Bond. Phillip Bond. He is not a secret agent, although his command of dates, documents and process might make the average desk officer wish he would disappear behind a revolving bookcase. Mr Bond is a retired officer who served with the Metropolitan Police and West Midlands Police. He now teaches investigative and quasi judicial bodies how to investigate properly. I have met Mr and Mrs Bond. They struck me as decent, pleasant, middle England people, not performers auditioning for the role of professional victim. Phillip is precise. Sometimes you have to stop him and ask which document belongs to which event. He stops, resets and explains. That may make him demanding. It does not make him dismissible.

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Mr Bond alleges that he and Mrs Bond have endured a sustained campaign involving threats, hostile social media material, suggestions that he is insane, general nastiness and the defacing of a memorial bench. He says one principal individual, known to Warwickshire Police, sits at the centre of it, with a small group around that person. I have seen numerous reports and pieces of material, although I do not propose to empty the Bonds’ filing cabinets into this article or conduct a criminal trial by Substack. The immediate question is simpler. Did Warwickshire Police ever place the whole body of material before one experienced investigator and ask whether these apparently separate incidents formed a continuing course of conduct?

In February, Warwickshire Police told me that two harassment reports involving Mr and Mrs Bond were under investigation. By June, the force said both had been filed as not for action because of “insufficient evidence provided”. Those words deserve attention. Insufficient evidence found after a thorough investigation is one thing. Insufficient evidence provided by a complainant is another. The police are not a parcel collection service waiting for a perfectly wrapped prosecution to arrive at reception. Their job includes finding evidence and linking incidents. Perhaps all that happened. Warwickshire Police has not said. I asked whether the wider pattern had been reviewed as a possible course of conduct. It did not answer.

This is not Warwickshire Police’s first rodeo on the no further action roundabout. Earlier this year it emerged that the force had missed the prosecution deadline in 16 drink driving cases over three years. In one Nuneaton case a van driver crashed into parked vehicles, pushing two into nearby properties. Blood results reportedly showed alcohol above the legal limit and drugs in the driver’s system, but the email containing them was missed and the deadline was not chased. The force’s complaint process found numerous failings, and no further action letters had been sent without explaining why. When journalists asked about the other cases, the communications department said the questions were best suited to Freedom of Information. I recognise the route. It has polite signposts and appears to lead in a circle.

Warwickshire Police’s press office sent me down precisely that lane. It answered the easy part, declined the awkward process questions and told me they belonged under Freedom of Information. I duly submitted a request. The FOI unit then said it could neither confirm nor deny holding the information because I had identified the Bonds. Legally, that exemption may be available. Administratively, it is magnificent choreography. One department points towards a door. Another explains why it cannot be opened. Nobody is rude. Nobody answers the question.

We used to call it being kicked into the long grass. Nowadays people too often appear not to be there to help you but to deal with you, moving you to the next inbox and department until you tire. I cannot prove that was Warwickshire Police’s intention. But a responsible police press office must understand the route it recommends. Sending a journalist towards an exemption can look less like assistance and more like getting him out of the room. I am going to assume such a low down technique is not standard operating practice. Warwickshire Police may care to reassure me.

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HMICFRS is the national inspectorate which examines and grades police forces. It looked at 50 Warwickshire incidents reported as antisocial behaviour and concluded that 32 crimes should have been recorded, but only 21 were. It found poor handovers, missing evidence, crimes waiting weeks for allocation, missed investigative opportunities and unjustified delays. Inspectors also judged 85 of 100 investigations effective, so this is not an argument that every Warwickshire officer is hopeless. It is evidence that missing patterns and allowing difficult files to drift are real risks.

Then there are the complaints. Warwickshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner reported that 34 complaint reviews were completed during 2024/25 and 47 per cent were upheld because either the handling or outcome had not been reasonable and proportionate. Forty seven per cent. Nearly half. Most complainants do not enter the process as experts. They misunderstand forms and use ordinary language where the system expects the approved incantation. Warwickshire Police knows every gate, nuance and phrase. It enters with home advantage, the rule book and possession of the ball. Yet nearly half of the reviewed decisions were still found wanting.

And then there is the Warwickshire Hunt business. Warwickshire Police issued the hunt with a community protection notice. Eight months later it was replaced by what Matt Western MP described in Parliament as a secret protocol. He said he was refused a copy, wrote repeatedly to the chief constable and Police and Crime Commissioner and was blanked. He later alleged a cover up involving the hunt, the force and the Commissioner. The Commissioner denied it, and an independent review found no evidence that his Countryside Alliance membership influenced operational decisions.

That finding belongs here. So does the plain English appearance. A hunt, connected people, a private protocol replacing formal enforcement, an MP unable to obtain answers and the county’s great and good appearing to receive courtesies the great unwashed would not expect. Whatever the legal conclusion, the optics stank. The review itself identified shortcomings in oversight and communication and called for greater transparency. Not proof of corruption, but evidence that a matter requiring openness was handled in a way which bred suspicion.

David Gardner is Acting Chief Constable. It would be unfair to pin every historic failure on him because most began before he took the chair. Nor should we suggest he is campaigning for the permanent job. Emma Bond MBE is the preferred candidate. But Gardner is the operational head today, and acting chiefs do not receive acting responsibilities. Warwickshire is among the smallest forces in England and Wales. Small ought to mean agile. It should not mean a complicated complainant is passed among officers until everyone has touched the file and nobody owns it.

GRIT is not letting this go. I will ask Mr and Mrs Bond to make Subject Access Requests for their records and closure rationales. I will submit another Freedom of Information request, force wide and stripped of personal identifiers, asking how Warwickshire Police records, links, supervises and closes repeated harassment and online abuse reports. If the answers justify a formal complaint, I know how to make one. I hope that will not be necessary. The preferable outcome is one suitably senior and experienced investigator reviewing the Bond material as a whole and reaching a reasoned conclusion.

That conclusion might be that no criminal case can properly be brought. Mr Bond may not like it. I might not like it. But a proper investigation can withstand an experienced former police officer examining it. A half job cannot. Warwickshire residents do not pay for a police force to outlast complainants by attrition. They pay it to distinguish irritation from risk, paperwork from evidence and a string of incidents from a pattern. How many reports does it take before somebody stops counting them separately and starts investigating what they mean together?

Mrs Olley and I went to the Actress and Bishop because Tony Iommi was launching his new album, From The Dark. We went because Tony is a mate and when a friend has spent two years creating something that matters to him, you turn up and support him. Admittedly, most of my friends have not invented heavy metal, sold millions of records and altered the course of popular music, but you have to take people as you find them. Tony was there to introduce his first solo album in 21 years, Frank Skinner was there to interview him, and Mrs Olley was there with her camera. More of that later, because she took what I believe is a world class photograph, although marriage requires me to declare a possible interest.

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Frank Skinner, Albion to his bones, jokingly observed that Birmingham now appeared to be married to Aston Villa. It never used to be like this. Geezer Butler is a proper Villan, but Tony has never been much interested in football and never even came to watch the Saddlers with me, which remains a surprising gap in an otherwise dazzling life. Ozzy and Bill were hardly likely to be found debating the merits of a back three either. Yet Sabbath made its final bow at Villa Park and the club regularly embraces the band and its music, so perhaps Frank has spotted a civic marriage that took place while the rest of us were looking the other way. He did not labour the point and neither shall I. A joke is like a soufflé. Poke it repeatedly with a spoon and everybody wishes you had left it alone.

Frank was the right man for the afternoon because he has the rare ability to show proper affection without allowing reverence to turn into embalming fluid. Before long he had promoted Tony to the new James Bond, which seemed reasonable enough. Tony has also been awarded an MBE but has not yet collected it. Frank wondered whether he would wear a top hat and suggested that the King might confuse him with Slash. Tony laughed, as he did through much of the conversation, without ever looking like a man who had arrived expecting the room to kneel. That may be the most remarkable thing about him. The world sees Tony Iommi, creator of riffs that changed music and inspired generations. Tony appears still to see Tony, a Brummie bloke who plays guitar, makes records and occasionally has to explain why he once set fire to his drummer.

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The album has not suddenly popped out of the woodwork. Tony has mentioned it on and off for a considerable time, and it has taken two years to complete. There was no pressure, he said, which is precisely why a perfectionist can take two years. Nobody was standing behind him with a stopwatch, but Tony was, and he is probably the more demanding of the two. This is plainly a labour of love, made because he still has music inside him that needs to come out and because he will not put his name on something until it sounds as he believes it should. The contrast with Paranoid was glorious. This album took two years, while Tony recalled that Paranoid was written in about two minutes. Some music has to be coaxed from hiding over months of work. Other music turns up before anyone has found the kettle and announces that it intends to become immortal.

Tony described From The Dark as a very Brummy album. Many of the musicians involved are from Birmingham and much of the merchandising has been made here. That matters because Birmingham is not decorative wrapping placed around Tony Iommi after the event. It is in the work. His story runs through Washwood Heath and Aston, through workshops, factories and the stubborn ingenuity of a city that made things long before it became fashionable to hold conferences about making things. The industrial accident that cost Tony the tips of two fingers should have finished his playing. Instead, he found another way, fashioned tips for his fingers, adapted his guitar and helped create a sound that travelled around the planet. Birmingham hurt him and Tony made Birmingham part of the answer. There is something very Brummie about refusing to accept that the machine has had the final word.

Frank described Tony as the player manager of Black Sabbath, and it fits. He was the sensible chap keeping the whole extraordinary contraption on the road while the wheels threatened to head towards four separate continents. Sensible, of course, is a comparative term. Tony once set Bill Ward on fire and left him with third degree burns, after which Bill’s mother told him off. This is difficult to reconcile with our conventional picture of sensible management. Somewhere between musical director, peacekeeper, practical joker and boy receiving a severe lecture from somebody’s mom sits the Tony Iommi of Sabbath. It is a wonder they made any records at all. It is an even greater wonder that the records were so magnificent.

There was also the suggestion that the new album might eventually be performed live. Tony announced nothing and gave little away, but said anything was possible and that he was not opposed to doing it. Nobody should book a hotel, order a commemorative T shirt or begin sleeping outside Villa Park, but the door was not slammed shut either. That is enough to keep hope alive without turning a friendly answer into a world tour. Frank said he loved the album, and what we heard suggested Tony has not spent 21 years preparing a tasteful selection of background tunes for a garden centre café.

Afterwards Tony was surrounded by people wanting photographs, signatures, handshakes and a few moments of his time. That is the strange tax placed upon famous people. Everybody wants a small piece of them, and the decent ones keep giving until there is hardly any afternoon left. Tony managed it all with patience and warmth. I had, purely for research purposes, acquired a rather unofficial copy of the song from the video and briefly considered offering it back to him at a competitive price. Unfortunately, he was busy being an international rock star and the commercial opportunity passed. The evidence will naturally be destroyed. Tony may be one of the most influential musicians alive, but he is also arguably the nicest international rock star in the world, which must make life difficult for those who believe greatness requires behaving like an arse.

And then there is Mrs Olley’s photograph. In the red light, Tony is smiling broadly, relaxed and unmistakably enjoying himself, with his own name towering behind him. It captures the afternoon better than a thousand carefully arranged publicity shots could. The legend is present, certainly, but so is the man. I have used it as the foundation for the artwork because it contains the thing I came away thinking. Tony Iommi has every reason to behave like a monument, yet he remains recognisably human, funny, courteous and thoroughly Birmingham.

We went to support a friend as he launched something he had worked on and worried over for two years. We came away proud of him, not merely for the music he made half a century ago, but because he is still creating, still improving and still refusing to become an exhibit in his own museum. Tony Iommi is still just Tony. Considering everything he has achieved, that may be his finest trick.

There is a familiar civic recipe for helping young people who are not in education, employment or training. Find a stuffy institutional building, fill it with folding tables and earnest people wearing lanyards, add several plates of curling civic sandwiches, then express surprise when the young people do not come. Simone Schehtman tried something rather more intelligent. She opened the doors of Teamworks Hub and brought more than 400 disadvantaged young adults together with 56 employers, training organisations and support partners in a place that young people might actually want to visit. This may sound like common sense, but in the world of public policy common sense can still arrive dressed as a dangerous new idea.

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Teamworks is at 202 Fazeley Street in Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SE. It is close to the Custard Factory, around ten minutes on foot from New Street station and served nearby by the 2, 4, 6, 97 and 97A buses. It also has a large car park, which in central Birmingham now counts as a minor miracle. Teamworks deserves the plug because it is not simply a building that happened to be hired for the day. It is Birmingham’s city centre indoor karting venue, with laser tag and racing simulators, but it has also developed into a serious hub where young people can build confidence, explore careers, prepare CVs, practise interviews and connect with jobs, apprenticeships and further education. (Teamworks Karting)

The scale and range of the Talent Finder Day were impressive. Ten construction and engineering employers attended, alongside four healthcare organisations, adult social care, the RAF, the Army and Civil Service opportunities. Hospitality, finance and banking were represented, while Creative Alliance brought opportunities covering digital media, marketing, television and film production, ceramics, fashion design and more. There were cosmetics companies, training providers offering routes into healthcare, sports coaching and catering, plus English language assistance, housing support and other practical help. This was not a gathering of organisations competing to distribute the greatest number of glossy leaflets. There were real jobs, apprenticeships, courses and routes forward.

The expression NEET is useful for official statistics but tells us very little about the young person standing in front of us. One may need qualifications. Another may need confidence. Someone else may be dealing with insecure housing, limited English, poor health or no idea how to approach an employer without feeling that the entire process has been designed to expose their shortcomings. Bringing employers, trainers and support organisations together in one place makes practical sense. Putting them somewhere welcoming rather than somewhere that feels like an appointment with official disappointment makes even more sense. The venue was not a gimmick attached to the event. The venue was part of why the event worked.

