrmann
On the 22nd of August 2017, the leader of Birmingham City Council, John Clancy, sent a text message to a senior officer from the trade union Unite. Facing mounting public anger about that summer’s ongoing bin strike, Clancy had gone outside official channels to negotiate with Unite’s assistant general secretary Howard Beckett, with whom he exchanged dozens of messages.
But judging by this particular message, the two men were not so much negotiating as conspiring — against Clancy’s own council staff. "Still working most of every day to outflank inappropriate officers so they have nowhere to go,” the Labour council leader texted Beckett. “Obviously a pincer manoeuvre from others will help specifically to do this."
What did Clancy mean by a “pincer manoeuvre”? And who were the mysterious “others” who he hoped would make life difficult for his colleagues at the council who opposed his ill-fated agreement with Unite?
The messages between Clancy and Beckett have never been published in the media before, even though they can be found online as part of a court case linked to the bin strike. But they provide a window into the astonishing factionalism, dysfunction and incompetence that has driven Birmingham to its financial abyss.
“How a public body with 12,000 employees can operate sensibly with this degree of chaos between its senior personnel is remarkable,” commented the judge in that case. It sounded like a rhetorical question, and five years later we know the answer: it could not operate sensibly at all.
Labour is still the governing party in Birmingham, but in name only. In reality, the city is now run by a small group of all-powerful commissioners sent by the government, through whom every important decision flows. A bankrupt city must now plug an eye-watering £300 million budget gap, with enormous cuts coming for pretty much everything the council does, including children’s services and adult social care. Grand buildings will be sold off and we will pay much higher Council Tax for years to come. Dozens of cultural organisations will lose their funding. Some believe Birmingham City Council itself will be broken up.
"There's something rotten in the state of Birmingham and residents deserve to know why,” said Conservative leader Robert Alden at a recent council debate. Alden accused the city’s Labour leadership of dragging its feet by not setting out the starting date for a public inquiry into the council’s crisis. "Brummies deserve answers and they deserve them sooner rather than later,” he told the chamber.
Few expect those answers to come any time soon. The public inquiry may begin later this year and will not report until 2025. For obvious reasons, most of the focus right now is on the council’s most pressing problems: fixing the Oracle computer system and closing the colossal budget shortfall are the most obvious ones. But most people agree those issues are glaring symptoms of the city’s malaise, rather than causes.
For the past few months, The Dispatch has been speaking to people who had frontline seats as the country’s largest local authority became enveloped in an ever-deepening crisis, including senior councillors, council officers, union officials and those brought in to help when Birmingham officially went bust last year. Most of them have spoken to us off the record so they could talk candidly, but one key participant — the Erdington MP and former senior councillor Paulette Hamilton — has given her first in-depth account of what she saw.
Also on the record is Clancy himself, pushing back very firmly on the received wisdom about who is to blame for what is going on in Birmingham. The former leader accuses senior council officers of inventing “spurious reasons for not doing as lawfully instructed”.
Today’s story — which won’t be the last in our series of reporting on this crisis — focuses on the grim summer period of 2017. That was when Clancy sent his curious, conspiratorial text to Howard Beckett, then the second most senior officer at Unite.
It was the summer when the ominous signs of Birmingham’s coming disaster began to show up.
‘Beer and sandwiches’
Cast your mind back to August 2017. The sun was beating down on the city as piles of bin bags spilt pungent rubbish onto the streets. It was “a buffet for rats”, as one resident, who donned a high-vis jacket and joined a throng of volunteers to help clear the mess, told ITV. The apocalyptic scenes were the result of a bin workers’ strike, which lasted for seven weeks.
The conflict arose from the council’s plans to eradicate certain roles within the bin fleet. Those at risk were the Grade 3 Leading Hand employees who operated at the rear of the refuse wagons, and who had “safety-critical responsibilities”. The proposals, if they went through, would see 106 workers reduced to a Grade 2, with that safety agenda passed instead to the driver, saving the city approximately £400,000 per year. It would also cost each affected member of staff between “three and a half to five thousand pounds a year”, according to Unite.
