How to fix Birmingham

Its council is too big to succeed. Time to break it up.

I was on Newsnight earlier discussing the Birmingham bin debacle - and suggested splitting up the council. This wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment: it’s something that I have long believed since seeing similar reform work in Glasgow.

Birmingham has long been very badly served by its local authorities: it’s been a scandal for decades. When he criticised the shortcomings of child protection services in Birmingham ten years ago, Sir Michael Wilshaw also chose to direct his criticism at the city as a whole. His responsibilities, as chief of Ofsted, were focused on children and their wellbeing. Yet Birmingham’s decline, he argued, had reached much further. “This is a city that ought to be snapping at London’s heels for power, status and influence,” he remarked. Instead, it has been consistently let down by years of poor governance.

Even those who are fond of Birmingham might find themselves agreeing with his assessment. The debacle over rubbish collection, the financial chaos: it all points to a problem than runs far deeper than a spat with the unions.

The UK’s second city boasts many strengths: a central location in England, a world-class university, a globally oriented population, and cultural highlights like the Symphony Hall. This only deepens the mystery of why its unemployment rate is double the national average, why its infant mortality rivals that of Belarus. The out-of-work benefit rate for our second national city is worse then any other city apart from Blackpool:-

For years, government officials have misunderstood Birmingham. The city thrived during the industrial boom of the Fifties, but invested its wealth in reshaping itself for a future that never arrived. It became a landscape of flyovers and underpasses, heavily reliant on a car manufacturing sector that eventually collapsed. The city’s planners made bold decisions, which ultimately failed. The King once wrote that the new city library…

“looks to me like a place where books are incinerated, not kept! . . . an ill-mannered essay in concrete brutalism intended to shock (which it certainly does). An insult to the grand civic buildings amongst which it squats.

The chief architect of the modern city, Sir Herbert Manzoni, demolished its Victorian core, but showed little interest in creating buildings or communities that would draw people in. He trusted in what he described as “the substitution of attraction for compulsion.” Thus, people would be compelled rather than enticed to inhabit his new concrete vision.

While the blunders of Birmingham’s urban planners have long been infamous, the mistakes of its political leaders are only now coming into focus. Its council is the largest local authority in Europe, wielding remarkable powers with remarkable ineptitude. The bin collection saga is simply the latest.

The council is simply too large to operate efficiently. Birmingham City Council has over 101 councillors, as many as the US Senate. Its jurisdiction covers 1.1 million residents and 80 secondary schools, an enormous responsibility. Too enormous, in fact, for any single council – which may explain why no other European country allows councils to become so vast.

Manchester City Council, by comparison, serves 500,000 people and 29 schools. It is one of ten separate councils in Greater Manchester – and the contrast between the cities is stark. While Birmingham has become synonymous with municipal failure, Manchester’s story is one of remarkable achievement. The key is not just size but leadership – especially the 15-year partnership between the council’s chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, and the 25-year stint of its former Labour leader Sir Richard Leese. They pursued a dynamic pro-growth strategy, successfully attracting businesses to the city. They maintain close ties with Manchester University, whose bustling campus is now the largest in Europe. They have helped ensure their city boasts the only major airport outside London, providing global connections to match its international ambitions. All this helped Salford become the BBC’s second base, following the broadcaster’s large-scale relocation. Manchester does not act like it wants to be Britain’s second city: it acts like it wants to be the first.

Birmingham has just as much potential, but it is hard to see how such leadership could emerge from such a sprawling, ineffective council structure. The city was offered the chance to have a mayor, who would likely have had the authority and vision to drive change, but the proposal was rejected in a referendum. Understandably: Brummies have been poorly served by local government and see little reason to want more of it. But this leaves the city – and its children – trapped in the same failing system. The mayoral system, in my view, has not much benefited Manchester or Birmingham.

Anyone who cares about Britain must care about Birmingham, so it is worth considering a solution. As Sir Michael pointed out: if a bank is too big to fail, it might be broken up. If a council is too big, it is not just money at stake or the collection of bins but children’s lives. So why not break it up as well?

For years, Glasgow and its surrounding areas were managed by the vast Strathclyde Regional Council, once the largest in Europe. It was divided into a dozen smaller authorities, benefiting the whole region. Bringing that principle to Birmingham could be the best way to give the city the government it urgently needs.