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I visited Teamworks a few days beforehand and could already feel the energy building. It is a wonderful place and seeing this kind of ambition in Birmingham made me more than a little proud. For the record, no go karts were operating during the Talent Finder Day. Parts of the track were instead being used to help secure the future of another generation at a jobs fair they are unlikely to forget. This was an excellent use of the circuit and certainly more useful than my own appearance on it many years ago.

I had been invited to my future son in law’s stag event and tipped the scales at about 20 stone, not necessarily all of it muscle and sinew. I was then, and remain today, an exceptionally good looking hunk. And if you do not believe that, take a look inside my mind. When the race began, my considerable ballast carried me magnificently through the first couple of bends. Then the lighter young men accelerated past and disappeared. The race track may remember my defeat, but dignity requires that I do not.

The young people attending Talent Finder Day should retain a rather better memory of the place. They met employers, explored careers, discussed vacancies and encountered people who could help with the obstacles between them and work. The buzz and the outcomes were palpable, while the feedback from employers and young people was described as off the scale. That is what happens when an event is designed around the people expected to attend rather than around the convenience of the organisations delivering it.

One of the people behind the wider effort was Professor Harris Beider, founder and chief executive of Forward, a Birmingham organisation bringing together business, government, universities and civil society to find practical answers to the city’s problems. Harris is an academic and public policy expert whose career has included senior work at Birmingham City University, Coventry University, the University of Birmingham and Columbia University in New York. His specialist interests have included communities, housing, race, cohesion and civic renewal, so he brings rather more to the table than a lanyard and a hopeful expression. (Birmingham City University)

Harris described Talent Finder Day as a made in Birmingham solution and said it was the eighth event of its kind. He reported that the model typically attracts more than 400 young people and more than 50 employers, with over 60 per cent of participants directly securing jobs, training or apprenticeships. Those are serious claims and serious outcomes. The model is not simply about creating a pleasant atmosphere for a day. It is about producing a destination for the young person after the banners have come down. (LinkedIn)

I recall this fellow very well. Harris was a colleague of mine in the Labour Party more than 30 years ago. I have a tale or two about him that would make him blush, and I am afraid, Harris, this material is not safe with me either. For the moment, however, I shall behave myself because he is right about the importance of what has been created. Attendance figures are welcome and enthusiastic feedback is encouraging, but real destinations are what matter. A successful employment event is not measured by how many leaflets leave the tables. It is measured by whether young people leave with somewhere useful to go.

Simone deserves enormous praise because she understood that you need young people in the room before you can help them. That means creating an event they want to enter. Too much employment policy begins by treating the young person as a collection of deficits. They are assessed, processed, referred and reviewed. Every organisation records an engagement and every programme produces an outcome report, while the young person is still waiting for somebody to offer a proper chance. Talent Finder Day joined the support directly to the opportunity. It was serious work without making seriousness feel like punishment.

Birmingham does not lack strategies about youth unemployment, skills gaps, economic inactivity and disadvantage. We can establish boards, appoint chairs, convene round tables and commission reports until the curling civic sandwiches demand their own representative body. What matters is whether a young person walks through the door, meets someone useful and leaves believing that life might move forward. More than 400 young people walked into Teamworks and found real employers, real training and real assistance waiting for them.

The go karts remained silent, but the building still moved at considerable speed. A circuit normally used for racing was partly occupied by people trying to give the next generation a better start. It was imaginative without being frivolous, serious without being stuffy and practical without being buried beneath official language. Congratulations to Simone, Harris, Teamworks and every employer and support organisation that arrived with something genuine to offer.

Birmingham needs more of this. More imagination, more direct contact and more opportunities placed where young people will actually find them.

Fewer lanyards would also be welcome, and the curling civic sandwiches can finally be put out of their misery.

West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker was on the train to Manchester and called it Britain’s third city. It was plainly a joke, and a decent one. He was travelling to meet the Prime Minister, not presenting the regional final of University Challenge. Even so, our Mayor was far too generous. On one perfectly respectable population measure, Manchester is fifth. Birmingham should welcome Parker home with a cup of tea and a small badge reading: “I visited Britain’s fifth city and all I brought back was a devolution deal.”

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There is, however, an awkward second half to the joke. Manchester may be fifth on that particular table, but it has spent decades behaving like a capital. Birmingham is larger, more central and blessed with an accent nobody from outside the city can imitate successfully, yet we still sometimes enter the national conversation as though we have come to repair the photocopier. Manchester arrives with a plan, a slogan, a bee and three television crews. We arrive with a consultation document and an apology that Coventry could not attend because the meeting was being held in Birmingham.

Manchester’s success did not begin when Andy Burnham bought his first smart jacket. Sir Howard Bernstein and Sir Richard Leese had already spent years building the civic machine, supported by cooperation between the ten Greater Manchester councils. Burnham inherited strong foundations, recognised their value and built upon them. Spotting a working engine and resisting the political urge to dismantle it with a ceremonial screwdriver is a considerable talent. Greater Manchester now sounds natural because its leaders kept saying it until everybody else accepted it.

Notice what did not happen. Bolton did not vanish. Salford was not bulldozed into a Manchester suburb. Stockport was not forced to surrender its crest, its council chamber or its opinions. Those places kept their identities, football grudges and sense of local superiority while presenting government, investors and the wider world with one recognisable front door. Greater Manchester works because it is short, clear and understood. That sounds elementary, but it is several educational stages ahead of the West Midlands when it comes to naming partnerships.

The obvious equivalent is Greater Birmingham. The chances of our councils agreeing to that are somewhere between remote and pigs catching the tram and paying the exact fare. Mention those two words in certain civic circles and chains of office begin to rattle. Wolverhampton suspects annexation. Solihull checks the house prices. Dudley reaches for the Black Country flag. Coventry reminds everybody that it had a cathedral while Birmingham was still deciding where to put the Bull Ring.

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By teatime, the compromise name becomes the Greater Birmingham, Black Country, Coventry, Solihull, Warwickshire Fringe and Associated Proud Places Strategic Economic Partnership Area. Its logo requires landscape mode. Its headed paper needs a continuation sheet. The launch is held in a neutral motorway service station because every actual town is considered politically provocative.

Yet Greater Birmingham need not erase anybody. I was born and raised in Shirley. I support a Black Country football team. I have driven a Coventry car, and my nan was born there. Birmingham later made me an Honorary Alderman. None of those loyalties has ever cancelled another. I have been a Greater Brummy all my life. I simply lacked the headed paper.

Ordinary people cross these boundaries constantly. We travel across them for work, shopping, football, hospitals, universities, entertainment and family. Many people living in Solihull work in Birmingham. People from Birmingham visit Coventry, Walsall, Wolverhampton and the Black Country without requiring diplomatic papers. Business understands that the regional economy does not stop at the borough boundary. It is largely our civic institutions that behave as though the old boundary line is electrified.

Birmingham has shown what can happen when it thinks beyond the parish pump. Sir Frank Price and others drove the creation of the NEC, which opened in 1976 beside the airport and railway. It was an act of civic confidence that changed the economic geography of the region. Dick Knowles later helped drive the ICC, Symphony Hall and the opening up of the western side of Birmingham city centre. Brindleyplace then turned derelict canalside land into one of Britain’s most successful regeneration schemes.

These were not timid projects. They were Birmingham saying, “This is where the country should meet,” and then building the place where it could. Later came the current Bullring, New Street and Grand Central, Paradise and the Commonwealth Games. The region can build magnificent things. It can stage magnificent things. It can occasionally astonish the country.

The problem is not that Birmingham and the West Midlands have achieved nothing. The problem is that our achievements too often sit like handsome individual exhibits rather than chapters in one continuing regional story. Manchester built momentum. We built several excellent things and then wandered off to rename the partnership.

This is also where locally rooted business figures matter. Stephen Goldstein built substantial commercial property businesses and played an important role in regeneration work around the Jewellery Quarter. People like Goldstein bring commercial knowledge, contacts, civic memory and the useful ability to remember what was agreed before the latest chief executive arrived. Manchester became good at keeping politicians, officials, businesses, universities and institutions around the same table. Birmingham has often had the right people, but not always the same table for very long.

So here is a gentle challenge to Richard Parker and the leaders of Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton. What do you collectively suggest we call this region when selling it to the world?

The answer must contain no more than three words. No slashes, ampersands, compass points, “wider”, “strategic”, “partnership”, “functional economic area” or explanatory asterisks. It must fit on a road sign and be remembered by somebody who has never attended a scrutiny committee.

If Greater Birmingham is unacceptable, produce something better. “West Midlands” is administratively accurate, but it sounds like the place where the weather presenter points when the rain has become too general to locate.

If our leaders cannot agree, let us at least be honest about why. It is not geography. It is municipal vanity. Are they civic leaders with the confidence to enlarge the region, or municipal mudlarks content to snuffle through the parish pump sludge for one tiny ceremonial pearl bearing their own town’s crest while Manchester walks away with the entire oyster bed?

Local pride is valuable until it starts costing jobs, investment and national influence. At that point it becomes an expensive hobby conducted in mayoral robes.

Richard Parker’s Manchester joke was good. Our correction should be affectionate: fifth city, Richard, fifth. But Manchester deserves the last laugh unless the West Midlands learns its deeper lesson. The fifth city persuaded its neighbours that standing together makes them bigger. The second city’s region still fears that standing together might make somebody else look important.

Greater Manchester got over itself years ago. Greater Birmingham, whatever we finally call it, needs to grow up, choose a front door and stop arguing over whose name goes on the bell.

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The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival was officially launched at the AC Hotel in The Mailbox on Friday, and by all accounts it was splendid. I say “by all accounts” because I was not there. While decent people listened to music and exchanged civilised conversation, I was in court fighting Birmingham City Council over a legal matter. That tale will be fully reported in GRIT at the proper time. Win, lose or draw, you are going to enjoy my take on it. For now, Friday offered me legal submissions, reserved costs and all the charm of municipal conflict, while everybody else got jazz.

The launch brought together two former MPs, Labour’s Khalid Mahmood and Liberal Democrat John Hemming, along with Cllr Deborah Harries, Birmingham City Council’s Cabinet Member for Culture and Heritage. Seeing those names together revived a lovely political memory. Nearly 17 years ago, Deborah worked in the council’s press operation when Birmingham’s children’s services were under fierce scrutiny. Khalid, then the MP for Perry Barr and never likely to tiptoe past an argument, was refused entry to a council press briefing.

Khalid reminded me later on Friday what happened next. He protested, naturally, but accepted the instruction on one condition: if he could not remain because he was an MP, John Hemming could not remain either. John was then the Liberal Democrat MP for Yardley, so out John went as well. It was a gloriously Birmingham solution. Equality had been achieved, though perhaps not quite as anyone intended. Years later there they all were again, no briefing dispute and nobody being shown the door. Politics moves on, memories soften and jazz appears capable of granting an informal amnesty.

Now in its 42nd year, the festival has again spread music across Birmingham and beyond, with more than 170 performances at more than 100 venues, most of them free. But “free” is not “costless”: musicians need paying, equipment needs moving and organisers need to retain what remains of their sanity. Jim Simpson and his team put live music where people live their lives, including, on Sunday, the sofa department.

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By Sunday I was more than ready for my own festival experience. Harvey Norman in Sutton Coldfield was a considerable improvement on Friday’s courtroom atmosphere. Nobody produced a summons, nobody referred me to a statutory provision and the only thing being reserved was possibly the extremely comfortable sofa on which I sat. The Australian retailer opened in April, reviving the old BHS premises at Gracechurch and establishing its UK headquarters in the Royal Town. Sutton has almost acquired its own John Lewis, although Mrs Olley will search in vain for the frock department. It is good to see our cousins from Down Under investing rather than merely arriving to recover the Ashes.

The performers were John Hemming and the Jazz Lobbyists, with Lorraine Olley on vocals. Their promise is “great music, no political agenda”, reassuring when the pianist is a former MP. John arrived armed only with a keyboard, while Mrs Olley sang beautifully. I am not an entirely independent critic, but marriage must permit a little bias when the evidence is plainly in my favour. I listened from one of Harvey Norman’s very fine sofas. This was not idleness but serious product testing in support of local investment. The sofa was admirably suited to jazz, although I stopped short of asking whether it would fit through our front door. That is how a free concert becomes a major household purchase.

Then came the sort of bonus no programme can promise. I bumped into my old friend Lisa, whom I had not seen for years. She once worked as a PA to a director I knew well and now sells sofas, very nice sofas, as I can testify. There she was looking younger than she did all those years ago, delightful for Lisa and mildly irritating for the rest of us. Also there was one of Birmingham’s favoured sons, Basil Gabbidon, founding guitarist of Steel Pulse and a true regent of reggae, supporting the music with his delightful wife, herself a singer with a magnificent voice. They are family friends, and seeing them added another layer of warmth. The best musicians turn out for other musicians too.

That is the real value of the Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival. The music draws you in, but the people make the memory. It turns ordinary spaces into stages and routine outings into reunions. Someone testing a sofa may rediscover an old friend. A former MP may play piano while another remembers the day he had him removed from a council briefing. A man who spent Friday fighting the city council may spend Sunday listening to his wife sing and remember that Birmingham, for all its arguments and absurdities, remains capable of immense warmth.

