Re~Stirred Forum

Re organising the seating arrangement on the Titanic, would not in my opinion have made any difference to the sad outcome of that ship, the same could apply to BCC

I've only little knowledge of the status quo at BCC so can someone help me out in understanding the thinking behind this and highlight the significant changes?

From the titles it is hard for me to map the council services or divisions that will come under each cabinet members portfolio. Is the intention to map it that way? Or is the intention to move to a 'collective responsibility' type of governance where the services or divisions intentionally do not directly map to a cabinet portfolio but rather multiple cabinet portfolios map across each of them? I'm not saying either model is right, just trying to understand what is proposed.

What position will Councillor Victoria Quinn get?

Will we still have licensing?

Publishing Cabinet minutes would be a symbolic and helpful step.

The danger of these is that they lead to a loss of financial control at a time when finance is particularly difficult. Basically the future budgets have been agreed with specific budget heads, but redistributing the accountability will make it difficult to track.

As a Housing Liaison Board chair, I am very concerned if Housing has been subsumed into a portfolio without it expressly being identified.

Your first para - no, haven't a clue, but see below for a theory.

Your para 2 - it appears that there may very well be split responsibilities amongst officers and cabinet members. This is likely to lead to confusion, or worse.

I fear that they may have been so busy trying to confuse everyone else that they've managed to confuse themselves as well. Having quickly looked at Labour's proposals, I can't find any strategic housing role, whilst day-to-day management appears to be placed on the district committees. As it currently looks, you may have reason to be worried.

Fergus if you are confused, think about us mere mortals, no doubt it is all being done to wrong foot returning coalition councillors and council employees that have had years of experience in working under the old system and to give new incoming Labour an excuse when things go wrong.

This may be a long running thread. Could the typo in the thread title be corrected?

Housing Strategy / Homelessness Strategy will be approved by Full Council with the cabinet member for Cabinet Member for Health
and Wellbeing having Statutory housing responsibilities where not covered by other portfolios or District committees.

Housing Liaison Boards and Local Housing Management Services, including Tenant Participation/Resident Engagement, and
Estate Management will be devolved to the District Committees.

OK

thought you wanted more localism, this is an idea, it has been months in the making with council officials.

afraid of actually devolving decisions downwards. It appears this is an attempt to have strategic decisions in cabinet and the day to day devolved ...

you should be applauding that and ensuring it works.

or of course your localism claim was not that at all but centralisation under a mayor ?

A long standing problem for Birmingham City Council has been the way that directorates have operated as individual fiefdoms with very little cross over between them. Unfortunately the residents of Birmingham steadfastly refused to compartmentalise their lives and reorganise themselves to be compatible with the Council.

For a local authority to provide effective services to people and families it needs to take a holistic view of the way that people access services, this tends to mean seeing the Council as a single point of services rather than distinct silos.

This is also why the business transformation programme was unable to control the rampant increase in costs though, ironically, monolithic directorates were one of the things that it was meant to address (the single contact number being an expression of this).

It will be interesting to see how a more generalist approach across the Council will resist the urge to slip into more central control given the apparent intention for a more localist approach.

It sounds like it is going in the right direction but I think it will meet resistance from an organisation that is understandably suspicious of change given recent history.

indeed Daz but it is different features which is the thing

After the election promises to focus on Vulnerable Children, seems strange to scrap the Vulnerable Childrens' Committee. Maybe someone could explain how this helps increase the focus please?

Yes, Barnard, but there was an 'Education and Children's Committee' before, so it doesn't sound like increasing the focus on Vulnerable Children as promised?

Clearly much more clarification is needed but this is a refreshing cross area look, lets see if it works as a new model for local govt

I know that in different circumstances Ian would be describing this as an 'unnecessary top-down reorganisation'. The cynic in me is thinking that this is at least in part motivated by Albert wanting to reduce his inner circle to the number of the bus route.

Somethimg has gone wrong here. Dominic has made an amusing joke. An eight memberr cabinet being Albert's Inner Circle. Yes. Did someone put something in the Maltese water?

As you ought to be aware from my comments elsewhere in response to Gareth's early mayoral enthusiasms, I voted no to a mayor, so your comments there are inaccurate. I did not say that placing the day-to-day responsibilities for housing with the "districts" was a bad idea. Local responsiveness is likely to be better than central, as long as the money follows the responsibility (and this is an important point). The worry I have is around those areas that need a single point of overview. Managing the repairs contracts, for example. Does this rest with the Health Cabinet Member, or with the Contracts Cabinet Member? Or is it with the Districts? Will the repairs companies find it "easier" (for them) to deal with the Districts, or, if it stays central, with the potentially internally confusing set-up as describe by Barnard.

PS - well done, Barnard, you managed to extract more than I could on this, but I'd never have considered looking under the Health responsibilities for Housing!

Does MM have a point?

Noone taking responsibility for arts, sports and culture?

I didn't always agree with MM, and I am a left leaning Labour voter, so I'm not supporting MM on party political lines.

But really - noone responsible for arts, sportss and culture? Is this a good thing??

Depends where each of these are distributed - sports should come under Health & Wellbeing but the other two headings Development, Jobs & Skills?

Abolishing departments, combining roles, exploring new services, ignoring basic ones, pointless relabelling, centralising some functions, decentralising others, creating new layers of bureaucracy, these changes appear to be trying to do about ten things at once.

Wtf is a Districts and Public Engagement Committee?

And how does a Birmingham Economy & Jobs Committee replace housing?

It feels like what might happen if you asked a bunch of people what they wanted to do without any central co-ordination or oversight.

Can anyone even explain the strategy, if there is one?

It looks like a recipe for serious confusion at best and total chaos at worst.

Ian Ward fails to cope with councillor duties in Shard End... I fail to see how he can succeed with his proposed workload.

Dominator, don't bring Shard End into it, the result was about 2032 for Labour, without a Lib Dem candidate standing, this ward is overwhelmingly white working class and should have turned out in the thousands and thousands to vote Labour, it didn't and has not done so in recent years, WHY?