Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from £20 million to around £100 million ($125.5 million). Contributing to the publication of a legal Section 114 Notice, which says the £3.4 billion ($4.3 billion) revenue …
I think this court action has been bumbling along for somewhere in the region of a decade. Why no mitigating savings?
Answering my own question, I suppose it is more sensible for the council to suddenly say we're broke and stick it to the Tories.
Was it Birmingham ten years ago or is my memory wrong?
"I think this court action has been bumbling along for somewhere in the region of a decade. Why no mitigating savings?"
All local authorities have seen their responsibilities increase without a commensurate increae in funding, although Birmingham CC is like most "safe" councils a victim of its own incompetence, and probably a belief that they were too big to fail and would be bailed out by government.
However, somebody should be asking why Birmingham CC sold the NEC and NIA for £307m in 2015 to go towards the equal pay settlement, and three years later the private equity buyer flipped it for around £800m. If the council hadn't been so incompetent in disposing of those assets, they'd have had the money to entirely cover the equal pay liabilities at that time rather than finance them from borrowing that it couldn't sustain.
Birmingham City Council's answer to overwhelming debt is like that of an adict to drugs or gambling --- take other people's property.
Ladywood is to the SW of the city centre, within the ring road. In the 1860s it was densely built up with Back-to-Back (slum) housing. My grandfather was born one in 1902.
The City Council inflicted its first "re-generation" on Ladywood in the 1960s. The back-to-backs and the whole community of business, pubs, schools, etc were demolished, leaving a wasteland. Ugly concrete tower blocks and 4-storey maisonettes were built to replace them. But only a fraction of the 15,000 residents were rehoused there.
The second re-generation was done in the 1990s. Miraculously, that time, the City Council were persuaded to involve the local people in the planning process. Joe Holyoak was the architectural advisor. My house was built in 1992, as part of a development advertised to "professionals".
Now there is a third "re-generation". The cabal who have planned this, in secret, in bed with a huge developer have led the people of the rest of Birmingham t believe that the 1960s tower blocks are typical of Ladywood. (In fact, the plan is to keep them, because people in houses with gardens are criminals.)
"Phase One" of the "re-generation" is compulsory purchase and demolition of exactly the area that actually benefitted in the 1960s and is as good as anywhere else in Birmingham (or anywhere).
Why? Because it is mainly privately owned. It is a sweetener to the developer, in the hope they will then build new tower blocks to replace the ugly Council maisonettes. But no developer in their right mind would demolish these houses. Thy will just give them a lick of paint, cram in some extra ones and re-sell them at twice the price for which they were stolen from the original owners.
If you live in Birmingham, please write to your Ward Councillor to tell them to stop this and concentrate on the debt caused by failing to pay women equally.
We had the money to host the Commonwealth games too, and the Wealdstone Raider was on about Birmingham hosting it again because Alberta said they couldn't afford it.
A lot of money has been spaffed up the wall. The council is far too big really and must be cut down in to smaller areas (like Manchester and London are). But it's good to know the reason the council haven't been out to fix my mom's fence that was broken by a council tenant 12 months ago is because they just don't have the cash to do it.
"The council is far too big really and must be cut down in to smaller areas"
The trouble with that, is that it is less efficient staffing wise. Hence why unitary authorities were created, so as to cut down on mismanagement of HR.
What is actually needed are leaders and managers who are well versed in corporate management and who can make rational and common sense decisions BEFORE spaffing the money up the wall on over-priced and mostly unachievable projects...either due to certain peoples need for recognition in the history books or simply because said councillors are too dumb to realise they are in over their heads and just enjoy being in the limelight when they actually get around to making a decision !!
… and tearing it apart will just replicate issues - many small councils have train-wreck ERP projects - though that’s small beer here in the. Of scheme of things:
The profligate WMCA (West midlands combined Authority) BCC are part of under Tory Major Andy Street is another overlapping/compounding cog in this machine.
Also 13 Years of UK Conservative forced austerity on local councils also needs a mention here.
Maybe Birm airport and other assets will have to be sold. At least they aren’t Thurrock or Woking other councils massively in a self-made debt shithole. Read the Guardian Article for a better explanation..
https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/05/birmingham-city-council-what-went-wrong-what-happens-next
Collapsing schools, collapsing economy, collapsing prospects, collapsing councils. Those fuckers have been in charge since 2010. Thirteen years of chronic mismanagement, austerity, and cutbacks.
Whatever is going wrong NOW, the Tories have to own it. They didn't just inherit a Broken Britain in a general election, they've been buggering it up for the past decade and a third. This is on them.