Then, right at the end of the set, the fire alarm went off. Mrs Olley and the Jazz Lobbyists had spent the afternoon setting the place alight, and the alarm appeared to take the compliment rather too literally. There was no smoke and, as far as I know, no fire, but better safe than sorry. Musicians, shoppers, old friends and assorted members of Birmingham’s political and musical history calmly made their way outside. Nobody panicked, nobody argued and I resisted the temptation to carry the sofa out with me.

So the afternoon ended not with a final chord but with an alarm bell and the audience politely leaving the building. Birmingham rarely allows a good story to finish without one last unexpected detail. When friends meet, hearts warm. When the band begins, old battles lose their sharp edges. And when Mrs Olley sets Harvey Norman on fire, even I know it is time to get off the sofa.

MidlandsGRIT is published by Just Only Limited, company number 09031530. Mike Olley is the editor and the person responsible for editorial decisions and publication.

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MidlandsGRIT is published by Just Only Limited, company number 09031530. Editor: Mike Olley.

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There are weeks when writing a column feels like trudging through wet cement while carrying a filing cabinet, and there are other weeks when the stories arrive waving their arms, shouting for attention and bringing their own jokes. This was emphatically one of the latter. We have travelled from blindness and railway stations to rock television, Belgian football, Birmingham City Council’s press office and the national prison crisis. What astonished me most was the response to the football piece. I deliberately tried to write about football for people who do not spend their lives studying League Two formations, arguing over wing-backs or declaring that a 19-year-old reserve goalkeeper “needs a loan spell.” Football writing can become a private language spoken by devotees in replica shirts, whereas I wanted to write about changing careers, institutions and loyalties, using Mat Sadler’s move from Walsall to Lommel SK in Belgium as the doorway. And, blow me down, people read it. Lots of them.

Sadler’s move looks like one thing and may prove to be something quite different. To some, leaving an English manager’s job to become an assistant coach in Belgium resembles going backwards, or at least taking a suspiciously long route to somewhere nobody had previously suggested visiting. Yet Lommel is part of City Football Group, the worldwide organisation built around Manchester City. Sadler has not merely changed clubs; he has entered an international system in which coaches, analysts, players, recruitment teams and ideas move between countries. That is modern football. We still sit in our familiar seats, complain about the referee and insist the opposition goalkeeper is wasting time from the fourth minute. Behind us, however, football is becoming a global graduate training scheme with shin pads. Mrs Olley and I watched Aston Villa beat Walsall 5-0 this week. We went with Villa and Birmingham City-supporting friends and had a perfect evening. No Blues colours were worn because diplomacy had to be protected. By the end, some of us might have accepted camouflage. Clubs may belong to global networks, but football still belongs to families, friendships, arguments and journeys home discussing a match everyone has already seen.

The other great surprise was the response to Rockefellas TV’s European studio launch in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Thousands upon thousands of people read that piece, which suggests either that Birmingham remains fascinated by its musical legacy or that the promise of a free T-shirt possesses powers beyond conventional journalism. Californian entrepreneur Alex Garcia invested here because Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, ELO, Duran Duran and The Moody Blues travelled 5,000 miles and lodged themselves in his imagination. Rockefellas TV is a streaming operation rather than an old-fashioned television channel, and its Birmingham studio will host Brad’s Basement, presented by singer Brad Henshaw. His first guest is Jim Simpson, the man who managed Black Sabbath when they were still called Earth. I have met people who begin conversations with, “When I first managed Black Sabbath…” and others who begin with, “According to paragraph 4.7 of the cultural strategy.” I know which table I would choose, even if the second one had biscuits.

Birmingham has never lacked culture. It has sometimes lacked the confidence to recognise culture unless it arrives with a lanyard, a funding stream and somebody using “stakeholder” as a verb. Heavy metal was not invented in a committee room, nor did it emerge from a consultation exercise conducted between 10am and noon on a wet Tuesday. It came from working-class Birmingham: factories, clubs, pubs, terraced streets and young men making an almighty noise. Sometimes it takes somebody from 5,000 miles away to point at our treasures and remind us what they are worth. There will be more on that next week, particularly for the metal fans. My lips are sealed, which is not a condition from which I usually suffer. At the launch somebody asked whether the Rockefellas shirts were for sale. Alex interrupted to say they were giving them away. I was too busy talking and missed out. For the avoidance of doubt, should anybody from Rockefellas be reading, I remain a 2XL.

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We began the week with a quieter and perhaps more important story. A blind reader told me about the assumptions people make because she does not “look blind.” Few phrases are intended as kindly and yet land quite so badly. Years ago, while guiding a friend with sight loss, I announced that there was a step immediately ahead. “Up or down?” he asked. One question demolished my confidence. I had supplied information that was perfectly clear to me and almost useless to him. My reader described being left on a train after the other passengers had departed. She eventually contacted a cleaner, while recovering the ticket cost reportedly took six months and the involvement of the Rail Ombudsman. Britain can propel hundreds of tonnes of steel around the country at speed, but refunding one blind passenger apparently required negotiations resembling the Congress of Vienna.

Her larger point was simple. Why is accessibility so often designed around asking for help rather than reducing the need to ask? At Sight Village, organised by Birmingham’s Queen Alexandra College, she suggested placing live departure information at head height, in high contrast, with audio and reliable updates. People living with barriers frequently suggest obvious solutions after institutions have spent years commissioning complicated ones. Not everyone with sight loss is completely blind. Many people have enough remaining vision to navigate independently, but using it constantly is exhausting. Every journey becomes an exercise in concentration, uncertainty and repeated requests for assistance. Accessibility should not begin with, “Please ask for help.” It should begin with, “We have already thought about you.” That is not special treatment. It is the same freedom the rest of us barely notice because we have never had to fight for it.

Thursday brought us back to Birmingham City Council, where my Freedom of Information request revealed that 3,257 media enquiries were logged between January 2024 and June 2026. The Council says it does not hold figures showing how many received a substantive answer, how many received a holding reply, how many received no reply, or how long answers took. It also says it holds no written service standard, media handling procedure or performance report covering those matters. This is a communications department. Measuring whether it communicates might be regarded as central to the enterprise, rather as counting books matters in a library or checking for water matters at a swimming pool. The press office has six full-time staff. Eleri Roberts is the responsible Strategic Director and Councillor Roger Harmer carries political responsibility as Council Leader. Harmer has inherited bins, commissioners, financial difficulties and assorted unexploded administrative devices. He can now add a press office that records questions but apparently cannot readily say what happened to them. Every cupboard he opens seems to contain another cupboard, usually on fire.

To be fair, there may be an innocent explanation. The information may exist elsewhere, or the reporting tools may be buried somewhere inside Vuelio beneath a button nobody has pressed since 2019. That is why a follow-up FOI has already gone in asking about data fields, reporting functions, audit trails and performance information. This is not about catching individual officers out. A communications department exists to explain the work of everybody else, and it should therefore be capable of explaining its own performance. If the system contains the information, splendid. If it does not, then fixing that ought to be among the easier challenges confronting Birmingham’s new administration. Nobody is demanding a moon landing. We are merely asking whether questions were answered.

Finally, prisons. Andy Burnham paused plans for earlier prisoner release following concern that those responsible for killing PC Andrew Harper might benefit. Pausing, listening and reconsidering is not weakness. In modern politics it is almost an endangered form of adult behaviour. The deeper issue, however, is honesty about sentencing. A judge says fifteen years. Television reports fifteen years. Victims hear fifteen years. The public believes fifteen years. Yet the period actually spent in custody may be very different because of release rules, licence periods and legislation understood by roughly twelve people, nine of whom are barristers. HMP Birmingham processed around 5,000 prisoners in a year, released more than 220 people each month and was close to capacity when inspectors visited. Inspectors also found prisoners who had been released after their lawful release date. We have built a system capable of releasing some people earlier than the public expects while keeping others longer than the law permits. That is not joined-up government so much as government assembled from several different jigsaws.

If a sentence means seven years inside and the remainder on licence, say so. If it means fifteen years in prison, say that. Justice should not require a footnote, a calculator and a postgraduate qualification. If honest sentencing requires more prison places, more experienced officers, stronger probation services and proper investment in rehabilitation, then let us have that argument openly. Justice has always cost money. The cost of failing to invest is eventually paid by victims, communities and public confidence. So there we are: blindness, broadcasting, Belgian football, Birmingham bureaucracy and British prisons. Five stories with little in common except one theme. Institutions become so absorbed in their systems that they forget the people standing in front of them. The blind passenger wants to travel independently. The football coach wants a route forward. The investor wants Birmingham to value what it created. The journalist wants an answer. The public wants a sentence to mean what it appears to mean. None of that is unreasonable. Indeed, much of it is painfully obvious. But then the painfully obvious is often where the best stories are hiding.

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Imagine climbing into bed tonight and taking a long look at the person beside you. Husband, wife, partner, duvet thief. Sleep well, because when people are murdered the person responsible is often not a tattooed stranger behind a bus stop but somebody they know. We talk about “killers” as though they are identical. They are not. During my legal training I knew of a woman who waited for her husband to return from the pub and stabbed him as he entered their home. She did not go to prison. He habitually came home, beat her and raped her. The law recognised the difference. Taking a life cannot be reduced to one word and one moral category.

Which brings me, by a route only a Brummie could regard as direct, to Andy Burnham. The Prime Minister has paused plans due to begin in September that could have allowed thousands of prisoners out earlier than the public expected. The row erupted when it emerged that Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, each serving thirteen years for the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper, might benefit. Harper, a 28-year-old Thames Valley officer, was dragged to his death behind a getaway car after responding to a quad-bike theft. His widow called the prospect deplorable. Burnham stopped, listened and ordered an urgent review. Good. Politicians tell us they are listening while continuing in the same direction. Pressing pause was not weakness. It was sensible.

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Here in Birmingham, prison is not an abstract Whitehall concept. We have The Green, as Brummies know HMP Birmingham. When inspectors arrived in October 2025 it held 976 men, only 21 below its reduced capacity. Around 5,000 passed through its gates in a year and 222 were released each month. Most were on remand, unsentenced or recalled. The Green is New Street Station with higher walls and worse coffee. Yet inspectors found nineteen prisoners had been released after their lawful date. Ministers were preparing to let some people out too early while Birmingham managed to keep others too long. If British justice entered the Olympics, it would finish fourth in a three-horse race.

The national prison population stood at 87,342 on 31 March 2026, including 16,025 on remand. Those are not decorative figures. They mean crowded cells, exhausted officers, delayed transfers and neighbourhoods receiving people back without proper preparation. In Birmingham, every release eventually becomes somebody’s neighbour, passenger, employee or the chap behind you in Aldi with frozen chips. The object is not to lock every offender away forever. It is to punish properly, protect the public and reduce the chance of another victim.

I could begin solving much of this overnight with a thing governments treat as faintly obscene: money. Whenever anybody suggests spending on justice, somebody cries “waste”. Waste? Do me a favour. Look in your kitchen bin at the food you bought and never ate. Open your wardrobe and count the shirts, frocks, jackets and shoes unseen since Theresa May was prime minister. Humans waste money. Governments do too, often after commissioning a report explaining why they need another report. The question is whether spending properly on justice costs less than overcrowding, reoffending, emergency releases, ruined lives and victims carrying the consequences long after the Treasury congratulates itself on a saving.

We need a quality prison estate, courts capable of trying cases promptly, properly funded probation, addiction treatment, education, useful work and experienced prison officers paid enough to stay. We treated experienced officers and their knowledge as expensive inconveniences. Then we wondered why prisons became harder to control and replacing experience proved more difficult than replacing a light bulb. Money alone will not reform every offender, and cells are no substitute for preventing crime. But neither can we empty prisons to disguise the fact that we refused to provide enough space and staff. Early release is not weather drifting in from Wales. It is a political decision produced by earlier political decisions.

What angers people most is the twisted language of sentencing. A judge announces fifteen years. Television reports fifteen years. The victim’s family hears fifteen years and the public assumes the offender will spend fifteen years in prison. Then the machinery hums behind the curtain and fifteen becomes seven and a half, or something else, with the rest served on licence. The system understands the calculation. The public discovers it years later, usually because a notorious case breaks through the fog. That is not transparent justice. It is sordid public-relations sentencing: a fierce number for the cameras and another in the small print.

We Brummies are straightforward. Tell us five years and we assume five years. Tell us fifteen and we assume fifteen. I want courts to sentence as the public reasonably understands sentencing, while recognising that not all crimes, killers or circumstances are alike. Announce plainly the minimum time to be served in custody and the total period under sentence. Put both figures in the judge’s remarks and every report. Let victims know the tariff. Let offenders know it. Let government know exactly what it is doing in our name. No hidden arithmetic, no ministerial conjuring trick and no justice carrying an asterisk saying terms and conditions apply.

Andy Burnham was right to pause September’s releases. Now I hope he goes further and stops the confidence trick that made them possible. If honest sentencing requires more prison places, build them. If it requires more well-paid officers, recruit them. Justice is expensive, but injustice sends a larger bill to victims, families, police and communities. I do not want cop killers serving a few years because Whitehall failed to provide enough cells. Nor do I want every person who causes a death treated as morally identical. I want judgment, punishment, rehabilitation and plain English. Burnham has pressed pause. He should now press reset, because justice does not become cheaper when government shortens the sentence. It merely sends the bill somewhere else.

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There are some occupations in which keeping records is probably advisable. Air traffic controllers generally make a note of where they have sent the aeroplanes. Banks tend to remember who deposited the money. Hospitals usually record which patient has received which operation, rather than relying upon somebody remembering that Mrs Jones definitely arrived with two kidneys. I had also assumed that the communications department of Britain’s largest local authority might keep a reasonably firm grip upon its communications. It appears I may have been asking too much.

