The Commissioners and the Hollowing Out of Birmingham Democracy

Birmingham voters changed the council. But did they change power?

There is a question now hanging over Birmingham that is larger than the council chamber, larger than party arithmetic, and larger even than the immediate scramble to form some kind of working administration. It is this: after the people of Birmingham have voted, changed the political map, broken the old Labour settlement, and sent a very clear message of civic discontent, has power actually moved? Or has Birmingham merely changed the scenery around a decision-making structure that still points upwards to Whitehall?

The city did not fall into government intervention by accident. There were serious failures around finance, governance, equal pay, the Oracle system, political leadership and institutional control. Nobody serious can pretend Birmingham was functioning beautifully until outsiders arrived and spoiled the picnic. The failures were real. Labour’s record was poor. Officers failed. Systems failed. Political judgement failed. But that is precisely why the commissioners were brought in. They came as the remedy. Nearly three years on, Birmingham is entitled to ask whether the remedy has become part of the illness.

Commissioners may be necessary in an emergency. There are moments when outside intervention is justified, especially where a council has lost financial control, failed to discharge its duties properly, or lost public confidence. But emergency supervision cannot become a substitute constitution. A city cannot be kept indefinitely in democratic semi-suspension and still be told that local democracy is working normally. If voters can change the council but cannot change the real power structure, then the election becomes a very expensive public consultation on a city still governed somewhere else.

The official language of intervention is always calm. It speaks of improvement, assurance, best value, governance, sustainability, milestones and progress. That language has its place. But it can obscure the democratic fact underneath. Commissioners are not elected by Birmingham. They are not removed by Birmingham. They do not knock doors in Kingstanding, Sparkbrook, Northfield, Sutton Coldfield, Erdington, Yardley, Handsworth or Harborne. They do not face the voters whose services are being cut, whose council tax is rising, whose bins have been uncollected, whose assets are being sold, and whose city has been humiliated. They answer upwards, not outwards.

That is not a personal criticism. It is a constitutional fact. The appointment letter for the Lead Commissioner says commissioners are accountable to the Secretary of State, who can withdraw their nomination. The current Secretary of State is Steve Reed, appointed to Housing, Communities and Local Government in September 2025. That may be lawful. It may even have been necessary at the start. But it is not local democracy. It is Birmingham being supervised by people answerable to a minister in a Labour government, itself led by Keir Starmer, while Birmingham residents are asked to believe that their local vote has meaning.

The Invisible Government: Who Are These People?

There is a temptation, in official language, to present commissioners as if they arrive from some higher administrative realm. Not politicians, not campaigners, not local troublemakers, but sober rescuers with leather folders, grave expressions and a working knowledge of “best value”. In the imagination of Whitehall, they are the white knights on shining horses, or perhaps the shiny knights on white horses, depending on which department drafted the sentence. Either way, Birmingham is supposed to be grateful.

But Birmingham should be careful with that mythology. The commissioners are not mystical saviours. They are paid, unelected public actors. They have CVs, not mandates. They have powers, not votes. They can advise, instruct, warn, block and supervise, but the public cannot remove them. That is why the burden on them should be heavier, not lighter. If councillors must answer to Birmingham, commissioners should not be allowed to answer only to Whitehall. A letter on a website is not democratic accountability. A report to the Secretary of State is not the same as answering Birmingham.

So who are these people? Tony McArdle brings local government and intervention experience. John Coughlan brings children’s services, social care and SEND experience. Chris Tambini brings finance. Pam Parkes brings HR, workforce, culture and equal pay. Jackie Belton brings housing, regeneration and environmental services. Myron Hrycyk brings technology, procurement, Oracle and corporate utility experience. On paper, that looks like a respectable toolkit. But Birmingham is not a paper exercise. Birmingham is not a problem to be arranged into neat professional categories and then cured by impressive CVs.

Birmingham is a city of around 1.2 million people, a huge public budget, deep poverty, extraordinary diversity, fierce neighbourhood identities, broken trust, industrial conflict, equal pay exposure, Oracle chaos, housing pressure and a political chamber now smashed into fragments. None of the commissioners’ experience, taken individually, quite matches that. Some have worked with large organisations. Some have impressive public-sector backgrounds. Some may know their particular patches well. But Birmingham is not Lincolnshire. It is not Wellingborough. It is not Leicestershire. It is not Bexley. It is not Essex. It is not Hampshire. It is not a water company. It is Birmingham, which is to local government what a live tiger is to pet ownership: technically in the same broad category, but only a fool treats it as transferable experience.

And this is where the real judgement should be made. Not on whether they have CVs. Of course they have CVs. The British state never appoints anyone without first confirming they have enough previous titles to stun a small horse. The question is whether their supposed expertise has made a visible difference where it matters. They were brought in as specialist repair. So judge the repair. Finance remains fragile. Oracle still haunts the building. Equal pay still stalks the budget. Waste has been a civic humiliation. Housing remains a crisis. Governance remains under supervision. If this is control, Birmingham may reasonably ask what chaos would look like.