This period of recent history looms large over present events because the grade 3 roles the bin workers went on strike to protect posed a hefty equal pay risk to the council. Workers in other parts of the authority, often women working in roles such as dinner ladies and administrators, were on a similar grade but lower pay.
With the rubbish piling up, the clock was ticking for then-council leader Clancy to resolve the dispute. The national Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) was brought in to help mediate and broker a solution, but to many close observers, it looked like Clancy decided to fly solo (the former leader strongly denies this — more of which in a moment). He met with Unite’s assistant general secretary, Howard Beckett, in private on 15 August, and the pair made a “beer and sandwiches” deal.
That phrase, “beer and sandwiches” deal, coined by the veteran Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Tilsley, has entered the lexicon of Birmingham City Council’s municipal tragedy. It connotes something about decisions being made casually. Democratic controls ignored. A great city run not by competent management but via backroom deals.
Without a council officer or ACAS official in sight, the two men decided the Grade 3 roles would remain. Who needs bureaucratic processes, or even a pen and paper, when two straight-talking blokes are in charge?
A deal and a u-turn
Some say a clandestine approach to doing business was characteristic of Clancy, a former school teacher and commercial solicitor who was first elected as a Labour councillor in 2002 and led the authority from 2015 until 2017. Clancy’s star had risen quickly — when he was elected leader he had never been a cabinet member before.
“He went straight to leader, and I think — in the most polite way — [it] perhaps went to his head a bit,” says the MP Paulette Hamilton, who served alongside him in the cabinet. “He was a lovely man, but he didn’t understand that you can’t just do what you like, you have to follow a process.” Clancy replaced Sir Albert Bore who had been in power for a long time. Clancy challenged Bore in council meetings, he was seen as intelligent and looked the part in a suit. For many Labour councillors, he came across as a competent leader and a breath of fresh air.
Councils are unusual organisations in that the elected members are supposed to set the direction and make the big decisions, but it is then the unelected professional officers — led by the chief executive, the city solicitor and the treasurer — who execute those plans. The system is supposed to provide checks and balances between the political side of the organisation, whose job is to represent the democratic will of residents, and the professional side, who are the civil servants with expertise in delivering key services.
In a well-run authority, big decisions are only taken once a senior officer has made a report to the cabinet of senior councillors. “We can be overruled, but we would still write the report,” says a council chief executive from another city who has been watching the situation in Birmingham closely. They explain that the treasurer (or Section 151 officer) would also advise on the financial implications of a decision.
And what about when a leader meets a trade union figure? “Meetings with unions should be minuted and observed by professional officers,” says a senior local government figure who was brought in to help after the implosion in Birmingham last year. His assessment of what he saw is cutting. “You have got a very backward Labour group, and the unions have far too much say for a process that is supposed to be based on democracy.”
Certainly, during the bin strike of 2017, the unions seemed to enjoy close access to a council leader who was very comfortable operating without the usual controls. There was a sense that Clancy and Beckett took their positions to mean they had outright authority — including the mandate to make decisions without involving others. As one Labour Party source says: “They didn't really understand the governance arrangements that the council was subject to. And that’s why it started to unravel.”
Unravel it did — albeit in a way even the High Court called “not entirely factually clear”. In a press release dated for the following day, 16 August, ACAS publicly declared: “Birmingham City Council cabinet members have agreed in principle that the Grade 3 posts will be maintained. Consequently there are no redundancy steps in place.”
But by teatime on 15 August, the same day of the beer and sandwiches meet-up, the news had already hit the media, with ITV reporting “talks have been taking place” between Clancy and Beckett and the Unite man confirming they hoped to “make meaningful progress urgently”. This was at 6:23pm
At 6.42pm, the council’s acting chief executive Stella Manzie emailed Clancy to formally request he “discontinue discussions with Unite and withdraw from the draft statement immediately.” She believed it would result in a major financial risk to the authority, a breach of the Equality Act, and trade union and workforce unrest.
“Despite you and your cabinet colleagues having received detailed legal and financial advice from the monitoring officer and chief finance officer that set out the significant and legal financial risks, these were not taken into account when discussing the reinstatement of the grade 3s with Howard Beckett,” Manzie writes.