Birmingham City Council has answered a Freedom of Information request about its press office, and the result reads like an administrative comedy written by people who do not realise they are appearing in it. Between 1 January 2024 and 29 June 2026, the Council received 3,257 media enquiries. Those enquiries were logged on the Vuelio media monitoring and public relations system. Six full-time press office posts were employed throughout the period, consisting of a Press and PR Manager, four Communications Executives and a Press and PR Officer. Staffing costs ranged from £237,000 to £337,000 a year, with another £88,000 recorded during the opening part of the current financial year. The Council identifies Eleri Roberts as the Strategic Director responsible for the function, while political responsibility rests with the Leader.

That Leader is Councillor Roger Harmer, the Liberal Democrat councillor for Acocks Green who was elected Leader of Birmingham City Council in June. This means the ultimate political responsibility for the communications operation now lands upon his desk, presumably somewhere between the bins, the commissioners, the finances and the dozen other unexploded devices bequeathed to the new administration.

So far, everything sounds reassuringly organised. Thousands of enquiries, six members of staff, specialist computer software, a Strategic Director and a Council Leader sitting at the top of the arrangement. It has all the outward appearance of a functioning communications operation. Then one asks the rather vulgar question of what happened to those 3,257 enquiries, and the beautifully decorated civic carriage immediately loses all four wheels.

The Council does not hold information showing how many enquiries received a substantive answer. It does not know how many received only an acknowledgement or holding response. It does not know how many received no response at all. It holds no average response time and no record of the longest time taken to provide a substantive answer. It says it holds no written workflow or internal procedure governing how enquiries are logged, allocated, escalated, answered, declined or simply left unanswered. There is no recorded target response time, no service standard, no performance report and no management information concerning response times or unanswered enquiries.

This is not merely the absence of a glossy booklet entitled How We Talk to the Press. The Council also says it holds no written guidance on when media enquiries should be referred to councillors, cabinet members, political offices, the Chief Executive, senior directors, statutory officers or government commissioners. It holds no guidance on whether officers may suggest wording to elected members, no guidance on whether an enquiry can be declined because it is politically sensitive, and no separate guidance governing the treatment of newspaper journalists, broadcasters, freelancers, bloggers, citizen journalists, Substack writers or former columnists. It also says it holds no reports, audits, reviews, complaints or lessons-learned exercises concerning the performance of the press office since January 2024.

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Perhaps the press office is magnificent. Perhaps its members rise before dawn, answer every journalist within minutes and spend their lunchtimes helping visiting industrialists understand why Birmingham is the finest place on Earth in which to invest. Perhaps Eleri Roberts presides over a communications machine of such dazzling efficiency that other councils gather outside the Council House merely hoping to hear it hum. I would be delighted if this were true. The difficulty is that the Council’s own answer supplies no evidence by which anyone, including its own management, could establish that it is true.

At the opposite end of the possibilities, the entire team might spend its days reading newspapers with its feet on the desk, carefully clipping money-off coupons and waiting for the next photograph of a councillor opening a cucumber-sandwich event at which the crusts have already been removed. I do not suggest for one moment that this is what happens. The point is that, based upon the information the Council says it holds, its leadership would struggle to prove it does not. I hope that any coupons collected are at least being used responsibly.

A press office is not a decorative civic parlour that exists only to circulate cheerful pictures, promote awards and announce that something marvellous has happened near a ribbon. It is the front door of the Council. Journalists approach it with questions on behalf of the public, but the people knocking may also include national broadcasters, international newspapers, businesses examining Birmingham as a place to invest and organisations trying to understand whether the city is competently governed. Some enquiries will be trivial. Others may concern matters of enormous public, financial or reputational importance. A system that records an enquiry but apparently does not record clearly whether it was answered is rather like a fire station recording the telephone call but not whether anybody sent the engine.

There is also the practical issue of responsibility. Who owns an enquiry once it enters Vuelio? Who is dealing with it? Which department has been asked to contribute? Has a holding answer been sent? Is a deadline approaching? What happens when the officer dealing with it goes off sick, takes leave or leaves the Council? A communications system should allow somebody else to pick up the file and immediately see what has happened. Yet the Council’s response provides no assurance that outcomes and response times are being consistently captured, monitored or reported.

The absence of performance information also creates a wonderfully comfortable world for everybody involved. Nobody can be accused of answering too slowly if response times are not measured. Nobody can be challenged over unanswered enquiries if unanswered enquiries are not counted. Nobody can be judged against a service standard if no service standard exists. It is accountability by disappearance: the fewer things one records, the fewer awkward things there are for management to discover.

That now presents Cllr Roger Harmer with a straightforward test. He does not need a commission, an expensive consultant, a citizens’ jury or a three-year transformation programme decorated with arrows and coloured boxes. He needs to ask Eleri Roberts for a clear account of how the office works, what Vuelio records, who owns each enquiry, what standards staff are expected to meet, how many questions are answered and how many quietly fall through the floorboards. If the information already exists, it should be published. If it does not exist, the political leader responsible for the function should require it to exist.

I have submitted a further Freedom of Information request seeking the fields held within Vuelio, its status categories, reporting facilities, response data, audit trails and management arrangements. It may reveal that the first answer was incomplete and that an impressive internal system has been quietly operating all along. Nobody would be happier than me to discover Birmingham has the most industrious communications office in the country.

Until then, we are left with a communications department that can count the questions arriving at its front door but apparently cannot tell the public how many were answered before somebody turned out the lights. For an organisation devoted to communication, that is quite a message to communicate.

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Suppose somebody offered you the chance to stop being the boss, move to another country and become somebody else’s assistant. Most of us would wonder whether they had misunderstood the meaning of promotion. Mat Sadler has done precisely that, yet his move may be the cleverest decision of his career. The former Walsall head coach has signed a one-year contract to join Lee Johnson’s staff at Lommel SK, newly promoted to Belgium’s top division after 23 years away. On the face of it, exchanging an English manager’s office for the second seat on a Belgian bench looks like a step backwards. Look beyond the job title, however, and Lommel belongs to City Football Group, the global organisation built around Manchester City and comprising 13 clubs across five continents. Sadler has not simply found employment after being dismissed by Walsall. He has gained entry to one of world football’s most sophisticated international networks. Belgium might be where he starts again, but it need not be where he finishes.

For readers who do not know a full-back from a flat-pack wardrobe, Sadler is a thoroughly Midlands football man. Birmingham-born, developed by Birmingham City and handed his Premier League debut at only 17, he appeared capable of reaching the very top. Indeed, he was once identified among a group of young footballers considered potential future England internationals. Then injury intervened with the casual cruelty sport sometimes displays. Five operations and years of interruption changed the direction of a career that might otherwise have made him a household name for club and country. He rebuilt himself through Watford, Shrewsbury Town, Crawley Town and Walsall, accumulating hundreds of professional appearances and an education that no coaching course can reproduce. He knows the Premier League, the lower divisions, the treatment room, the dressing room and those unforgiving Saturday afternoons when potential means nothing because somebody must have scored more goals by five o’clock.

Walsall is my club. I have been a season-ticket holder for many years, while my son, daughter and grandchildren are occasional but regular attendees, particularly at away matches, which become wonderful family days out regardless of what happens during the inconvenient 90 minutes in the middle. There is the journey, the motorway food, the optimism before kick-off and the painstaking reconstruction afterwards of every managerial error we could clearly see from 80 yards away. I once spent time filming at Walsall’s training ground, where Mat could not have been more helpful. At one stage he quietly began moving footballs out of our camera shot. We did not like to tell him that we might have preferred them left in, but it revealed something about him: no performance, no ego, simply a decent man noticing something that needed doing and lending a hand. That does not make someone a great manager, of course. Decency alone has yet to win promotion, although football might be a rather pleasanter industry if more people possessed it.

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Nor should affection varnish Sadler’s record at Walsall. His period in charge was impressive, exciting and, eventually, deeply frustrating. During the 2024/25 campaign, Walsall spent 119 days at the top of League Two, established a 12-point lead, won nine consecutive league matches for the first time in the club’s history and appeared to be cruising towards automatic promotion. Then the momentum vanished. A 13-match winless sequence cost Walsall a top-three finish, and defeat by AFC Wimbledon in the play-off final completed a collapse few supporters could quite believe. The following season brought an uncomfortable echo: another excellent beginning, another Christmas near the summit, then another decline. By March 2026, Walsall had won only once in 11 matches and fallen to 11th, prompting the club to dismiss Sadler with ten games remaining. Many supporters, myself included, thought the decision should have arrived sooner. Yet it is equally true that, at his best, he was among the division’s most impressive managers. He had demonstrated leadership, developed a young side and taken Walsall within one match of promotion. His failing was not an absence of ability but an inability to renew the formula once momentum had turned against him.

That distinction matters because almost every manager in League One or League Two is eventually dismissed. It is less a possibility than an occupational tradition. Many never receive another significant opportunity. Sadler has been fortunate, certainly, but luck usually arrives carrying a CV. Lommel and City Football Group have not recruited him because they feel sorry for a man who lost his job in the English fourth tier. They have looked at the whole record and concluded that the intelligence, character and coaching potential remain valuable. Walsall had to judge him against immediate results and the possibility of another lost season. A large international group can take a longer view. It can ask not merely what Mat Sadler achieved yesterday, but what wider experience might allow him to become tomorrow.

This is where the story becomes less about football than modern business. Traditionally, football clubs behaved as separate institutions. They hired their own coaches, recruited their own players, protected their own methods and competed against everyone else. Multi-club ownership changes that. City Football Group links clubs across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, allowing coaching knowledge, recruitment intelligence, technology, performance analysis and people to circulate through the network. Think of an international company whose local businesses retain separate names and customers but gain access to the expertise of the wider organisation. For more than a century football clubs principally learned by trying to beat one another. Some now also learn alongside one another. The badge remains local; the operating system is increasingly global.

Walsall is already part of a smaller example. Its owner, Trivela Group, describes itself as a multi-club football organisation and also controls interests including Drogheda United and Silkeborg. The idea is that clubs can share development expertise, commercial knowledge and opportunities for players and staff rather than solving every difficulty independently. Trivela is modest beside City Football Group, but the principle is recognisably similar. Aston Villa and Birmingham City are pursuing their own models under ambitious ownership, reminding us that this new structure is not compulsory and may not prove superior in every circumstance. Football is conducting a great business experiment in public while the rest of us remain occupied arguing about handball decisions. Some owners are creating international club families; others are concentrating their attention upon one great institution or building broader sporting and regeneration ventures. Nobody yet knows which model will dominate the next generation.

For Sadler, the opportunity is astonishing because coaches now possess pathways through these organisations just as young players do. Success at Lommel could lead to becoming its head coach, moving to another club within the City network, joining a larger coaching operation elsewhere or eventually returning to England with international experience and an immensely strengthened CV. Could he one day work at Manchester City? Yes, he could. That is not to suggest he has been secretly selected to replace Pep Guardiola, and even the most optimistic Saddlers supporter should postpone ordering the commemorative mug. It means he is now inside the organisation, learning its systems and demonstrating his ability before people whose football interests extend around the world. The old managerial career ladder led from a smaller English club to a slightly larger English club, usually before collapsing beneath the manager without warning. The new route may travel through Belgium, Australia, America, Spain or anywhere else within a global network.

There is, of course, a danger. A football club is not merely a branch office with a badge above reception. It carries civic pride, inherited loyalties and family memories. Supporters must believe their club exists to pursue its own success, not merely to develop a player, coach or commercial opportunity for a more important relative elsewhere in the group. The real test of multi-club ownership will be whether it strengthens each local institution or gradually reduces smaller clubs to useful squares on somebody else’s corporate chessboard. The benefits are obvious: specialist knowledge, wider recruitment, investment and opportunities that an independent club may never afford. The emotional risks are equally real. Supporters continue to fall in love with individual clubs while those clubs increasingly join families of their own.

On Tuesday evening, Mrs Olley and I went to Bescot with good friends who support Aston Villa and Birmingham City. No Blues colours were worn, obviously; standards must be maintained. Villa beat us 5–0, playing in their famous first kit while Walsall, mysteriously, wore our change strip despite being at home. It was nevertheless a perfect evening. We laughed, exchanged the necessary insults, admired some excellent football and enjoyed one another’s company. That is the beautiful contradiction at the heart of this story. Behind the scenes, football is becoming a global industry of interconnected businesses, shared data and international career routes. In the stands, it remains wonderfully human: family, friendship, teasing, hope and the willingness to return even after conceding five.

Somewhere in Belgium, Mat Sadler is beginning again. Perhaps he will return one day to the English lower divisions. Perhaps he will become a successful European head coach. Perhaps he will eventually walk into Manchester City as part of its coaching staff. Nobody can know. What we do know is that Lommel is not a consolation prize for a sacked Walsall manager. It is an extraordinary opening into football’s global future and may be the first step towards Sadler becoming the manager many of us always suspected he could be. Football’s business model may be changing beyond recognition. Its heart, thankfully, is not.

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I nearly smiled when I walked into the launch of Rockefellas TV’s new Birmingham studio. For a fleeting moment I thought I had spotted one of the city council’s culture officers. Then I remembered that this was rock music. Working-class culture. There were no discussions about strategies, consultation documents or five-year plans. This was culture in the way Birmingham has always done it best. Music, stories, guitars and characters. The sort of creativity that starts in pubs, clubs, terraced houses and makeshift rehearsal rooms before escaping to conquer the world. As I looked around, it dawned on me that this was not really a story about the opening of a television studio at all. It was a story about Birmingham itself.

