The last Birmingham Labour council got a dreadful reputation for neglecting the city’s outer estates and suburbs, and instead channelling the cash to “its friends and minority communities in the inner city”.

Time and again, when campaigning in outer areas of the city, I got the same message – why can’t we have the same quality of pavements and fences you are giving people in the inner city?

Working class communities in Oscott, Kingstanding, Shard End and Longbridge turned to the BNP. Leafier suburbs, from Hall Green and Moseley to Billesley and Bournville, went Lib Dem or Conservative. Labour was punished for a reputation it did not always deserve. But many voters felt passionately that Labour in Birmingham no longer stands up for “people like us”.

The re-election of a Labour council in May 2012 brought with it the return to the fold of the leafy suburbs of Hall Green, Moseley, Billesley and Bournville. More remarkably, it brought with it Harborne and for the first time ever, Sutton Vesey. Labour’s commanding majority of 34 has been built in no small measure on the appearance of a new and widespread phenomenon – Labour’s leafy suburbs.

Ed Miliband caught the mood of the country by his conference commitment to a One Nation Labour. A rapid early test of Labour’s local commitment to this idea in practice, will be how well it is expressed as ‘One City Labour’ in Birmingham. Has Labour learned the lessons of the past? The council faces huge financial pressures, as Sir Albert Bore revealed recently. Will Labour resist the temptation to channel cash away from its newly acquired leafy suburbs and again become just a party for the poor?

If Birmingham is truly to feel the benefit of Ed Miliband’s road to a One City Labour, then a fundamentally different strategy will be needed.

Any knee-jerk instinct for a blanket redistribution from suburb to inner city needs to be replaced by a commitment to the principle that the people of the suburbs are of equal importance.

One way of cementing this new strategy – that all citizens are of equal value and each is entitled to a fair standard of service wherever they live – would be to state it in the form of a new universal charter of civic rights. Reflecting the need to deal fairly with Labour’s leafy suburbs as well as areas of deprivation, this charter could lay down basic citizen entitlements.

For example:

* The equal right of all families to access to a decent school.

* The equal right of all citizens to decent standards of roads, pavements and streetlights (a ‘decent environments’ standard on the same lines as the ‘decent homes’ standard).

* An equal right of all unemployed citizens to access help into work, whether the unemployed citizen lives in Lozells or a ‘Leafy labour suburb’.

* An equal right to council support for community organisations, faith and voluntary groups, wherever these are in the city.

* Equal rights of householders to protection from the risks of crime and disorder.

This would then provide a logical and transparently fair basis for the distribution of the council’s increasingly scarce resources.

It would confirm:

* That a fair distribution of cash for roads and streetlights would be proportional to the lengths of roads in the various districts of the city.

* Help for people without jobs would ensure each individual has the same entitlement to support wherever they live.

* Help to combat crime would be a universal right but higher, quite fairly, in areas where the risk of crime was higher.

* Help to tackle ill-health would ensure each individual has the same entitlement to support wherever they live’ although once again, areas where more people were in poor health, would justifiably and fairly receive proportionally more resources.

There will no doubt be plenty of room for argument over the details, but this is not the point.

By adopting the principle of universal, fundamental civic rights for all its citizens, Labour will send a clear message to its leafy suburbs that they are not second rate citizens, an after-thought in Labour’s list of priorities, but communities with as much right to a fair share of the council’s resources as anyone else.

Asserting this principle would also be a cornerstone of the new strategy for social cohesion.

In the past Labour has all too often instinctively assumed that the exclusion and marginalisation of citizens was predominantly a feature of socially disadvantaged groups and minority ethnic communities.

In truth the greatest disaffection with the workings of the city council, and the strongest feelings that the council is not focused on their interests, is often felt among busy working families bringing up kids, and in the leafy suburbs who feel no-one recognises their equal rights for fair treatment too.

It was once an easy throw-away jibe, dropping readily from the lips of Labour councillors, that the leafy suburbs would have to pay to support deprivation and the neglected inner city.

Now, a One City council needs to state proudly and boldly that as well as protecting the inner city, it is equally standing up for that newly acquired phenomenon – Labour’s leafy suburbs.

* Rob Pocock (Labour) is a Birmingham councillor in the Sutton Vesey Ward