And she specifically highlights a concern about Clancy’s lack of consultation with the cabinet. “The council's constitution does not provide delegated authority for you to make that decision acting on your own.”
She didn’t get her way. By midday on 16 August, the Guardian declared the victorious end to “a bin strike that has caused anger and dismay for almost two months.” Soon after, the council sent out redundancy letters to the Grade 3 workers. England’s largest local authority was in chaos.
The ‘pincer manoeuvre’
The days and weeks that followed saw a tug-of-war between senior elected officials and council staff. Clancy kept Beckett updated by text message. Court documents from an injunction Unite filed against the council offer a bracing insight into how Clancy was operating against his own colleagues, including that remarkable text.
“Still working most of every day to outflank inappropriate officers so they have nowhere to go,” Clancy texted Beckett on 22 August, seven days after the infamous deal was struck. “Obviously a pincer manoeuvre from others will help specifically to do this.”
“Quite what was Mr Clancy's motivation in all of this is difficult to fathom,” said the judge in the case. “The very considerable number of text messages passing between him and Mr Beckett would be surprising on its own, even without considering their content.” More than 30 messages were exchanged over a fortnight, including some in which it appears Beckett “seems to have known more than Mr Clancy” about what was going on inside the council he led.
Whatever the leader of Birmingham was trying to engineer with Beckett, the messages testify to the extraordinary dysfunction and distrust that had taken hold of the council. “The schism within the council of the officers and the executive not working together, and in fact positively working against one another in some respects, is what has led to this highly unusual situation and what has led to these proceedings,” commented the judge. “Neither party to this litigation emerges from this sorry saga with any credit at all, in my judgment,” he added.
The judgement goes on: “How a public body with 12,000 employees can operate sensibly with this degree of chaos between its senior personnel is remarkable. I could choose any number of similar words; extraordinary and astonishing being two which immediately spring to mind. Certainly this is an exceptional case.”
A subsequent governance report into the debacle, published on 18 December, stated officially that Clancy hadn’t had the authority to do the deal. By that time, Clancy had resigned as leader, facing a vote of no confidence from his colleagues over his handling of the union negotiations. In a statement, he denounced the report as “nonsense from start to finish” and said it was commissioned to “protect the actions of officers and others” who prevented his and Beckett’s deal.
Clancy bites back
John Clancy hasn’t spoken much since he stood down as leader. In fact, he has almost entirely disappeared from view. He stood down as a councillor in 2020 and has left the city, now living in North Wales, although he still works as a visiting professor at Birmingham City University Business School.
What he hasn’t done is given up on the idea that he was right back in 2017 and his adversaries in the council were wrong. Clancy believes that the flood of equal pay claims that have brought this city to its knees could have been stemmed if his deal with Unite had been allowed to stand. When we contacted him recently to get his response to what we were planning to publish in this article, he shot back with a long email explaining his side of things. And telling a very different story.
“It’s clear the catastrophic position [in which] BCC finds itself shows how foolish it was that the chance I provided to solve the problem for good, as far back as September 2017, was not taken,” he wrote to us in one email, agreeing that we could quote these words on the record. And then the major allegation that forms the crux of his account: “Senior Officers of the council failed to follow what turned out to be perfectly lawful instructions from the Leader of The Council and cabinet.”
To Clancy, the council’s ongoing crisis comes down to the failure to conclude the deal he did in 2017. Clancy says that as the 2017 strike rumbled on, he feared public disorder in the city. His deal was a way to prevent that, but he also thought it was a key staging post in dealing with the equal pay liability. He wanted to stop the meter running on the equal pay liabilities by getting the unions to agree a five-day working week for the bin service. This was key, he says, because it would have prevented pay claims from non-bin workers who did not have the privilege of a four-day week. He thinks subsequent talks could have ended the liabilities entirely.
Crucially, Clancy says he received full backing from his cabinet for his deal at a private meeting; he says the cabinet voted to endorse the deal. Others we have spoken to are vague about this approval, with Hamilton telling us, “I don’t remember any of it coming through a formal cabinet process.” But on this question, the evidence would seem to be on Clancy’s side. In the documents related to the union court case, there is an email from Clancy to his cabinet on 17 August, in which he writes:
I am writing to ask your views concerning the interim arrangements which have been agreed through ACAS for the lifting of the strike by refuse collection staff. As you may be aware, there is a difference of view between councillors who are involved in negotiating this compromise through ACAS and senior officers of the council who are concerned that the outlying terms under which the strike was to be lifted and under which further discussions were to take place would expose the council to a higher level of equal pay claims.
