Like So Many: Birminghams The City That Reads Its Own Script

What we have are too many councillors reading out pre cleared scripts written by officers, as if the greatest political virtue is not to think.

If you ever want to understand why local government feels broken across Britain, start in Birmingham. What unfolds in this chamber is not unique; it is simply a more polished version of the same civic pantomime being played out in town halls across the land. Officers run the asylum, councillors read from the script, and the public wonder why they bothered electing anyone at all.

Was there ever a time when a Birmingham City Council Cabinet meeting felt like a genuine civic occasion? Would you have debate, ideas, maybe even the odd flash of conviction? These days, it is more like a local government audiobook. Officers write the script, Cabinet members read it out, opposition councillors ask well put together questions which are mostly ignored, and the rest of us are left wondering whether democracy has been quietly replaced by dictation software.

This month’s star turn was the Acquisitions Strategy 2025 to 2030, twelve pages of beautifully formatted fog. The report promises “clarity” on the Council’s housing plans, though by the end you are not sure whether it is trying to build homes or simply perfect the art of producing PDFs.

Labour Cabinet members Cllrs Mariam Khan and Majid Mahmood dutifully took to their microphones, reading word for word what the officers had prepared. Not a blink of improvisation, not even a rogue adverb. You half expected a stage direction to appear in the margins, pause for sincerity, followed by a PowerPoint transition.

Then up popped Cllr Mackey, the Tory deputy leader, with the unhelpful habit of listening. “The Council,” he pointed out, “is spending more money than it has.” This is what is known in finance as a problem. The deficit, a tidy forty six point two million pounds, was laid out like an elephant in the council chamber, unacknowledged but impossible to miss. “When will the savings be delivered?” he asked.

Silence. You could have heard the sound of an unread briefing note hitting the floor. The answer, one assumes, was not in the script handed to Cabinet members that morning. Labour Cabinet member Cllr McCarthy eventually thanked him for “recognising the budget pressures,” which is a wonderfully polite way of saying we do not know either. And if she does think the deficit is a problem, she gave no clue of it.

It is the same scene in council chambers and committee rooms everywhere. The questions get cleverer, the answers get duller, and the officers smile quietly to themselves.

A Strategy Built on Circular Logic

The report itself is a masterpiece of bureaucratic spin. Birmingham, it explains, currently has six hundred families living in bed and breakfast accommodation beyond the legal six week limit, and nine thousand children in temporary housing. The solution? The Council will keep buying private houses, at an average of two hundred and forty eight thousand pounds each, using the same Right to Buy money it received for selling council homes in the first place.

In other words, Birmingham sells its houses cheap, buys them back dear at market prices, spends a small fortune bringing them up to standard, and calls this reshaping the market. It is the civic equivalent of pawning your watch and then buying it back from Cash Converters, getting it serviced at the local jeweller, and declaring you are strategically managing your assets.

Every city now has its own version of this financial loop. No one builds, everyone buys, and all call it progress.

The Acquisitions Strategy even admits that this may be pricing private buyers out of the market, but reassures us that it is fine because homeowners have more financial mobility. That is one way of putting it. Another would be that the Council is competing with the very people it claims to represent, armed with public money and a mandate to outbid them.

The Ghost of BMHT

Buried deep in the report is the quiet admission that the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, once the city’s proud house building arm, was wound up earlier this year after years of under delivery. Building had become too slow, too expensive, too much like actual work. So the city has pivoted from building homes to buying them, a kind of housing retail therapy. By March, officers boasted, one thousand and ninety one affordable homes had been delivered, though two hundred and thirteen of those were simply shuffled from one Council ledger to another, and one hundred and twenty two were bought second hand.

New build, the report insists, cannot meet demand on its own. No kidding. It is hard to meet demand when you have stopped building anything. Presumably because the Council’s officers have such a lack of combined talent they cannot jointly build anything, only produce puff and nonsense through their dreary reports that so often speak with a forked tongue.

And this, again, is the national picture. We have become a nation of councils that used to build. Local government is no longer a machine for delivery but a factory for paperwork.

