When Birmingham city council announced last week it was “no longer bankrupt”, after years of budget cuts and asset sales, one retired police officer was left feeling despondent.
Wendy Collymore had experienced first-hand the impact of the council’s cost-cutting drive on the UK’s second largest city when the adult day centre her elderly father attended was forced to close in 2024.
“It was awful to me personally, for my dad, but for the staff as well,” the 65-year-old said. “It was really sad. You had service users crying, saying: ‘I don’t want to go.’ It was soul-destroying.”
Since the announcement from the council last Tuesday that it was “back on track”, Collymore is one of several people in Birmingham that have expressed frustrations with the measures implemented by the local authority to tackle its financial woes.
The council issued a section 114 notice declaring effective bankruptcy in September 2023, blaming a £760m equal-pay liability, a botched IT system and £1bn in cuts over the previous decade of Conservative government.
In response, the council put forward a massive cost-cutting drive, a £750m asset sale programme and a 17.5% rise in council tax bills over two years.
The city has also been dealing with the impact of a more than year-long bin strike after the council slashed pay and jobs. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Unite union said workers had voted in favour of extending the strikes beyond the May local elections into September.
“The rubbish, the fly-tipping … you’ve got young people, they have no longer got a youth centre,” Collymore said. “When the opportunity was there, Birmingham city council turned their backs and walked away.”
The Save Birmingham campaign began in response to the bankruptcy declaration, with the aim of securing the future of community assets – including libraries, youth centres and community centres – which were at threat of closure due to the asset sale programme.
Kathy Hopkin, the campaign coordinator, said: “These kinds of places are a lifeline and are either free of charge or very low cost. If people don’t have access to them any more, then [you get] issues of social isolation, issues of young people not having access to activities.”
For Hopkin, the announcement from the council on Tuesday has done little to assuage her concerns. “There are still libraries that are on the chopping block so [the announcement] feels quite tokenistic to me. It feels like nothing’s actually going to change … they’re stripping the city of everything.”
She added that the asset sale programme, which the council said was continuing in order to finance the equal-pay liability, was shortsighted. “Stripping away all of these things, you’re setting yourself up for having higher costs in the future,” Hopkin said. “It’s storing up issues for the longer term.”
A council spokesperson said that there were no plans to close any of Birmingham’s libraries. Regarding asset sales, they added: “The council is conducting a city-wide asset review and disposal programme to raise up to £1bn in capital receipts by the end of 2027, to support essential services and transformation.”
Sidrah Awan, the welfare manager at Green Lane mosque, said families in Birmingham had been increasingly struggling, with residents “choosing between whether they eat or whether they warm up their home”.
Demand for many of their services – including a food bank, financial assistance programme and social services – had doubled or tripled in the two years since she took on the role and this included stay-and-play sessions, which, Awan said, were one of many services cut by the council in recent years.
However, for Awan, the blame cannot be put solely on the local authority. “This is an ongoing problem,” she said. “I don’t think we can blame just one party for the issues that have been happening. This [has] obviously been a long process that has caused the council to get into this position.
“It’s been a difficult time for everybody, council included.”
Many local authorities have raised concerns in recent years about rising costs and demand, with 30 receiving exceptional financial support from the government last year to stave off effective bankruptcy.
Birmingham’s Labour leader, John Cotton, said the council would “start reinvesting in frontline services and deliver improvements for people in the city”.
The “extra £130m investment” would be used to address fly tipping, youth services, knife crime and libraries, he added. “This is the first stage in addressing the 15-year legacy of austerity in this city,” Cotton said.
“We know there’s still much more to do, we’re pressing on with making the changes that people rightly want to see.”