The judge notes in his judgement: “He [Clancy] sought approval for what he called the compromise negotiated on the council's behalf through ACAS and the other options.” On the morning of August 18, Clancy wrote to chief executive Manzie:
Last night I emailed my cabinet colleagues to seek their views about taking a collective cabinet decision to approve the interim arrangements which have been agreed through ACAS for the lifting of the strike by refuse collection staff….
The cabinet has therefore taken the decision that whether to accept or reject the ACAS compromise constitutes a key decision under Article 13.3B under our constitution. I and my cabinet colleagues are fully aware that there is a difference of views between the councillors involved in negotiating this compromise through ACAS, and senior officers of the council.
Clancy says the dysfunction at the council came down to senior staff refusing to do what they were supposed to. He tells us the officers “invented spurious reasons for not doing as lawfully instructed”. In his eyes, Manzie wanted a total victory over the unions and wasn’t willing to let the elected politicians get in the way of that.
“It was their job to apply governance arrangements to implement the settled prior decision of the cabinet forthwith,” he told us, “not to engage in a process over time deliberately to undermine it, which they did, leading me ultimately to have no choice but to resign.”
Who runs Birmingham?
Even in an article of this length, it is difficult to unpick who is right about the negotiations with Unite and the equal pay implications of what happened in 2017. That will need to be examined by the public inquiry. But it is possible to see that Clancy is telling a story that, in crucial respects, differs from the one that has taken hold in the city in recent months. Crucially, it lays more blame at the door of professional city officers than the elected members, accusing them of incompetence and abuse of power.
Senior local government figures outside of Birmingham who we consulted for this article pointed out that the city has had an unusually high level of staff turnover in recent years. Manzie, who was acting as an interim in 2017 and 2018, is one of ten chief executives the council has had since the turn of the century. This level of “churn”, which naturally tends to suggest major issues with a local authority’s political leadership as well, would be destabilising for any organisation.
“There was a lot of mistrust,” recalls Hamilton about the relationship between elected members and the professional officers. She also mentions something that is a prominent theme in Clancy’s story: that members of the cabinet sometimes felt they weren’t getting the full picture from the officers who were supposed to be serving them. Referring to a later bin strike, under Ian Ward’s leadership in 2018, she reveals senior councillors (other than the leader) were kept out of discussions entirely: “We just weren’t told, it’s as simple as that. I can’t say I was lied to because I wasn’t told.”
Clancy is more explicit, telling us that council officers repeatedly covered up problems and withheld crucial information from elected members. Manzie denies this. In a short statement to the Dispatch, she told us: "The allegations made by Mr Clancy are untrue. The circumstances of Mr Clancy's resignation as Leader of Birmingham City Council in 2017 are well documented and in the public domain."
Clancy remembers addressing a large group of council staff at the Hippodrome at one point during his leadership, and reminding them that they work for a political organisation, not a business or a charity. A council is supposed to enact the democratic will of residents, he was saying, and it therefore requires political leadership.
Now, of course, the city is firmly in the hands of technocrats. The commissioners sent in by the government have their hands on the controls, and most of the levers they are pulling will result in drastic cuts. The city is expected to sell £1.25 billion in assets to repay a government loan, and we all face a 21% Council Tax increase. Our street lights will be dimmed, our bins will be collected less often and even the costs of burials will be hiked.
Naturally, everyone wants someone to blame. But the truth of this city’s calamity is as messy — and hard to pick through — as a pile of rotting bins on a Birmingham street corner.
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This is a fascinating article.
If there are more stories to come on the collapse of the council, I’d love to know more about Oracle’s role. It feels like they’re going to get away with an awful lot of our council tax without any real scrutiny.
As s historical point, the phrase "beer and sandwiches" was coined to describe meetings between Prime Minister Harold Wilson and trades unionists at No. 10 in the mid-1960s.