The more the city council talks about opening up and engaging with citizens, communities or the great unwashed the more impenetrable their language and processes become.
Both council leader Sir Albert Bore and chief executive Mark Rogers went before the districts scrutiny committee to discuss their thoughts on devolution and community governance in the wake of the Kerslake review. Admittedly, it is a tough sell to get anyone outside the local political bubble to think about ‘community governance’.
But this is quite important. As Lord Kerslake himself said that the city is failing in its community leadership role and people feel they have no way of holding public services to account.
Low and behold, the first feedback from residents attending various consultation meetings was that they could not even understand what was being asked. The official consultation talks about ‘new strategic partnerships’ and ‘community boards’ apparently. Even some of the councillors around the committee table looked a little lost by the discussion – and they are supposed to be the experts.
Mr Rogers said he definitely did not want a vision which no one can understand and admitted they have a big problem because, in the wider world, ‘politics is turning people off’.
Sir Albert Bore told the committee that the new districts, plans for which are currently being drawn up, would not be given responsibility for budgets. This had previously failed as, to secure economies of scale, the council had made large area contracts for such services as housing repair and grass cutting, landing the smaller districts with a bill over which they had no control.
Coun Claire Spencer highlighted the problem, saying that if an area wanted a Sunday refuse collection because they have a thriving Saturday night life, they had no way of delivering this within the council’s rigid structure.
Instead, they will now be given the role of challenging and influencing the quality and delivery of public services in their patch. Coun Bore said there would remain a group of city wide scrutiny committees at the centre (although he did not confirm they are looking at taking the current number of nine down to five).
He also made it clear that there would not be a single system of devolution as there had been before – when we had carved the city up into ten equal districts.
This had been done because bureaucrats like structures to be uniform and neat, but the real world is messy and untidy and from now on the council will need to better reflect the difference needs of Birmingham’s many varied neighbourhoods.