If somebody had told a young Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler or Bill Ward, rehearsing in Aston in the late 1960s, that one day an entrepreneur from California would invest heavily in Birmingham because of the noise they were making, they would probably have laughed. Yet that is pretty much what has happened. Alex Garcia, founder of Rockefellas TV, grew up in America captivated by the music pouring out of Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Electric Light Orchestra, Duran Duran and The Moody Blues. Those records travelled thousands of miles, found their way into California homes and inspired a young man who would eventually build a successful business before deciding that Birmingham was exactly where he wanted his company’s first European studio.

Now that is a compliment no civic award can ever match.

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Garcia’s own story is almost as interesting as the one he has chosen to tell. He started his working life creating striking, large-scale murals before moving into outdoor advertising and becoming a major independent billboard operator in California. He understands pictures, audiences and how to grab people’s attention. More importantly, he understands that authenticity cannot simply be manufactured. Hollywood can build almost anything on a film set, but it cannot recreate the history of a city that accidentally invented heavy metal, influenced generations of musicians and still wears that achievement with almost embarrassing modesty. Birmingham has spent decades wondering whether London notices it. Alex Garcia has quietly answered that question. California noticed years ago.

Rockefellas TV is not a traditional television station where viewers wait for a programme to appear at a set time after the weather forecast. It belongs to the newer streaming world, with its own app and an online service available through platforms including Google. Its mixture of interviews, documentaries, live performances and original entertainment can be watched across Europe and North America, with the company’s own publicity reporting an audience running into the millions. This is television without the old geographical boundaries, and Birmingham has become an important part of its international operation. The little old Californian who was given Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin by Birmingham has now come here carrying his cheque book.

The heart of the new Birmingham operation is Brad’s Basement, fronted by Birmingham-born singer Brad Henshaw. If ever there was somebody suited to sitting opposite musicians and coaxing stories from them, it is Brad. He has the warmth of an old friend, the curiosity of a proper interviewer and, perhaps most importantly, the credibility that comes from spending years making music himself. His opening guest is Jim Simpson, the man who first managed Black Sabbath when they were still called Earth and who remains one of Birmingham’s most important musical figures. Listening to Jim is rather like opening a living history book. There are not many people who can casually begin a sentence with, “When I first managed Black Sabbath…” Jim can, and does so without the slightest trace of showing off. It is simply part of his extraordinary life.

Birmingham has always been a curious city. We have frequently been far better at creating talent than celebrating it. Liverpool rightly embraces The Beatles. Nashville proudly sells country music. Motown became synonymous with Detroit. Birmingham, meanwhile, managed to change popular music forever and then carried on as though nothing particularly unusual had happened. Heavy metal was not born in a boardroom. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody appointed a steering group. Four working-class lads plugged in their instruments, turned up the volume and changed music forever. Had they waited for a consultation exercise, the first power chord would probably still be awaiting approval.

Perhaps that is why Garcia’s investment feels so significant. This is not somebody chasing a fashionable postcode or arriving because a committee has invented a short-term grant scheme. He has invested because he believes Birmingham’s musical story still matters and can generate something new. It is a rare thing to see somebody from overseas value your city’s history quite as much as you do yourself. Sometimes we become so accustomed to walking past our treasures that it takes a visitor from 5,000 miles away to point at them and remind us what they are worth.

The launch had exactly the right atmosphere. There was excitement without pretension, enthusiasm without too much hype and a genuine sense that those involved wanted to make programmes people would enjoy watching. There was music, conversation, plenty of laughter and sufficient coffee and pastries to keep a small newsroom operational until teatime. More importantly, there was optimism. In a world where too many Birmingham stories revolve around cuts, disputes and political rows, it was rather uplifting to spend a morning talking about investment, creativity and ambition.

As the formalities wound down, somebody casually asked whether they could buy a Rockefellas TV shirt. “Hell no,” interrupted Alex Garcia. “We’re giving them away.” It was a small moment, but a lovely one, and it told you plenty about the man behind the investment. Sadly, I missed out because I was too busy talking.

By the way, I’m a 2XL.

None of this guarantees success, of course. Television, even in its newest streaming form, is fiercely competitive. Audiences have never had more choice, and every new network and platform must earn its place. But every worthwhile venture begins with somebody prepared to take a chance. Garcia has done precisely that. He has backed Birmingham with his own money, his reputation and his belief that the city’s musical heritage can still inspire new audiences. Investment does not always arrive accompanied by ministers, development agencies or a large novelty cheque. Sometimes it walks into an old building in Camden Street wearing a Rockefellas TV shirt and starts giving the shirts away.

As I left B-1 Studios, I kept returning to one thought. We spend an awful lot of time asking what Birmingham can do to attract investment. Perhaps we should also ask what Birmingham has already done to deserve it. The answer can be heard whenever somebody anywhere in the world puts on a Black Sabbath record, turns up the volume and wonders where that extraordinary sound came from. It can be heard in the music of Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, ELO and the generations that followed them. Birmingham’s greatest export may never have been cars, metal or manufactured goods. It may have been culture, made by working people who had no idea they were creating an international inheritance.

Rockefellas TV can be watched through its dedicated app and online streaming service, giving viewers access to its growing catalogue of music and entertainment programming. If Alex Garcia and his team fulfil even a fraction of the ambition on display at the launch, the next chapter in Birmingham’s musical story will not merely be heard around the world.

It will be watched as well.

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I am not blind. I wear glasses, one eye is useless and the other has carried the firm, like the only competent person in a run office. That makes me no authority on blindness, merely a man with an unreliable spare part. Years ago, while guiding a friend with sight loss, I announced: “There is a step immediately in front of you.” He replied: “Is that up or down?” I have never forgotten it. I had delivered information useful to me and useless to him. In one sentence, he exposed the British approach to disability: kind voice, good intentions, wrong information, carry on regardless.

That memory returned when I met a reader who is blind. I am not naming her because I forgot to ask permission. She does not “look blind”, whatever that means. No dark glasses, no official from the Ministry of Visible Disability stamping her forehead. She looks well, so people assume she is. At a coffee shop she asked a barista to read a poster he had pointed towards. He did, but with that air of wondering whether he was being conned by a woman who had failed to perform blindness convincingly enough.

She could wave her white stick like an airport marshaller bringing in a Boeing. But why should she? We do not demand everyone announce private difficulties to qualify for service. A man booking a doctor’s appointment need not shout across reception that his groin resembles a leaking lasagne. Yet a blind woman is repeatedly expected to declare herself, explain herself and prove herself before information appears. Apparently dignity is accessible, provided you book it two hours ahead, arrive early and find staff who have not vanished behind a door marked “customer assistance”.

Her railway story is where corporate trousers begin heading towards the ankles. She says she was left on a train after everyone else had gone and remained there until she contacted a cleaner. Otherwise, she believes she would have remained stranded. Then came the refund. Britain can propel hundreds of tonnes of metal at 125 miles an hour, but returning one ticket price to a blind passenger required six months, an ombudsman and the energy of a peace treaty. Somewhere, a senior manager’s email signature promised inclusion. On the train, inclusion had gone home.

The railway industry is magnificent at language. It offers Passenger Assist, Welcome Points, accessible travel policies and the chance to “travel with confidence”. There will be strategies, dashboards and a steering group chaired by somebody parked near the door. The arrangement is simple: the passenger must ask. Ask where the platform is. Ask whether it changed. Ask someone to read the board. Ask to be guided. Ask to be met. Ask again when nobody arrives. Then, after being forgotten, ask for money back. This is ceremonial dependence dressed in a lanyard.

Sight Village, organised by Birmingham’s Queen Alexandra College, is a national exhibition across Britain, bringing together technology, equipment, activities and support for blind and partially sighted people. There, my reader challenged Rail Delivery Group representatives about station information. Her suggestion was so sensible that the industry may need several committees to survive it. Put departure information at head height, where people with residual vision can read it. Make it high contrast. Add audio. Update it when platforms change. Suddenly, some blind and partially sighted passengers would not need assistance. They could arrive, check the train and board it, behaving like customers rather than emergencies. Perhaps independence has been overlooked because it produces fewer glossy leaflets explaining how much assistance exists.

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The forgotten people, she says, are those with residual vision. They may see enough to navigate or read close up, but using that sight is exhausting. Imagine every journey as a permanent eye test while listening for announcements, watching for obstacles, locating staff and wondering whether the platform changed. Then imagine being sent to a touchscreen designed in an office with lighting and both eyes firing like floodlights. Technology is not accessible merely because somebody bolts it to the floor and adds a wheelchair symbol to the brochure.

The regulator’s figures puncture corporate bunting. Millions of assistance requests are made, yet passengers report receiving none of the help they booked. RNIB research found blind and partially sighted people unable to make journeys they wanted or needed, lacking confidence in staff training and uncertain they would be met at destinations. These are not minor wrinkles. They show the railway has confused having a policy with delivering a service. A fire extinguisher painted on a wall is useless when the building burns; an accessibility promise is decoration if the passenger remains alone on an empty train.

My reader is not asking for a personal footman, a sedan chair or a brass band at New Street. She wants information positioned where it can be used, audio that works, staff who appear when promised and a system that does not demand self-disclosure as the entrance fee to ordinary life. Newly sight-impaired people face fear, grief and collapsing routines. Every avoidable barrier tells them the world has become smaller. Every sensible adjustment gives a little of it back.

So spare the railway another consultation. Lower the screens. Add audio. Test everything with blind passengers during disruption, not a Tuesday demonstration attended by six executives and a photographer. Measure success by how rarely people need to ask, not how many assistance bookings are processed. When somebody is left on a train, do not make her fight six months for her fare. The railway says it wants blind passengers to travel with confidence. Splendid. It can begin by pulling up its corporate trousers, putting down the PowerPoint and noticing the woman it left behind.

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What a roller coaster of a week this has been. A warm welcome first to all our new subscribers. You are genuinely very welcome. Reads across our platforms are already approaching 30,000 this month, which is superb, and I remain enormously grateful to everyone who reads, shares, comments, argues and occasionally tells me that I am talking complete rubbish. Independent publishing only works when readers become part of the conversation, and the GRIT conversation is growing louder, broader and considerably more interesting. This week carried us from a three-vote election margin in Sutton Coldfield to the future reputation of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, with Birmingham’s first Cabinet meeting, a Chief Constable’s forthcoming misconduct hearing and a lively afternoon in the council chamber squeezed in between. Quiet weeks are clearly no longer available.

We began in Sutton Coldfield, where the resignation of newly elected Labour councillor Alex Cowley has created a Royal Sutton Coldfield Town Council by-election in Vesey ward. Nobody should dismiss it as “only” a Town Council contest. In May, Reform UK missed the final Vesey seat by three votes. Not 300. Not 30. Three. That result alone gives the coming contest significance, but the wider political setting makes it more important still. Birmingham’s electorate delivered an extraordinary verdict in May. Reform became the largest party on Birmingham City Council, the Conservatives recovered ground, Labour endured heavy losses, the Greens advanced and independents demonstrated that determined local campaigning can still overcome national party machines. Vesey will provide the first proper indication of whether that upheaval was a one-day explosion of anger or the beginning of a more lasting political realignment.

Reform has already proved that it can attract support. Its next challenge is to organise that support. Elections are not won simply because a party is fashionable on social media or because thousands of people tell an opinion pollster they are fed up. They are won by selecting credible candidates, knocking on doors, recruiting volunteers, identifying supporters, encouraging postal votes and returning to homes where nobody answered the first three times. That may sound old-fashioned, but democracy remains stubbornly analogue. The Conservatives will want to build upon their May successes in Sutton, while Labour must defend a seat vacated almost immediately after it was won. Sometimes the smallest elections tell us the largest stories. Vesey will not decide who governs Birmingham, but it may tell us which party is learning fastest from May.

Tuesday brought Birmingham’s new political administration and its first Cabinet meeting. To the surprise, perhaps, of those expecting chaos, revolution or somebody accidentally selling the Council House before lunch, the opening performance was calm, competent and businesslike. Cllr Roger Harmer chaired proceedings in an open-necked white shirt, wisely concluding that a tie and a heatwave need not occupy the same neck. Beside him sat Cllr Julian Pritchard, immaculate in jacket and tie, appearing ready for a Cabinet meeting, a board meeting and a wedding reception without requiring a costume change. Different wardrobes, one administration and, importantly, no immediate calamity. First impressions matter, and Birmingham’s new leadership made a respectable one.

The meeting nevertheless prompted a serious question. At the beginning, councillors were invited to declare any relevant interests. That is proper and necessary. Yet around the same table sat senior officers who had prepared reports, shaped recommendations, advised members, managed contracts and possessed considerable influence over the decisions being taken. Nobody asked them the same question. To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that any officer present had an undeclared interest. I am questioning the convention. Why not begin future meetings by asking whether any members or officers have a relevant interest to declare? Ten additional seconds would create consistency and strengthen public confidence without accusing anybody of anything. Transparency should not depend upon whether somebody reached the council chamber through an election or an appointment process. Birmingham’s Cabinet got off to a respectable start. Well done, chaps. Now, as readers repeatedly reminded me, sort the bins.

Wednesday moved from local government to policing and the forthcoming public gross misconduct hearing involving Staffordshire Chief Constable Christopher Noble. Allegations are not findings, and that distinction must be defended even when the person facing them occupies one of the most powerful positions in public life. Public misconduct hearings are healthier than the old system in which too much happened behind closed doors. Senior police officers exercise enormous authority and should be subject to proper scrutiny. Rank must never become body armour. If wrongdoing is established, the public deserves to know and the consequences should be real.

