Birmingham City Council - Divide and Rule

Were you as shocked as I was, to hear the news recently that Birmingham City Council is proposing to outsource jobs to India, where labour costs are lower than Birmingham? Yes, local authorities need to make financial savings, and this is bound to involve some radical re-thinking about the way they provide services. But a local authority isn't just another employer. We all grumble about banks and phone companies setting up call centres in Mumbai, but ultimately, as customers, we can vote with our feet and look for a supplier that responds to our demand for a more local operation. If the people of Birmingham are displeased with the way their council is moving jobs offshore, they can't pick another local authority, except by moving house.

Equally, if the council, which is voted for by and answerable to the people of Birmingham, is not a champion of the skills and abilities of the local workforce, who will be? There must be a more holistic way of valuing jobs than just the cost of the workers' wage packets. 

To add some more context to their proposals, this council has 11 officers earning more than £100,000, and a chief executive, Stephen Hughes, who is paid more than £200,000. No doubt they are well practised in justifying the need to pay such sums to themselves for the difficult job they do, finding other ways to cut budgets.

Birmingham City Council has a genius for coming up with money-saving measures that generate lots of publicity: remember their idea about cutting the amount of support provided for social care for people with disabilities?

That proposal was ruled unlawful in April, when judges found that the Birmingham plans contravened Section 49a of the Disability Discrimination Act. They had hoped to save £17.5 million this year, by cutting funding to some 4000 individuals with "substantial" needs. Their decision was reached without undertaking proper consultation beforehand, and without considering making cuts to alternative parts of their budget or putting up council tax instead.

Is it overly cynical to imagine that some council bean-counter saw the idea of making Birmingham employees redundant, once they had trained someone in India to do their job, as a wonderful riposte to the suggestion that they should have looked at other ways of saving money, before proposing to withdraw the social care lifeline from so many people with significant disabilities? Normally speaking, Unite, the trade union which represents the public sector workers whose jobs would be lost, is a champion of the rights of people with disabilities, but if members' jobs are pitted against money for social care, the former are bound to take precedence.

"Divide and rule" is a precept that has proved its worth over centuries. Is this just another example?

Charities shouldn't need to pay huge salaries

Everybody seems to be looking over their shoulder at everybody else's pay packet at the moment, and I've been inspired to join in, having read about the number of charity bosses being paid large six-figure salaries. The trade union Unite, which represents 60,000 people working in the not-for-profit sector, has highlighted examples such as Age Concern, Anchor Trust and Riverside Housing Group, where the chief executive's salary is more than the £197,000 earned annually by the Prime Minister.

They are concerned that over-generous remuneration is corrupting the ethos of the charity sector. The justification from apologists for those in receipt of these big salaries is that you need to pay a lot to somebody who is running a complex business, and that they could in any case earn even more in other areas.

Which appears to me to contain an inherent contradiction. If money really is the only motivator, as they seem to be suggesting, then everybody will no doubt rush off to become a big cheese in finance, where obscenely big pay packets are still de rigueur, in spite of the desperate necessity for taxpayer support just a few months ago. In reality, though, most people evaluate their employment on a range of measures, one of the most important of which (once you are fortunate enough to be earning enough to cover your outgoings) is the amount of satisfaction gained from doing the job. Being privileged to work at something where what you do really makes a difference to other people's lives should weigh considerably more than knowing that you are at the top of the premiership when it comes to earning power. 

So I don't think charities need to beguile potential chief execs with huge pay packets - they are actually offering something much more important, or should be, if they are true to the charitable purposes for which they were first established. On the other hand, if charities really have become just another big business as I suggested in an earlier blog posting, and are more focused on commercial activities than philanthropy, then perhaps they will need to offer pay packets like big businesses, competing for the services of people who do only measure their success in terms of money. Because they will have lost their unique appeal, and that will be a loss for all of us.