They came. They saw. They commissioned. And Birmingham is still in the mess they were appointed to clear. That does not mean every failure is theirs. The rot was deep before they arrived. But they were not appointed to admire the scale of the wreckage. They were appointed to help clear it. If after all the fees, letters, reports, meetings and “improvement journeys”, Birmingham still feels stuck in the municipal brown and smelly, the city is entitled to ask a simple question: what, exactly, are they still doing here?

The Myron Hrycyk appointment captures the unease rather neatly. He may well be a serious technology and procurement figure, and he may have useful knowledge of Oracle and major suppliers. The Cabinet Office material describes him as Crown Representative for Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, working with government departments and suppliers on Oracle-related programmes. Yet Birmingham’s Oracle system remains, in plain English, a mess. Auditors warned that until significant Oracle implementation issues are resolved, the council remains at risk of not having adequate arrangements to discharge statutory responsibilities and maintain proper governance. That is not a personal allegation against Mr Hrycyk. It is a fair public question: if an Oracle expert is part of the answer, why is Oracle still one of the city’s most expensive civic disasters?

There is also the Severn Trent symbolism. Hrycyk held senior roles at Severn Trent Water. Again, this is not a personal allegation. But politically, it is awkward. The water sector has become one of the great national symbols of modern British failure: high executive rewards, leverage, pollution rows, regulatory softness and public fury. So when Birmingham is handed expertise from that broad corporate-managerial world, residents are entitled to ask whether they are being offered renewal, or merely decline management in a sharper suit.

The bin strike exposes the democratic problem even more sharply. The public account from Unite is that improved deals were blocked by unelected commissioners and officers, and the Guardian reported Unite’s criticism of commissioner interference as the dispute edged towards resolution. The council, officers and commissioners may dispute parts of that account, and there will be legal and financial arguments around affordability and equal pay risk. But that is precisely the point. If the Labour cabinet, officers, unions and bin workers can move towards settlement, and unelected commissioners can still effectively say no, then the question is not merely industrial relations. It is democracy. Who carries the decision? Who owns the refusal? Who pays the price in rubbish, rats, anger and public humiliation?

Residents do not experience the bin dispute as a governance diagram. They experience it as rubbish in the streets, smell, vermin, embarrassment and the sense that nobody is visibly in charge. Workers hear one thing. The council says another. The union says another. Commissioners sit somewhere in the structure. Ministers sit beyond them. The public watches and wonders who actually has the authority to settle it. Responsibility becomes a maze. And the public hates mazes.

The same is true of Birmingham’s wider funding settlement. Central government likes to speak as if it generously subsidises local government with grants, support packages and money from on high. Another way of putting it is that central government takes much of the tax first, pools power in Whitehall, then rations money back to places like Birmingham with strings, conditions, directions and lectures attached. If Birmingham is to be taxed, tax it fairly. Better still, tax it directly, so the public can see who raises the money, who spends it, and who should be blamed when it goes wrong. A serious local property tax, openly raised and openly spent, would at least make accountability honest: Birmingham would know what it paid, what it received, and who to punish if the bargain failed.

If Birmingham is to govern seriously, let it govern directly. If local politicians mess it up, let Birmingham voters kick them out. At least then the line of responsibility is visible. The present system obscures real governance. Power is dispersed, blame is shared, and accountability evaporates.

This is the real hollowing out. Birmingham voters can sack councillors. They cannot sack commissioners. They cannot vote out the official who says no. They cannot remove the Whitehall logic that turns local democracy into a supervised exercise. They cannot easily see whether a decision was made in the council chamber, in the chief officer corridor, in a commissioner’s letter, in a ministerial direction, or in the nervous space where everyone waits for someone else to take responsibility.

Of course, the answer is not simply to shout “send the commissioners home” and pretend all problems vanish. That would be childish. Birmingham’s failures were deep. Any new administration will inherit brutal financial constraints, legal duties, service pressures, equal pay consequences, broken trust and a public mood already close to exhaustion. There is no magic democratic wand. But democracy is not a luxury to be restored only after everything is tidy. It is the mechanism by which a city chooses among the untidy options.

A council under intervention must have a visible route back to full democratic responsibility. What powers remain constrained? What must Birmingham do to regain them? Who decides when that has happened? What happens if elected councillors disagree with commissioners? How are commissioners themselves assessed? Who judges the judges? These are not awkward questions. They are the questions democracy requires.

Birmingham should not be governed by people who appear mainly as PDFs. If commissioners can instruct, block, approve, warn and supervise, then they should also answer. They should sit for serious media questioning. They should explain themselves to residents. They should be heard, challenged and pressed in plain English. If they remain part of the city’s real governing structure, they must stop being invisible government and start behaving like public power.

The voters have spoken. They have disrupted the city’s political order. They have told Labour it no longer owns Birmingham. They have brought Reform and the Greens into the centre of the argument. They have made independents matter. They have created a council that may be difficult, unstable and awkward. But difficult democracy is still democracy.

Birmingham does not just need a new leader. It needs to know where leadership lives. It does not just need improvement. It needs democratic ownership of improvement. It does not just need commissioners, officers and plans. It needs politics back on the field. Commissioners may have been necessary in an emergency. But if they stay too long, they risk becoming part of the emergency. And Birmingham has had enough emergency to last a generation.