But openness must also protect the innocent. I watched a close friend, himself a Chief Constable, endure suspension over allegations which ultimately proved unfair. I saw the damage inflicted not only upon him but upon his family, his career and his ability to plan his own life. Vindication eventually arrived, but far too late to restore the closing years of a distinguished career. That experience taught me that accountability and fairness are not competing ideas. They are two halves of justice. If Christopher Noble is found to have committed gross misconduct, his office must not save him. If he is cleared, his reputation deserves restoring with the same energy that accompanied the accusations. An innocent person should not be expected to disappear quietly with a belated apology and perhaps one of those mythical £1,000-a-day commissions former Chief Constables always appear to discover. I am joking, although only slightly.

By Thursday, attention had returned to the Council House, where Birmingham’s first proper Full Council meeting since May demonstrated that governing is a very different skill from campaigning. Watching Full Council can resemble watching an open-book examination. Cabinet members arrive with thick folders containing anticipated questions, background information and carefully prepared answers. There is nothing improper about that. The danger begins when a supplementary question arrives which has not been lovingly placed inside the folder by an officer.

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Labour’s Marcus Bernasconi had noticed that Reform councillor Danny Carter’s website appeared to claim he had completed 340 ward surgeries in only 64 days, more than five every day. Carter laughed, explained that the figures were dummy content on a website under construction and promised to correct them. It was an honest answer, and the chamber appreciated it. Reform’s Alan Feeney then asked Conservative scrutiny chairman Richard Frederick Jex Parkin what measurable improvement his committee would deliver. Parkin preferred to criticise Reform rather than provide a direct measurement, leaving readers and councillors to decide whether the question had been answered. Labour’s Ray Goodwin challenged Liberal Democrat Cabinet Member Baber Baz on housing standards, while Conservative Matt Bennett produced the afternoon’s biggest laugh by christening Better Birmingham’s Harris Khaliq “Councillor Bin Face” before moving to the rather more serious questions of the continuing refuse dispute, government-appointed commissioners and whether their requests had been met. “It’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?” he observed. Occasionally a line writes itself.

What mattered was not who won each exchange. Birmingham politics is beginning to resemble politics again. Labour challenged the administration. Conservatives challenged the administration. Reform challenged the administration. Cabinet members were required to move beyond prepared answers and think on their feet. That is precisely what democratic scrutiny should involve. The election posters are down, the celebrations are over and the honeymoon has ended. Birmingham’s councillors are now beginning the less glamorous business of earning their keep.

Friday took us to Westminster and Rachel Reeves. As a younger Labour Party member, I remember hearing Reeves discussed with enormous reverence. She was the coming woman, the intellectual heavyweight and the future Chancellor whose Bank of England experience was repeated so frequently that it almost became a qualification in itself. Perhaps it merely proved that she had worked there. Prestigious institutions, after all, employ people of varying abilities just like engineering works, newspapers and councils.

My judgment is coloured by experience. I once owned and operated an engineering business in the West Midlands. Payroll did not arrive as a theoretical Treasury entry. It arrived on Thursday and had to be met. Once you have watched an order book weaken, worried about wages and considered whether the business can afford another machine or apprentice, economic policy sounds very different. In Whitehall, an increase in employer National Insurance is a fiscal measure. In Birmingham, it is a hotel leaving a vacancy unfilled, a restaurant stretching existing staff, an engineering firm delaying an apprentice and a small company postponing expansion.

That is why Professor David Bailey’s assessment interested me. Dave, Professor of Business Economics at Birmingham Business School and one of our region’s brightest academic gems, gives Reeves five out of ten. He credits her with placing planning reform at the centre of economic policy, supporting investment reform, creating the National Wealth Fund and attempting to restore fiscal credibility. He is especially interested in the longer-term potential of infrastructure and pension reforms. His criticism is that Reeves trapped herself before entering office by ruling out increases in income tax, employee National Insurance and VAT, leaving employer National Insurance, welfare changes and Winter Fuel Payment restrictions as politically damaging alternatives.

Dave is balanced. I am the old engineering businessman muttering from ringside that the favourite has still failed to cut the mustard. Labour promised an economic heavyweight. In my view, it delivered a carefully trained light-middleweight who never quite possessed the authority or political punch we were promised. History may judge her more kindly if planning reform, pension investment and infrastructure spending eventually produce factories, homes, jobs, apprenticeships and cranes across Birmingham and the West Midlands. That is the proper scorecard. Not speeches, spreadsheets or fiscal headroom, but whether businesses recruit, families feel more secure and our skyline contains more cranes than artists’ impressions.

And so the week ends where most political arguments eventually end: with a verdict still pending. Vesey’s voters will decide whether Reform can turn enthusiasm into organisation. Birmingham’s new Cabinet must turn a respectable opening meeting into competent government. Christopher Noble’s hearing must distinguish evidence from allegation. Councillors must prove that lively exchanges produce better decisions. Rachel Reeves must demonstrate that long-term reform can create visible prosperity before public patience expires.

Thank you again for reading and for helping GRIT approach 30,000 reads across our platforms this month. Enjoy the weekend. Birmingham will undoubtedly provide another full menu of politics, power, personalities and occasional nonsense next week. I will be watching, notebook ready, while Mrs Olley prepares the only verdict against which there remains absolutely no right of appeal.

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As a younger member of the Labour Party, I remember Rachel Reeves being talked about with reverence. Labour grandees assured us that here was the future: an intellectual heavyweight with the credentials and judgement to become a great Chancellor. The Bank of England (where she had worked) was always mentioned. It became shorthand for excellence, as though merely passing through its doors conferred economic genius. Perhaps it should only have been shorthand for having worked there. Prestigious institutions, like every workplace, employ people of differing abilities. Looking back, I cannot escape one blunt conclusion. Labour promised a heavyweight and, in my view, delivered a light-middleweight: technically trained and carefully coached, but never possessing the authority or punch we had been led to expect.

Naturally with the moving of PM Starmer to make way for Andy Burnham, Reeves will also be moving on. So how is she to be judged?

Perhaps I judge Chancellors differently because I once owned and operated an engineering works in the West Midlands in the 1980s. We had to make the payroll on a Thursday, not discuss it as an abstract entry on a Treasury spreadsheet. Once you have worried about finding the wages, watched an order book thin out and agonised over whether the business can afford another apprentice or machine, you never hear economic policy in quite the same way again. Decisions taken in Whitehall reverberate through Birmingham workshops, factories, cafés, hotels and small businesses. In Westminster they are fiscal adjustments. Here they decide whether somebody is recruited, whether investment proceeds and whether an owner sleeps on Wednesday night. Economic policy always ends up with a Birmingham postcode.

That is why Professor David Bailey’s assessment of Reeves interests me. Dave is Professor of Business Economics at Birmingham Business School, a leading voice on manufacturing and regional policy, and one of those rare academics who can explain difficult things without making everybody else feel stupid. His students have just given him a Students’ Choice Award, confirming what Birmingham already knows: he is one of our brightest and best-loved little academic gems. Dave approaches Reeves calmly. I approach her as an old engineering businessman muttering from ringside that the favourite still has not cut the mustard.

My disappointment was deepened by the damage to the constructed image of competence. Her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was found to contain more than 20 examples of material drawn without proper acknowledgement from sources including Wikipedia and published sources. Reeves denied deliberate plagiarism, while her publisher accepted shortcomings and promised corrections. Then came the dog-eared CV. The length of her Bank of England service had been overstated online, and the description of her later HBOS work shifted from economist to retail banking. None of that alone proves somebody cannot run the Treasury. Taken together, however, it chipped away at the mythology Labour had built around her. “Rachel from Accounts” stuck because it resonated: less transformational economic titan, more machine politician with a spreadsheet and briefing note.

Professor Bailey is fairer. He believes Reeves’s strongest decision was to place planning reform near the centre of economic policy. Britain’s problem is not simply how much government taxes or spends; it is also that we have made it painfully difficult to build homes, factories, electricity networks and major infrastructure. For Birmingham, this matters enormously. We possess the location, universities, engineering knowledge, manufacturing heritage and workforce, but too often projects become trapped between ambition and delivery. If planning reform speeds approvals and removes genuine barriers, Birmingham could attract investment, restart stalled regeneration and put cranes on a skyline too familiar with artist’s impressions and delayed digging.

The difficulty for Reeves is that the benefits arrive slowly while the pain arrived immediately. Bailey identifies the rise in employer National Insurance as especially damaging to Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. This is now a city with a large service sector and thousands of small and medium-sized employers. Raising the cost of taking somebody on did not remain inside a red Treasury box. It became a restaurant leaving a vacancy unfilled, a hotel stretching existing staff, an engineering firm delaying an apprentice and a small company postponing expansion. One decision rarely makes news. Thousands of cautious decisions can kill a labour market.

Bailey nevertheless gives Reeves credit for restoring fiscal credibility after the Truss turmoil, creating the National Wealth Fund and pursuing pension and investment reforms that may direct more capital towards infrastructure and productive industry. His central criticism is strategic. By ruling out rises in income tax, employee National Insurance and VAT before the election, Reeves boxed herself into a corner. When reality arrived, she was pushed towards employer National Insurance, welfare changes and Winter Fuel Payment restrictions. The long-term reforms were overshadowed by immediate rows, and the Chancellor who had promised stability looked politically trapped by promises she had helped design.

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Professor Bailey’s score is five out of ten: neither catastrophic nor transformative, a Chancellor who understood Britain’s structural weaknesses but failed to convert that understanding into convincing growth or public confidence. His patience is greater than mine. Labour promised me a heavyweight. I think it delivered a light-middleweight. Dave says the judges should wait until the final bell because planning, pension and infrastructure reforms take years to work. That is why he is the balanced, much-loved professor, while I am the dramatic old businessman waving his scorecard before the fight has officially ended.

Birmingham will provide the fairest test. We do not ultimately judge Chancellors by speeches, fiscal headroom or the neatness of spreadsheets. We look out of the window. Are factories expanding? Are businesses recruiting? Are apprentices being trained? Are homes being built? Are cranes appearing? Are families more secure? If Reeves’s reforms eventually produce more investment, jobs, housing and infrastructure across Birmingham and the West Midlands, history may be kinder than I am today, and I will happily concede that Professor Bailey read the fight better. Until then, my verdict remains unchanged. I expected a heavyweight and got Rachel from Accounts: a light-middleweight machine politician who never quite lived up to Labour’s extravagant billing.

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Politicians are at their most impressive immediately after an election. Every problem has a solution, every promise is deliverable and optimism fills the air. Then comes the first proper Full Council meeting. Sixty-four days after Birmingham’s political earthquake, the honeymoon is over. The speeches have finished. The supplementary questions have begun.

Watching Full Council is rather like watching an open-book examination. Cabinet members arrive armed with substantial briefing folders prepared by officers, anticipating almost every conceivable question and providing carefully crafted answers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is how modern local government works. The difficulty comes when councillors ask supplementary questions that weren’t on page seventeen. That is when the interesting politics begins, and Tuesday’s meeting produced several moments that showed Birmingham’s new administration is beginning to discover the difference between campaigning and governing.

The first smile of the afternoon belonged to Labour Councillor Marcus Bernasconi, who had clearly been doing a little homework before turning his attention to Reform UK Councillor Danny Carter, Chair of the Pype Hayes Ward Forum. Bernasconi had noticed that Councillor Carter’s website appeared to claim he had carried out 340 ward surgeries in just 64 days. By my arithmetic, that works out at more than five every single day. Even the NHS might struggle to maintain that pace. How, he asked, did Councillor Carter ever find time to sleep? To his credit, Carter took the question exactly as it was intended. The figures, he explained with a smile, were simply dummy text on a website still under construction and would shortly disappear. It was an honest answer, the chamber enjoyed the exchange and everyone moved on. It was also a useful reminder that in politics your own website can sometimes become a more effective opposition than the people sitting across the chamber.

Next came Reform UK Councillor Alan Feeney, who asked what sounded like one of the simplest questions of the afternoon. Addressing Conservative Councillor Richard Frederick Jex Parkin, chairman of one of Birmingham’s scrutiny committees, he asked him to identify one measurable improvement his committee’s work would achieve. A perfectly fair question, you might think. The answer, however, took a different route. Rather than identifying a measurable outcome, Councillor Parkin used the opportunity to criticise Reform, pointing to Sandwell where scrutiny arrangements have been delayed until September and suggesting Reform lacked developed policies. Readers can decide for themselves whether that answered the original question. It did make me wonder, though, whether politics is entering a curious new age. For years parties have been criticised for making promises they later struggle to keep. Perhaps the winning strategy is to promise less in the first place. Cynical? Possibly. But modern voters are not renowned for believing every manifesto that lands on the doormat.

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Then it was the turn of Labour Councillor Ray Goodwin, who caused a small moment of confusion before he had even spoken. Regular followers of Birmingham politics will know Ray is almost inseparable from his trademark hat. On Tuesday, however, the hat had apparently taken the afternoon off. Fortunately, his supplementary questions had not. Goodwin challenged Liberal Democrat Cabinet Member for Housing and Homelessness, Councillor Baber Baz, over the administration’s ambition to improve housing standards two years ahead of previous targets. Councillor Baz replied confidently that the administration was on course and that further updates would follow. Given that the administration has occupied the benches for barely two months, it was certainly an ambitious statement. Goodwin’s supplementary gently pulled him back to the original question. Was the target genuinely being brought forward by two years? The second answer was noticeably more cautious. Councillor Baz argued that the administration was still clearing up problems inherited from Labour and was determined to improve matters as quickly as possible. It was a textbook example of how supplementary questions often reveal considerably more than the original answer.