Cars, Strikes, and Other Inconvenient Truths

Some councillors did stray off script long enough to commit truth. Lib Dem leader Cllr Harmer revealed, with commendable candour, that car use within the Clean Air Zone has gone up by ten per cent. That is quite an achievement for a city determined to drive drivers out of existence. But then, it is hard to promote public transport when service reliability in Birmingham now ranks somewhere between roulette and ghost hunting.

Then came Cllr Bobby Alden, Tory group leader, who noticed a green light glowing on the Cabinet dashboard. The KPI for employee relations, that delicate measure of staff happiness, was listed as green. A sign, apparently, that all is well in the municipal garden. Which will come as news to anyone following Britain’s longest running bin strike. You would think months of industrial action might nudge the dial towards amber at least.

The Council Leader, Cllr John Cotton, suddenly off book, offered the immortal reassurance that one union dispute does not a summer make. A phrase that might comfort the city’s residents as their uncollected waste mounts up in midsummer piles. It was a rare moment of unscripted honesty and confirmed that the Council’s idea of green indicators has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with wishful thinking.

From Birmingham to Bradford, the refrain is the same. The language of leadership has been replaced by the dialect of middle management.

Leadership vs Managerialism

Leadership is about doing things. Managerialism is about managing things. Birmingham is currently doing neither. What we have are too many councillors reading out pre cleared scripts written by officers, as if the greatest political virtue is not to think. No one is leading, they are merely administering.

We are told that buying up scattered houses at two hundred and forty eight thousand pounds a time is a strategy for affordable housing, when any sane reading of the situation would say the city should be building social housing, at scale, for the long term. Instead we have piecemeal acquisitions, glossy frameworks and green KPIs. It is not leadership. It is managerial nonsense, a city being managed as if it were a slightly awkward spreadsheet.

And that raises the question, why do we even bother electing anyone? Why not just cut out the middleman and let the officers read their own reports directly into the microphone? At least it would save on allowances.

The grand total under the schedule of members’ allowances for 2024 to 2025 is two point four nine million pounds, not including election costs, which are difficult to disentangle as Birmingham’s election accounts are not clearly published. A fair estimate, based on Cabinet Office figures, would be about three million. So, ditch the councillors and save roughly six million. What do you think?

If this feels familiar, it is because it is happening everywhere. Local government has become a strange inversion of power, where the elected whisper and the unelected speak.

A Word on Rob Pocock

Now, credit where due. Cllr Rob Pocock at least seems to possess a mind of his own. He tried, bravely if hopelessly, to defend the indefensible, the idea that everything really is in the green. It was like watching a man attempt to talk sense into a mirror. Did I, however, note he was disagreeing with his own leader’s one summer suggestion? Surely not.

I remember Rob in his younger, more radical days, the left wing agitator, the earnest campaigner who railed against bureaucratic drift. Now here he is, sleeves rolled up, doing a very convincing impression of the sort of managerial moderate he once swore to oppose. The very model of a modern municipal man, fluent in officer speak, armed with bullet points, and just as baffled as the rest of us by what any of it actually achieves.

Still, he deserves some sympathy. In a Cabinet of scripted monotones, a councillor who actually thinks, even if wrongly, feels like a rare species worth protecting. And perhaps, in that sense, Rob is not just a Birmingham story but a national one, a reminder that conviction politics has been quietly traded for career caution in town halls everywhere.

A Pause for Dignity

To be fair, not everything was farce. The Cabinet adjourned at the eleventh hour to rush up to the Hall of Memory to mark Remembrance, a genuinely dignified moment in a morning otherwise devoted to the art of scripted avoidance. For that brief silence, Birmingham remembered those who gave their lives for freedom and democracy. Then the microphones came back on, and the city went straight back to reading the minutes.

The Final Word

The Acquisitions Strategy is, in truth, less a housing plan than a symptom. A city that once built the world is now reduced to buying back its own bricks, slowly, expensively and under officer supervision. Councillors who should be leading are instead reciting. And behind every line of strategic ambition lies the quiet panic of an authority still forty six million pounds short and counting.

Perhaps, one day, someone will stand up in that chamber or a committee room and say something that is not pre approved by the Directorate of Spin. Until then, Birmingham will continue to build houses on paper and call it progress. And every other council in Britain will nod along, clipboard in hand, certain that this is what governance now looks like.