Dear Editor, Ken Rushton is right to demand that Birmingham’s new Labour Council should hold an inquiry into why the devolution of more powers to the city’s suburbs has stagnated for so long (Post letters, July 26).
Your article in the same edition (Inquiry looks at how to meet Bore’s target for devolution) shows that this is now exactly what the new council administration intends should happen.
As one of its appointed members, I hope the Districts and Public Engagement Overview and Scrutiny Committee inquiry on ‘Devolution – Making it Real’ will not shirk the grand scale of the task.
While I have spoken out for the unique case of Sutton Coldfield, the bigger picture remains the flawed monolith of over-centralisation which continues to deprive our local communities of real democratic control across the whole of Birmingham, and gnaws inexorably away at Birmingham’s regional competitiveness.
Weighed down with the effort of managing a million people’s services from a single central authority, our city’s ability to move swiftly and decisively on far-sighted strategic competitiveness has become fogged and slow, while local residents see little purpose to the limited powers they have been delegated.
A decade ago, following Sir Adrian Cadbury’s Democracy Commission, a whole tide of new steps were taken to move away from Birmingham’s over-centralised structures.
To start things off, a £100 million budget was handed to the 10 local constituency districts across Birmingham. What has shocked and puzzled so many regional commentators is the utter stagnation that followed once the city had fallen into Conservative hands in 2004.
The city has a £3.5 billion budget – in fact £7 billion if other public services are included – yet devolution has got stuck at the starting post of its original £100 million.
As I said at the July O&S Committee meeting which resolved to launch the inquiry, it’s time to draw a veil over the past eight dismal and moribund years, and re-ignite a popular passion and democratic zeal for a new way forward, a new ‘constitutional settlement’ in Birmingham’s troubled history with its local services.
No-one should doubt the vast scale of this enterprise, or the dramatic transformation that will be needed in the way our local services are administered, if this goal is to be reached.
But this is the historic mandate the new administration was elected to deliver, and now intends to carry out.
Councillor Rob Pocock
Sutton Vesey Ward
