This week, Birmingham City Council announced that they had issued a Section 114 notice, the public sector equivalent of announcing bankruptcy. This means that spending is under severe controls, limited to “protecting vulnerable people and statutory services.” With all other spending stopping with immediate effect.[1]
What exactly does all of this mean for the city residents and for local churches? I was asked by a Christian broadcaster if I was available to be interviewed about these kinds of questions this morning but I had to decline partly because I was about to get the train back home from seeing my dad up in Bradford and partly because my honest and immediate answer was “I don’t know.”
If we are honest, none of us really know what it means and what the impact will be just yet. There are a few reasons why we aren’t too sure. First, it is a little bit unprecedented and almost unthinkable. Whilst other local authorities have had financial difficulties and gone into a formm of special measures, we’ve not seen anything on this scale. Birmingham is the largest local authority administration in Europe and like the banks during the credit crunch I think it assumed ti was too big to fail. Indeed, the expectation was that the government would step in and bail them out. I think there has been and still is some brinkmanship going on.
Indeed, the traditional view was that you could not let public bodies get into such a mess. Nack when I was studying law, there was a lot of discussion around the legal lability of public bodies, whether councils or health authorities. The traditional view among the judiciary was that yes, a body might be liable, yes there was an issue of justice but if they penalised such bodies with fines and requirements for compensation then it would not really punish the people responsible for failure as penalise the general public. Birmingham offers a good example. The Council have been subject to a number of cases concerning failure to offer equal pay. They have been directly or indirectly discriminating against women. A culture shift in the legal system means that now the courts seem quite happy to insist that public bodies cough up for what they are liable.
There is a challenge here. It is obviously the case that those who were discriminated from should receive justice. However, should it be in a way that puts the wider public at risk. Indeed, arguably many of those who will benefit from the payouts will also potentially suffer the most from the Council cutting costs and services.
The second reason why we don’t know is that there has been such a hollowing out of local democracy that no-one is really too sure what Local Authorities are responsible for anymore. For example, much of education in the city is delivered through multi-academy trusts and free schools. Some services such as buses have long been privatised and other aspects of local democracy around transport and policing have been transferred to metro mayors and elected commissioners.
So, we are left wondering what the statutory duties are that the Council are committed to continuing? According to the Local Government Association, authorities are responsible for matter including “social care, schools, housing and planning and waste collection ,.. such as licensing, business support, registrar services and pest control.”
That all sound well and good, because if Birmingham Council are going to continue to deliver all of these things at least at the level of service we currently have, then we should be okay. The bins will be emptied, care packages delivered, vermin kept at bay and hopefully they might even maintain roads and pavements. Indeed, one might want to ask exactly what it was over and above these things that the Council were getting themselves involved in. Perhaps that’s one of the political debates that this crisis is bringing to the forefront.
However, I suspect it doesn’t work quite like that. First, you’ll find that within a statutory service, there’ll be the bare minimum of what is accepted and that will potentially fall short of what is really needed. Secondly, I suspect that even as those services continue to be provided, the expectation will be that costs will be cut under the old euphemistic heading of “efficiency savings.” There’ll still be care workers, teaching assistants, bin men and road repairers, just less of them expected to cover more. The promised repair to our pavement where it’s cracking up which was meant to be 12 weeks away is probably at least a year away now, if not longer. It will be reassessed and reprioritised.
One fear is that pay cuts and job cuts will follow leading inevitably to industrial action. We’ve recently been through a bus drivers strike in the city and it isn’t so long back that the refuse collectors walked out.
This adds to uncertainty because the Local Authority have declared that they’ll protect vulnerable people but what exactly does that mean? You see, what the Council can best do in terms of protecting older or physically impaired residents is make sure that their bins are emptied so we don’t have rubbish piling up bringing pests and diseases, that their pavement isn’t a tripping hazard and that community centres and services such as libraries stay open to help protect against isolation and loneliness.
Hence “we don’t know”. And this is the first and main implication for churches. We are living in uncertain times and uncertainty will no doubt increase anxiety and fear. So, our immediate priority needs to be to respond to this. This means that the church’s first priority is to do the very thing that we were called to do. We need to prioritise the Gospel. The collapse of our local council is a stark reminder that we cannot put our hope in the solutions of this world. We need to point people to the greater hope we have in the one who never lets us down. This means that we need to model what it means to live as God’s people by not being anxious ourselves. We need to live out our trust in Jesus.
Secondly, I think that we have a responsibility to pray and intercede for our city. We should be praying for those in authority but also for our neighbours as they are affected right now by anxiety and as they’ll be increasingly affected by the practical fall out of Birmingham going bust.
Thirdly, as things become clearer, there may be situations where we need to step in practically to show compassion in action and help those in need. This will mean looking out for each other in the church (our church in a timely manner is planner a series on James soon which will have much to teach us). It will mean looking out for neighbours and for the vulnerable and needy in our city.
Please pray for Birmingham and for churches in the city.
[1] Statement regarding Section 114 notice | Birmingham City Council
Faithroots 
1 comment
Comments are closed.