The liveliest exchange of the afternoon belonged to Conservative Councillor Matt Bennett, questioning Better Birmingham Cabinet Member for City Operations and Digital, Councillor Harris Khaliq, on Birmingham’s continuing bin dispute. Bennett momentarily stumbled over Councillor Khaliq’s surname before announcing, with impeccable comic timing, that he would simply call him “Councillor Bin Face.” The chamber laughed. Councillor Khaliq laughed too. Then the mood changed. Bennett’s question concerned the Government-appointed commissioners and the questions they had raised about the dispute. What progress had been made in responding to them? Councillor Khaliq replied that negotiations were continuing and that providing a running commentary risked undermining discussions with the workforce. Bennett’s supplementary neatly exposed the distinction. He wasn’t asking for a running commentary. He was asking whether the commissioners’ requests had actually been complied with. “It’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?” he observed, producing probably the biggest laugh of the afternoon without anyone being entirely sure whether it had been deliberate. He then asked the more serious question. Did Councillor Khaliq know who was actually in charge of bringing the dispute to an end and, more importantly, when would that happen? Councillor Khaliq maintained his good humour, repeated his commitment to finding a resolution acceptable to all concerned and promised to write to Councillor Bennett with a fuller response.

If there was one lesson from Tuesday afternoon, it was that Birmingham’s politics has settled into its new shape remarkably quickly. Labour is scrutinising. Conservatives are scrutinising. Reform is scrutinising. Cabinet members are finding that carefully prepared briefing notes only take you so far before a well-aimed supplementary question requires you to think on your feet. That is no criticism. It is exactly how local democracy is supposed to work.

There was humour. There was the occasional political jab. There were answers that wandered gently around the question before eventually arriving somewhere in the same postcode. Above all, there was scrutiny. Real scrutiny.

Sixty-four days ago Birmingham elected a very different council.

On Tuesday, it finally started behaving like one.

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There are some invitations you open with excitement. A Buckingham Palace garden party. Centre Court at Wimbledon. Watching Walsall FC in their annual pre-season friendly with Aston Villa and seeing the Saddlers give them a walloping. It may require optimism, prayer and the temporary suspension of footballing reality, but that has never stopped us before. Then there are invitations which make you pause for rather different reasons: “Would you like to attend the public misconduct hearing of a serving Chief Constable?” Well, that is not a sentence I expected to encounter when I first became a columnist, but here we are.

Staffordshire Chief Constable Christopher Noble is due to face a public gross misconduct hearing at Yarnfield Park Conference Centre on 29 and 30 July. It is scheduled to sit from 10am until 5pm on both days, and members of the public and media may apply to attend. Noble faces allegations of gross misconduct, but they remain allegations. The hearing exists to decide whether they are proved, not to provide two days of public entertainment ending with the ceremonial toppling of a senior police officer. A hearing notice is not a guilty verdict, however quickly social media can assemble a jury, hear no evidence and return from its deliberations before the kettle has boiled.

The spectacle still feels remarkable. Once upon a time, Chief Constables were rather like snow leopards. Everybody knew they existed, most people had seen a photograph of one, but very few ever encountered one in the wild. They appeared at press conferences to explain what everybody else had done wrong. They did not normally occupy the chair reserved for the person being asked the awkward questions. The system is more open now, and I think that is progress. It is not that policing suddenly discovered misconduct. It is that the public is now more likely to see what happens when misconduct is alleged.

There have been some spectacular examples. Northamptonshire’s former Chief Constable Nick Adderley was dismissed without notice in 2024 after a public disciplinary panel found gross misconduct proved over false claims concerning his naval service. Other senior officers have been investigated, suspended or taken through disciplinary proceedings, with very different outcomes. That last point matters. Accountability cannot simply mean becoming better at making accusations. A decent system must identify and remove the rotters, however grand their title, while also protecting good officers from injustice, exaggeration and the assumption that an allegation becomes true merely by appearing in a headline.

I know something about the second half of that equation. A close friend of mine was a Chief Constable. I will not name him because he suffered quite enough pain when the episode was current, and I have no intention of reheating it for another public serving. He was suspended amid all sorts of allegations which, as events unfolded, proved to be unfair. I lived through part of it with him, not as a columnist looking for a story, but as a friend watching another human being’s world become smaller by the day.

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I remember the conversations, but I remember the silences more. The anger, the bewilderment and the peculiar helplessness of seeing a man who had spent his working life making serious decisions suddenly unable to plan his own future because his career, reputation and peace of mind were sitting in somebody else’s in-tray. We imagine that people who reach the top of policing acquire an extra layer of armour. They do not. They go home. They worry. Their families worry. Friends ring without knowing what to say, while some people stop ringing altogether because even an unproved scandal can apparently be contagious.

My friend chose to keep a public diary so that anyone genuinely interested could see what was happening rather than relying upon gossip, fragments and carefully rationed official statements. That was an extraordinary act of courage. It also revealed the grinding language of such a process: allegation, referral, investigation, review, extension and another decision expected next month. Bureaucracy rarely carries a knife, but it can still cut somebody to ribbons.

Eventually, he was vindicated. Yet “vindicated” is one of those splendid words which sounds far more effective than it often is. His closing years in policing had been ruined, and so had much of the post-Chief Constable career he had every right to expect. Accusations arrive in enormous headlines. Vindication generally turns up months or years later in a few sober paragraphs below a story about a celebrity’s new kitchen. If a man is innocent, he should not merely be allowed to slip away through a side door with a muttered acknowledgment that nothing was proved. He should leave with his name intact and full access to his £1,000-a-day commissions. I am joking, of course. Well, mostly.

That experience did not persuade me that these hearings should be private. Quite the opposite. It persuaded me that they must be open, rigorous and visibly fair. Darkness can protect a rotten officer, but it can also imprison an innocent one. Most of the senior police officers I have known have been thoroughly decent people carrying responsibilities that would keep the rest of us awake until breakfast. Clearly, policing has produced some rotters too. Every profession does, although few give their rotters warrant cards and enormous operational powers. When serious allegations arise, rank must not become body armour.

Then comes my own little dilemma. Do I spend two complete days at Yarnfield, drinking industrial quantities of coffee, filling page after page with notes and returning home for Mrs Olley, the real editor, to glance at my work and declare: “That’s pants”? I merely wear the editor’s badge. Her judgement is quicker than any misconduct panel and offers considerably less prospect of appeal. As a columnist rather than a court reporter, two days is a sizeable commitment when the eventual decision may contain the real story.

Noble was suspended in August 2025 while independent investigations continued. The Commissioner described suspension as a neutral act carrying no indication of guilt, which is exactly how it must be treated. He is entitled to enter the hearing presumed innocent. If gross misconduct is proved, his rank must not save him. But if he is innocent, he must not be allowed to disappear quietly with his reputation permanently stained. He deserves to walk away with his name intact and, yes, access to his £1,000-a-day commissions.

Justice is not achieved simply by putting a Chief Constable in the dock. It is achieved by finding the truth, treating the person at the centre of the case as a human being and giving the eventual answer every bit as much prominence as the original accusation.

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It was one of those glorious Birmingham afternoons when common sense suggested leaving the jacket at home. Cllr Roger Harmer clearly agreed. Birmingham’s new Leader took the chair for his first Cabinet meeting looking smart, relaxed and sensibly dressed in an open-necked white shirt. Sitting alongside him was his deputy, Cllr Julian Pritchard, who had taken an altogether different approach to the weather. Jacket. Shirt. Tie. Immaculately turned out, looking as though he could chair Cabinet, nip off to a board meeting and still have time to present the evening news. Two politicians. Two wardrobes. One heatwave. It was a reassuringly human way to begin a new political chapter for Birmingham.

More importantly, the meeting itself was a decent first outing. New administrations can sometimes look nervous, hesitant or unsure of themselves. This one did not. It was orderly, businesslike and refreshingly free of unnecessary political theatre. There were no spectacular own goals, no dramatic rows and certainly nothing that made you think Birmingham had accidentally handed the keys to the city to the cast of a sitcom. Credit where it is due. They looked prepared, they looked professional and, as opening performances go, they deserved a generous round of applause. Of course, now comes the difficult bit. The city’s finances still need repairing, confidence still needs rebuilding and, yes, those bins still need collecting. But first impressions matter, and this was a respectable beginning.

Then Cllr Harmer reached the point in the agenda that appears in virtually every council meeting in the country. Were there any declarations of interest? It is one of local government’s oldest traditions and, frankly, one of its most important. If an elected member has a financial interest, a family connection or another relevant involvement in the business before them, the public deserves to know before decisions are taken. Nobody could sensibly argue with that principle.

But as Cllr Harmer asked the question, my attention wandered towards the senior officers sitting around the Cabinet table alongside the elected members. They had written the reports. They had prepared the recommendations. They had advised Cabinet members, assembled the evidence and, in many cases, knew more about the subjects under discussion than anyone else in the room. Yet nobody asked them whether they had anything to declare.

Before anyone rushes to the complaints procedure, let me make something crystal clear. I am not suggesting that any officer present had an undeclared interest. Nor am I criticising Cllr Harmer personally. He simply followed the convention observed in council chambers across the country. My question is whether that convention still makes sense.

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Council officers wield enormous influence. They oversee procurement, negotiate contracts, manage major projects, investigate complaints, draft policies and advise elected members before decisions are taken. They are governed by professional codes, internal declaration procedures and employment rules, exactly as they should be. But if transparency is the objective, why not make it visible? Why not simply ask everyone sitting around the Cabinet table the same question? “Before we begin, do any members or officers have a relevant interest to declare?” It would add perhaps ten seconds to the meeting and send a powerful message that openness applies equally to everyone involved in public decision-making.

Nationally, we know officers are every bit as capable as elected members of finding themselves in difficulty over conflicts of interest. Internal audits have uncovered undisclosed business interests, procurement conflicts and relationships with suppliers which should have been declared. The consequences can be severe, ranging from disciplinary action to dismissal and, in the most serious cases, criminal investigation. They are not superhuman. They are simply human, just like the politicians sitting alongside them.

Cllrs who are found to have breached their Code of Conduct face the Standards process, and Birmingham quite properly publishes annual Standards information and the outcomes of formal findings. My only observation is that if you have ever tried finding some of those reports, you will know they are not exactly displayed in the shop window. They are there, but locating them can sometimes feel like taking part in the Great Birmingham Municipal Treasure Hunt. One click takes you to committee papers. Another to an agenda. Then an appendix. Then a report hidden inside another report. Eventually, after enough digital archaeology, you find the document you were looking for. By then you’ve forgotten what you were looking for in the first place.

Interestingly, Birmingham’s own governance review has already highlighted the importance of transparency around officers’ declarations of interests, gifts and hospitality. The government-appointed commissioners recommended improvements in this area, recognising that public confidence depends upon clear and robust governance. So this is not some daft question dreamt up over a cup of coffee. It is a perfectly respectable question about whether local government should demonstrate openness in the same way for everyone who influences a decision.

So here is my modest proposal. Keep asking Cllrs to declare their interests. That is absolutely right. But extend the invitation to the senior officers sitting around the Cabinet table as well. Nobody loses face. Nobody is accused of anything. Everybody is treated equally. If transparency really is the aim, then transparency should apply to everyone involved in making public decisions, not simply those who happen to have fought an election.

As for Cllr Harmer and Cllr Pritchard, congratulations on getting through your first Cabinet meeting without any obvious calamities. One of you may wish to invest in a tie before winter. The other may wish to leave his at home until October. More importantly, you made a decent start. There was nothing in that first performance which made me think, “Good grief, this lot will never sort Birmingham out.” On the contrary, it was a respectable job, competently done. Well done, chaps. Now get on and sort the bin strike.

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Politics is a funny old business. Sometimes billions of pounds, international crises and national opinion polls dominate the headlines. Then along comes a vacancy on a Town Council and suddenly Westminster, Birmingham and every political activist with a clipboard begins paying attention. That is exactly what may happen in Royal Sutton Coldfield. Following the resignation of Labour Town Councillor Alex Cowley, Birmingham City Council has confirmed that sufficient requests have now been received from electors to trigger a by-election. The date is yet to be announced, but one thing is already certain. This little election has suddenly become rather important.

Not because Royal Sutton Coldfield Town Council controls vast budgets or determines the future of civilisation as we know it. It does not. But because elections, particularly by-elections, often tell us something about the public mood that opinion polls simply cannot. Think of it as Birmingham’s first political MOT since the extraordinary elections of May. The Conservatives recovered ground. Reform UK became Birmingham’s largest party. Labour suffered heavy losses. The Greens continued their remarkable rise. Independents demonstrated that local campaigning still counts for something. The electorate looked less like a loyal family and more like speed dating. Now comes the first opportunity to discover whether that was a one-off political earthquake or the beginning of a new landscape.

Vesey is fascinating because the numbers tell a story. At Birmingham City Council level the Conservatives captured both Sutton Vesey seats. Yet in the Town Council election, held on exactly the same day, Labour won three of the five available seats, the Conservatives secured two and Reform UK missed taking the final Labour place by just three votes. Three. In electoral terms that is not so much a defeat as a rounding error. That alone makes this by-election worth watching.