So, yes, it's the Tories' fault.
They say you get the politicians you deserve.
There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"
The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.
I might point out that Birmingham City Council are (and have been for a long time) a majority Labour run council.
In the past, the different politics of Birmingham City Council and various Tory governments have collided. I remember some time back in the '90s when the Tories were putting caps on local government finances to try to make councils more efficient (local governments at the time were fond of just plugging their financial deficits by raising the rates and Council Tax), and Birmingham ignored the cap, and continued to post budgets that breached the rules, and ended up with significant penalties.
Birmingham City Council has a long history of poor financial management going back decades.
Probably going to follow: Kirklees - Labour
That monstrosity was the product of the 1974 reform of local government. It welded together two local authorities which had no common history and named the result after a place that's actually in neighbouring Calderdale.
One of this year's gems has been to spenf goodness-knows what building out this corner to create a one-way, yes one-way, cycle lane about 10 metres long. It will probably last until the awkward turn into Acre Lane causes an accident. Or more likely well beyond the point when it causes several accidents. I suppose it contributes to some target for length of cycle lane.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5916726,-1.8384101,3a,75y,99.83h,91.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgsGiaMKCmb2M0QWNsv9J6Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu
There are about 100,000 people in the Woking Council area, so that's a mere £26,000 each for them to stump up. After all, they elected the idiots and wouldn't have returned the money if the investments had turned out to be profitable. A one-off 10% wealth tax on the value of houses should cover it, more or less.
Yes, either through letting their grifting mates rip off their tax payer, or general incompetence; or gross incompetence in letting Labour win an election and letting their grifting mates rip off the tax payer or exercise their own general incompetence.
For LibDem/Green/etc councils - well they might as well take the blame for that as well.
I used to live in a council district that had one of the lowest council taxes in the country and one of the largest per capita savings.
Piss poor manglement by the county council and county town borough council brought them to bankruptcy.
Government handlers were brought in and decided that unitary status was the answer and would provide so many cost savings to the tax payers.
Guess what? My district council (and another) were linked with the borough which paid off most of their debts with the savings in the two districts and the council tax has gone up considerably, with fewer services in the rural areas.
Makes me really angry having worked in local government for years to see the waste. Managers that are just plain shit, directors that want "their vision" put in place, fuck the cost, councilors that are lied to and/or themselves are liars, contracts not put out to tender but instead bought in on the quiet as they are known by the new director and a chief exec (now gone to be a crook elsewhere) that was covering up the fuck up with asbestos.
Yet us lower down staff, sneeze incorrectly and get fired.
The Reg article is largely factually wrong. The Oraclebtrain wreck is only partly the issue. I would suggest they revoke it, apolohiae and have another go.
Oracle, Pay Aettlememngs where they knowingly broke the law for the last 50 years and numerous other issues like a general lack of control, multiple Social Care crises and inadequate statutory services, a City that’s been dug ip for 2 decades with a development master plan - vastly overrunning capital projects, successfully running other people events (2022 Commonwealth games after Durban pulled out)…. etc
A piss poor ainhke cause fallacy article.
More likely angry-posting on a mobile where fingers are generally too big for the on-screen keyboard and rapid mashing ends up with bad mis-typed words/letter strings.
I've made that mistake before, but I tend to read my ramblings back to myself first to make sure I don't post unrecognisable letter-salad. :-)
apolohiae Aettlememngs ainhke
I was wondering what colourful meanings might attach to this dialect vocabulary. I was imagining, however unlikely, "Aettlememngs" was a brummy word for poor exploited or abused women.
Likewise hazarded:
"Ainhke" - n. a puff piece lit. full of wind.
"Apolohaie" - vt. to insert where the sun doesn't shine.
“A great article discussing one of the underlying reasons. It is interesting that the sky news article doesn't mention the fleecing by Oracle at all!”
Normally I’d say the clue is that it’s Sky News………but unless my brain is addled aren’t BskyB an Oracle Customer? I know they’ve advertised for Oracle devs in the past.
"What is it with governments, national or local? How do they bollox it so often?"
Simpy because most politicians and councillors are "normal people" (before they were elected to office) and most likely were embued with few actual management or decision making skills, as they were elected based on their political leanings and not their actual capabilities.
The resulting chaos is due to their leaders also being clueless and hence they buy in "consultants and advisors" who generally are not accountable to the electorate.
This can go one of two ways and mostly it's not the right way.
