Birmingham City Council has declared itself effectively bankrupt.

The local authority – the largest in Europe – has issued a Section 114 notice preventing all but essential spending to protect core services.

What chance any levelling up now? – Owl

By Sophie Madden www.bbc.co.uk

In a joint statement, the leader and deputy leader of the Labour authority said the notice was a “necessary step as we seek to get our city back on a sound financial footing”.

Such a notice, issued in the past by councils including Croydon and Thurrock, means a local authority has judged itself to be in financial distress and can no longer balance its budget.

Opposition leader, Robert Alden, Conservative, said the council had “failed to show the proper speed and urgency needed to tackle equal pay”.

In their statement, councillors John Cotton and Sharon Thompson, leader and deputy leader respectively, said the authority was also facing financial pressures due to issues with the implementation of its Oracle IT system.

The flagship IT system, intended to streamline council payments and HR systems, was set to cost £19m but after three years of delays it was revealed in May it could cost up to £100m.

“Like local authorities across the country, it is clear that Birmingham City Council faces unprecedented financial challenges, from huge increases in adult social care demand and dramatic reductions in business rates income, to the impact of rampant inflation,” Mr Cotton and Ms Thompson said, adding local government faced “a perfect storm”.

The statement continued: “We implemented rigorous spending controls in July, and we have made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support.

“[Tuesday’s] issuing of a Section 114 Notice is a necessary step as we seek to get our city back on a sound financial footing so that we can build a stronger city for our residents.

“Despite the challenges that we face, we will prioritise core services that our residents rely on, in line with our values of supporting the most vulnerable.”

Birmingham City Council has paid out almost £1.1bn in equal pay claims since a landmark case was brought against the authority in 2012.

The Supreme Court ruled in favour of 174 mostly female employees – working in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners and catering staff – who had missed out on bonuses which were given to staff in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners.

In July, the city council stopped all non-essential spending after it revealed it still faced a bill of up to £760m.

The authority said its bill over equal pay claims was increasing at a rate of £5m to £14m per month.

It said it was in a position where it must fund the liability accrued to date but it did not have the resources to do so.

Because of the situation, it added, the council’s interim director of finance, Fiona Greenway, had issued the Section 114 notice, which confirmed there were insufficient resources to meet the equal pay expenditure and there were no other means of meeting the liability.

The leaders’ statement said: “The council’s senior officers and members are committed to dealing with the financial situation and when more information is available, it will be shared.”

Prof Tony Travers, a visiting professor in the London School of Economics’ Department of Government, a specialist in issues affecting local government, told the BBC that Birmingham had faced financial difficulties “on and off” for more than a decade due to equal pay and other challenges.

“Birmingham is a very important city within Britain and it is essential for the whole country that its services are good and that the city is seen to be motoring forward,” he said.

“The risk is that the city council’s provision of services will be trimmed further and further back and that has consequences not only to what the city looks like and feels like to live in, but also the reputational hit to the city as well.”

Mr Travers added: “People around the city don’t need to worry that their bins aren’t going to be emptied or that social care doesn’t carry on.

“It will mean that no new spending can be committed, so there’s nothing additional from here on.

“But it also points to the fact that the budget for next year, 2024/25, will be terrifically difficult and it is not a problem that is going to go away.”

Mirror and Daily Mail agree….

Rishi Sunak to overturn onshore wind farm ban amid Tory rebellion

Rishi Sunak is set to overturn the ban on building new onshore wind farms to stave off a rebellion from Tory MPs, The Telegraph can reveal.

By Nick Gutteridge, Political Correspondent www.telegraph.co.uk

Ministers are poised to unveil changes to planning rules that will free up councils to give the green light to proposed turbines where there is broad public support.

The move comes as MPs prepare to vote on the Government’s contentious Energy Bill on Tuesday after returning from their summer break.

A group of Tories is backing an amendment tabled by Sir Alok Sharma, the former Cop26 president, that would scrap the ban on new onshore wind.

It has attracted signatories from all wings of the party including Liz Truss, the former prime minister. Rebels are “confident” it is destined to pass.