Reform’s performance across Birmingham in May was remarkable by any sensible measure. To move from political outsider to becoming the council’s largest party in such a short period is something most parties can only dream about. But remarkable does not necessarily mean perfect. Looking through the ward results there is a pattern emerging. Reform attracted substantial support in many parts of the city but did not always convert that enthusiasm into seats. Castle Vale is perhaps the clearest example, where victory slipped away by just 44 votes. In Vesey, at Town Council level, the margin was only three votes. Elsewhere Reform established itself as a serious challenger without quite getting over the finishing line. The point is not that every second place was a hidden victory. It was not. The point is that there were places where a sharper, more concentrated and more personal campaign might have produced more councillors.

There is a world of difference between building momentum and building an election-winning machine. The first is exciting. The second wins council seats. Politics is littered with parties that packed public meetings, filled Facebook with enthusiastic supporters and generated impressive headlines, only to discover that elections are actually won by knocking on doors in the rain on a Tuesday evening. Successful local politics is gloriously unglamorous. It means selecting candidates people know and trust. It means building a reputation before polling day arrives. It means keeping records, following up residents’ concerns, identifying supporters and, perhaps most importantly of all, encouraging postal votes. It means real personal contact rather than assuming a national wave will carry every candidate over the line.

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Labour has understood that lesson for decades. The Conservatives understand it too. Neither party simply turns up six weeks before polling day and hopes for the best. They identify likely supporters, return to them, speak to them again, organise postal votes and make sure people actually cast their ballot. Reform has already proved it can generate enthusiasm. The next test is whether it can turn that enthusiasm into disciplined electioneering. That means high-profile candidates with local credibility, strong ward campaigns, careful organisation, repeated doorstep contact and postal votes treated as a primary consideration rather than an afterthought.

This is where Vesey becomes such a useful test. Reform came within three votes of winning a Town Council seat only weeks ago. It does not need to invent a support base because one already exists. But a by-election is a different animal from a city-wide election. Turnout may be lower. The electorate will receive more concentrated attention. The established parties will know exactly what is at stake. Reform will not be able to rely simply on national momentum or anger with the old parties. It will have to show that it can identify its voters, persuade the undecided and make sure supporters return their postal ballots or get to the polling station.

Labour also has a serious problem to solve. It has lost both City Council seats in Sutton Vesey and now faces an unexpected vacancy after one of its Town Councillors resigned only weeks after being elected. Retaining the seat would show that its local vote remains resilient despite the wider collapse. Losing it would deepen the impression that Labour’s old grip on parts of Birmingham is continuing to loosen. The Conservatives, meanwhile, will see an opportunity to add to their May gains and demonstrate that their Sutton recovery was not merely a temporary reaction against Labour.

That is why nobody should dismiss this as only a Town Council election. The seat itself may be modest, but the political test is real. If Reform wins, it will suggest the party is beginning to turn enthusiasm into organisation. If Labour holds on, it will show that local campaigning and established networks still count. If the Conservatives take it, they will claim their resurgence in Sutton is becoming firmly rooted. Each party has something to prove, and each has something to lose.

Somewhere in campaign headquarters across Birmingham there will already be volunteers hunting for canvassing sheets, candidates checking their diaries, printers warming up for the first leaflets and activists discussing postal votes over cups of tea that went cold half an hour ago. Politics, after all, is rarely glamorous. It is usually won one conversation, one doorstep and one ballot paper at a time. Or, in Vesey’s case last time, just three.

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Love him, loathe him… or never really had him on your radar?

If you enjoy political memoirs, Andrew Mitchell MP’s Beyond a Fringe is well worth your time. Refreshingly honest, self-deprecating and often very funny, it offers a rare insider’s view of Westminster without descending into score-settling. Whatever your politics, this is an engaging and worthwhile read from Sutton Coldfield’s long-serving MP.

“I loved it ..” - Mike Olley

From decent booksellers including Amazon …

Another week, another milestone. Midlands GRIT comfortably passed 30,000 reads this week. That’s exciting, slightly daunting and, if I’m honest, rather motivating. Raise the bar once and readers quite rightly expect you to clear it again. Can we? I genuinely think we can. Even as I write, there are already a couple of strong investigations lined up for next week that I think you’re going to enjoy. But first, let’s look back at what has been another remarkable seven days.

Monday: Elite Culture. Working Culture. One City. One Question.

England’s dramatic World Cup victory over Mexico, followed by Norway sending Brazil home, reminded me that football isn’t simply sport. It is culture. Millions of us shared exactly the same emotions at exactly the same time. That led to a bigger Birmingham question. When we talk about “culture”, whose culture do we actually mean? Museums, galleries and orchestras unquestionably matter. So do grassroots football clubs, brass bands, darts leagues, pub music, working men’s clubs, anglers, classic car enthusiasts and thousands of volunteers who quietly keep communities alive every week. Looking through Birmingham City Council’s budgets, I could identify significant investment in what might broadly be called elite culture. What I could not clearly identify was an equivalent, recognisable investment in working culture. Perhaps it exists across several budgets. If so, now seems the perfect opportunity to show us where. Perhaps Birmingham doesn’t have a culture problem. Perhaps it simply has a definition of culture problem.

Tuesday: Britain’s Employability Challenge

National Employability Week proved that Britain’s biggest employment problem may not simply be skills. It may be opportunity. EmployabilityUK brought together educators, employers and policymakers to ask why, despite decades of discussion, too many young people remain NEET, not in education, employment or training. Professor Edgar Meyer argued we should stop describing communication, resilience and confidence as “soft skills”. There is nothing soft about convincing somebody to offer you your first job. Former MP Professor Khalid Mahmood questioned whether Britain measures activity better than outcomes. For me, one point stood out. Employers often say young people lack experience. But somebody has to provide that first experience. One apprenticeship, one placement or one week of work experience could change a young person’s life. Education opens the first door. Employability gives people the confidence to walk through it.

Wednesday: Who Is Cllr Alan Feeney?

Political interviews too often tell us what politicians think. I wanted to discover who one actually is. Meeting Cllr Alan Feeney revealed a far more interesting story than party politics alone. Before entering elected office he worked in hospitality, became a funeral celebrant, served as a prison officer, performed Shakespeare, sang opera and somehow still found room to become a devoted Star Trek fan. He also corrected me. In last week’s article I referred to him as a being a Worcestershire county councillor, as well as currently a Birmingham City and Solihull MBC. In fact, Alan served as a Worcester City Councillor, and I’m very happy to put the record straight. Whether readers agree with Reform UK or disagree entirely, understanding the people asking for our votes seems far healthier than simply repeating party press releases. I hope this profile series becomes a regular feature of Midlands GRIT.

Thursday: Hide and Seek with Day Rates

Sometimes local government almost writes the jokes itself. I submitted a Freedom of Information request asking one simple question. How does the public contact Birmingham’s government-appointed commissioners? The answer? Through the Council’s Complaints Team. That immediately raised another question. Who actually reads the emails? The council could identify no written protocol explaining how correspondence reaches commissioners or how replies are managed. So I have now written directly to them and asked for an interview. The questions cover everything from consultants and cashable savings to Birmingham’s pension fund, neighbourhood knowledge and whether anyone overseeing Britain’s second city truly understands the place beyond spreadsheets. Deadline: Monday. If they answer, Birmingham learns something. If they don’t… well… sometimes silence says just as much.

Friday: What Changed?

Former Cabinet Member Cllr Majid Mahmood asked a question Birmingham’s new leadership has yet to answer. Before the election, fortnightly, or as GRIT insists on calling them, bi monthly, residual waste collections were described as unacceptable while services remained unreliable. After the election, a pilot proceeds. Perhaps that is the correct decision. Perhaps circumstances genuinely changed. Perhaps officers produced evidence. Perhaps commissioners insisted. All of those explanations could be perfectly reasonable. But residents deserve to hear them. Politics is not judged simply by what governments do. It is judged by whether they explain why. Majid’s question remains refreshingly straightforward. What changed? Birmingham is still waiting for the answer.

Thirty thousand reads tells me something important. People haven’t lost interest in local journalism. They’ve lost interest in journalism that doesn’t ask difficult questions, admit mistakes when they’re made, celebrate good people wherever they’re found and challenge those in power, whatever political colour they happen to wear. That’s exactly what Midlands GRIT intends to keep doing. Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing, disagreeing, correcting me when I get something wrong and helping build a publication that believes Birmingham, the Black Country and the wider West Midlands deserve serious journalism that still knows how to smile. Have a wonderful weekend.

Mike Olley
Editor, Midlands GRIT

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Cllr Majid Mahmood may just have done Birmingham a favour. In a short video defending the waste changes he helped set in motion while still a Labour cabinet member, he asked the question the city’s new administration has not yet answered: what changed?

Before the election, leading voices now inside the Green, Liberal Democrat and Better Birmingham administration were distinctly uneasy about moving to bi monthly bin collections while the service remained unreliable. Now, with power obtained, offices occupied and cabinet titles printed, the same broad direction is being rolled out. That may be necessary. It may even be right. But if it is right now, Birmingham residents deserve to know why it was so wrong then.

Majid’s point is blunt. He says the move to bi monthly collections was never about politics, but about Birmingham’s financial and environmental position. The city’s recycling rate was dire. Too much waste was being burned. The service needed modernising. Taxpayers needed better value. These were, in his argument, difficult decisions rather than popular ones. He backed them when they carried political pain. He now accuses the new administration of opposing the same course, warning residents about its consequences, then introducing it anyway with too little communication and too much confusion.

The awkward evidence starts with Cllr Roger Harmer’s own election-facing words. The Liberal Democrat manifesto did not merely say waste services needed improvement. It said weekly collections would be maintained until the service had shown itself to be completely reliable for a significant period of time. It also said moving to fortnightly residual waste collections was simply not acceptable while missed collections remained high. Strip away the council vocabulary and that is the same doorstep issue: do not reduce the main bin collection while the service is still in a mess.

That was not an offhand comment. That was an election document, offered to voters before power was won. Now the administration is proceeding with a pilot that includes bi monthly residual collections. So the question is unavoidable. Has the service now become completely reliable for a significant period? If so, show the evidence. If not, what happened to the promise?

Cllr Julien Pritchard’s Greens also faced the electorate on waste and recycling. Their political territory was clear: cleaner streets, restored recycling, less incineration and a greener waste system. Nobody can reasonably complain that Greens want better recycling. That is rather like complaining that a council report has too many appendices. But the issue here is not whether recycling matters. It does. The issue is sequencing and honesty. If the new administration believes Birmingham can only restart serious recycling by reducing residual collections, it should say so plainly. If the financial and environmental case now overwhelms its earlier doubts, say so. If government funding, statutory waste changes, recycling targets or Defra pressure have changed the room, say so.

Then there is Cllr Harris Khaliq. He is new to the council, new to cabinet, and has landed in one of the most exposed jobs in Birmingham politics. That deserves some allowance. But he also campaigned as a community voice, as someone who would rebuild trust, deliver reliable services and stand up for residents who felt ignored by the old political system. He is now the Cabinet Member for City Operations and Digital, which means the bin mess is no longer someone else’s problem. It is on his desk, in his title and probably in his dreams.

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GRIT asked Cllr Harmer, Cllr Pritchard and Cllr Khaliq for comment. At the time of writing, none had replied. That is disappointing, particularly because Cllr Harmer has previously been attentive and responsive to difficult questions, and Cllr Pritchard has often been willing to engage seriously. One unanswered enquiry does not prove a collapse into old habits. But it is striking. This is not a niche enquiry about a bent parking sign or a missing shrub outside a leisure centre. It goes directly to whether the city’s new political leadership has moved away from words used before the election.

The deeper problem is that Birmingham’s waste policy was already moving before the new administration took office. Cabinet papers from the previous period show the waste transformation programme was not a sketch on the back of a recycling sack. Routes and rounds had been developed. Containers had been ordered. The plan included food waste, extra recycling capacity and a shift away from weekly residual collections. Commissioners welcomed the direction, supported the timetable and called for whole-council alignment. That phrase matters. Whole-council alignment is the sort of phrase that sounds harmless in a report and ominous in a democracy. It means the machine had a destination. The new councillors have now climbed into the cab. The public is entitled to ask whether they are steering, navigating, or merely announcing the next stop.

This is where ITV Central’s reporting on the bin strike becomes relevant. ITV revealed a confidential March document, drawn up by senior council officers, which suggested sacking striking bin workers without the approval of elected councillors as a way of bringing the dispute to an end. That does not prove commissioners or officers forced the present administration to proceed with bi monthly collections. But it does show the atmosphere in which Birmingham waste policy has been made: senior unelected figures were prepared to contemplate routes around elected councillors when dealing with the bin crisis.

Majid is an awkward messenger because he was inside the previous Labour administration. He helped lay the groundwork. He owns his part in the decision. That gives him vulnerability, but also force. He can say he took the political pain openly while others opposed, criticised or warned, only to arrive in office and carry on. His video lands because it asks the question residents understand immediately. You said one thing before power. You are doing another thing after power. What changed?

There may be a good answer. Perhaps the new administration has seen fresh reliability data. Perhaps officers have shown them that the old promise cannot be delivered. Perhaps government recycling rules make delay costly. Perhaps commissioners have made clear that the waste transformation programme is not optional. Perhaps the new leadership has simply discovered that Birmingham is easier to criticise from the pavement than to govern from the Council House.

Any of those explanations would matter. Some might even persuade residents. But explanations must be given before trust can be rebuilt. Until then, the suspicion will grow that Birmingham’s new leadership is already being pulled towards the old municipal gravity: officer reports hardening into inevitability, commissioner objectives becoming the real programme, and elected promises being quietly folded away once the votes have been counted.

Cllr Majid Mahmood asked a simple question.

What changed?

Birmingham is still waiting for the answer.