Labour supports the proposal, which means only six more Tory backbenchers would need to vote in favour to overturn the Government’s majority.

The Telegraph understands ministers have been locked in talks with MPs for almost a week over a compromise deal to avoid a bruising Commons defeat.

Negotiations are set to continue on Monday as the final details are thrashed out, especially on how quickly the Government will be able to legally scrap the ban.

But plans are being drawn up for a minister to submit a written statement to the Commons this week committing to change the current planning rules.

Having secured the necessary guarantees, the rebels would then drop their amendment.

It would end the situation, which has been written into law since 2015, where an objection from just a single resident can prevent a wind farm from being built.

Government sources said the changes would allow councils to “more flexibly address the planning impacts of onshore wind projects as identified by local communities”.

One Tory MP who is supporting the amendment said No 10 had little choice but to act, given it was supported by “senior people from all wings of the party”.

Another added: “It’s great to see ministers listening to concerns and, providing local communities are happy, it will make net zero easier and cheaper too.”

The announcement will mark the second time that Mr Sunak has been forced to act on the issue after coming under pressure from his own MPs.

When he took office last October, he pledged to keep the ban in place – reversing the decision taken by Ms Truss just weeks earlier to end it.

But in the face of a sizeable rebellion from backbenchers, he performed an about-turn on that position in December and said the embargo would be lifted.

That in turn prompted a backlash from Tory MPs who oppose the construction of new onshore wind farms and wanted the moratorium to stay in force.

The Prime Minister promised them that rules would be drawn up to ensure local communities are fully consulted before any new project can be built.

Ministers also began to work on plans for people who live near new turbines to be compensated in the form of cheaper electricity.

But since then there has been little progress on the issue, prompting Tory MPs to force the issue again by tabling their amendment to the Energy Bill.

Sir Alok said: “The Government committed to change planning rules by the end of April 2023 to overturn the de facto ban on onshore wind but this has not happened to date.

“This amendment therefore seeks merely to deliver on the Government’s own promise and help to unlock investment in one of the cheapest forms of energy, and ultimately bring down household bills and improve the UK’s energy security.”

Under the current rules, councils can only approve new sites if they can show that local concerns over their construction have been “fully addressed”.

The effect of the wording is that a single objection can prevent a project from going ahead.

Ministers are set to loosen the requirements so they can be built “when it has been demonstrated that the planning impacts have been satisfactorily addressed”.

The new guidance will stress that developers must “act on concerns and suggestions” from residents and that councils can only approve them where “there is community support”.

Under the changes, local authorities will also be given more discretion to choose where new onshore wind projects can be built within their boundaries.

“One of the first things I did as chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school re-building programme for 500 schools.

“Now that equates to about 50 schools a year, that will be refurbished or rebuilt.

“If you look at what we have been doing over the previous decade, that’s completely in line with what we have always done.”

Maybe, but it’s about a quarter of what was actually needed. – Owl

This government will now limp on to the the next election, fatally wounded. – Owl 

RAAC concrete crisis: Rishi Sunak blamed for school rebuilding cuts by official – education funding explained

Ralph Blackburn uk.sports.yahoo.com

Rishi Sunak refused to fully fund a programme to rebuild at risk schools while Chancellor, a former senior Department for Education official has said.

Jonathan Slater, who was permanent secretary at the DfE from May 2016 to August 2020, said that while up to 400 schools a year need to be replaced, but the department only got funding for 100, which was “frustrating”.

In an interview with the BBC, he claimed that in 2021 Rishi Sunak actually halved the funding – so only 50 schools a year would be rebuilt. This was during the midst of the Covid pandemic.

The revelation comes as thousands of pupils are facing disruption at the start of term this week, after an order to fully or partially close 104 schools because of concerns about collapse-prone reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). This type of concrete, which was used as a common building material from the 50s until the early 90s, is reportedly “prone to collapse”.

Questions have been asked of the government as to why the announcement was made just days before the start of term. NationalWorld previously revealed that the Department for Education raised the risk level around buildings collapsing to “critical – very likely” in September 2021.

Speaking to the BBC this morning, Slater said he was “absolutely amazed” that a decision was made after he left the department to halve the school rebuilding programme.

He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “The actual ask in the Spending Review of 2021 was to double the 100 to 200 – that’s what we thought was going to be practical at first instance. I thought we’d get it, but the actual decision that the chancellor took in 2021 was to halve the size of the programme.”

Rishi Sunak said “this is completely and utterly wrong”, before confirming he gave funding to 50 schools a year. He told broadcasters: “Actually one of the first things I did as Chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school re-building programme for 500 schools.

“Now that equates to about 50 schools a year, that will be refurbished or rebuilt. If you look at what we have been doing over the previous decade, that’s completely in line with what we have always done.”

Labour analysis of National Audit Office figures found that spending on school rebuilding dropped by 41% while Sunak was Chancellor. It said the school rebuilding budget in 2019-20 was £765 million, but after Sunak became Chancellor this dropped to £560 million in 2020-21 and as little as £416 million in 2021-22.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, said: “The defining image of thirteen years of the Conservative-run education system will be children sat under steel girders to stop the roof falling in.

“Rishi Sunak bears huge culpability for his role in this debacle: he doubled down on Michael Gove’s decision to axe Labour’s schools rebuilding programme and now the chickens have come home to roost – with yet more disruption to children’s education.

The issue of England’s ageing schools – highlighted by a NAO report which said up to 700,000 children are being taught in buildings that need replacing or major refurbishment – has become a political storm.

Just days before the start of term more than 100 schools in England were told to fully or partially close as a result of safety concerns about RAAC. The Department for Education has so far refused to say which schools are affected.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has vowed to publish a list of the schools affected by the concrete crisis this week.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We will publish the list, but I do want to double-check that the school has had the opportunity – because not all the schools are back yet – to tell all parents.”

She said three companies providing portable buildings have already been contracted to set up temporary classrooms.

“Many schools are either looking for alternative accommodation, if they’re within a multi-academy trust or within a local authority, or moving to another classroom if they’ve got spare classrooms,” she told Sky News.

“If it’s across the whole school, then that gets more difficult. So what we’re doing right now is we’ve assigned a caseworker for each one of the schools, working with the school to figure out what the mitigation plans are.”

She defended the Tories’ record on school funding, in response to Slater’s comments.

“I’ve just announced 239 school rebuilding projects,” she said, but could not indicate how many a year, saying only that they would be done “as soon as possible”.

She added: “We’ve delivered much better value for money, much more schools have been rebuilt, much more schools are going to be rebuilt, we’ve got a grip of RAAC.”

While the Prime Minister defended the timing of the announcement, saying: “New information came to light relatively recently and it’s important that once it had, that the Government acted on it as swiftly as possible.

“Of course I know the timing is frustrating, but I want to give people a sense of the scale of what we are grappling with here: there are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.” If 5% of schools in England are impacted, that would mean 1,100 are affected.

Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Munira Wilson said: “This bombshell revelation shows the blame for this concrete crisis lies firmly at Rishi Sunak’s door.

“He slashed funding to repair crumbling classrooms when officials said it needed to be increased. Now children and parents across the country are paying the price for this disastrously short-sighted decision.”

Unions and industry groups said they have been warning the government since 2018 over concerns around the safety of school buildings.

Cllr Kevin Bentley, senior vice-chairman of the Local Government Association, said: “Leaving this announcement until near the end of the summer holidays, rather than at the beginning, has left schools and councils with very little time to make urgent rearrangements and minimise disruption to classroom learning.

“The LGA has been warning of the risk from RAAC in schools since 2018. The government should urgently establish a taskforce, including with the LGA and councils to ensure the safety of both pupils and staff in the long term.”

Thirteen national education associations wrote to every Conservative MP in October last year warning about funding, saying they were concerned about the 2,000 schools which contained RAAC. At the time, they warned that these roofs are prone to collapse.

And in February, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) along with seven unions wrote to the DfE urging it to disclose which school buildings are most at risk and have an urgent intervention

Schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also being assessed for RAAC. The Scottish Government has said it is present in 35 schools, but that none poses an “immediate risk” to pupil safety.

The Welsh Government said councils and colleges have not reported any presence of RAAC.