"Simpy because most politicians and councillors are "normal people" (before they were elected to office) and most likely were embued with few actual management or decision making skills"
On the contrary, normal people might ask a few sensible questions, and challenge daft ideas before they spiral out of control. The political classes of this country are a special breed of blind, deaf, unreasoning and talentless incompetence, existing in an echo chamber formed entirely of their own party's accolytes.
"The political classes of this country are a special breed of blind, deaf, unreasoning and talentless incompetence"
I would suggest that this is the one reason why very few people actually attempt to become elected...as they are too stupid to actually appeal enough to the electorate, so as to be elected.
That then leaves the door wide open for "career politicians" who toe the party line and simply do very little except to pay homage to their illustrious leaders (so that they can keep their cushy jobs at the next election).
> That then leaves the door wide open for "career politicians" who toe the party line and simply do very little except to pay homage to their illustrious leaders.
That's a little harsh. Many also manage to vote through lucrative development planning applications for land owned by themselves, their families or mates. Or sell off council land to their mates on the cheap. Or otherwise shovel bucketfuls of taxpayer cash to cronies... see the Rotten Boroughs column of Private Eye, passim, ad nauseum.
Back in 1989 (showing my age!) I took an option on an old wharf warehouse building and tried to get planning permission to change into flats. Turned down flatly by the local district council and told there was no way it could ever be converted. I withdrew my option on the building.
1 year later I find that it is being converted and so checked into it. It had been bought and planning permission obtained (on what looked like an exact copy of my plans) by one of the district councillors.
Apparently, I could only get this looked into on the grounds that they lied to me that it could never get planning permission and then it was granted to a councillor with my plans, by spending around 8 times my annual salary trying to get a judicial review.
Just in it for themselves, the bastards!
I know a number of people who volunteer in parish councils, town councils and so on as their contribution to a functioning democracy. They genuinely do it out of a willingness to serve. I count as friends in this category both Tory and Labour councillors. But it's hard to get elected without a party ticket of some kind. There are a few independents in local government, but most have affiliated themselves with a party rosette of one kind or another.
Those genuine people who just want to get the paths weeded and timely dustbin collections, through their party allegiances, can also be the levers through others get into higher office.
In all walks of life, the Dunning-Kruger effects (or if you prefer, the Peter Principle) gets us all in the end.
On the flip side of the coin - YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE JACKIE WEAVER - as a delightful demonstration of the enjoyment that can be had in eavesdropping in on little local parish councils and the power plays that go on within (and, sadly, tend to be more obstructive than constructive).
Ex Chairman of a Parish Council. There were no political affiliations in my council, over all the years that I was involved.
We were the "pillars of the community" trying to do right by what our parishioners wanted.
We used to work with the district council and things tended to amicable.
Then the district council was replaced with a unitary, who changed rules without informing us and generally tried to dump on us from a great height (trying to pass responsibilities down to us, but providing no extra money for it).
That was enough - I was no longer willing to spend hours trawling through the obscure depths of their website to find out what they had changed this week and not told us about - and resigned.
Yes the political affiliation of the layer above us changed, but I think that the problem was that the good people who used to be in the districts, who we could work with, were replaced with the aresholes from the old county and borough councils, who got themselves into huge financial and legal trouble and caused the imposition of unitary status in the first place.
To be honest, not many people actually want to be politicians, or want to be elected.
Fewer still of the ones who want to be elected can be relied upon not to do something stupid, or say something that can be construed to be some sort of *-ist.
Having whittled the field down to the last 10% or so, few of the remainder have any actual management talent. Actual managerial talent is rare, for it to be accompanied by brains is rarer still. The few people who meet these criteria can generally find themselves much more gainful employment in commerce rather than in politics, and thus most decent managerial brains are unavailable for politics.
It's a really unattractive job. First of all, you have to spend years of doing crap like pushing leaflets through letterboxes, then spending time fighting campaigns that you will lose just to show that you work hard. Then you get selected for a marginal seat. But if you time it wrong, you just lose because your party is not in order. Then you become an MP where most of your day is just voting with the party, doing some trivial nonsense in select committees. Your personal life is considered as public record. Voters will bother you for all sorts of nonsense. And in 5 years you could be redundant and out of a job for a decade.
Why would you do that rather than working in medicine, software or engineering?
"You could argue that the national government during WW2 was competent - in looking after the population at least. Prior to that, you might have to look at the House of York's tenure during the Wars of the Roses."
I'd argue for Neville Chamberlain, coincidentally a Brummie politician. Focused on some useful social improvements on the domestic front, and internationally bought time by signing the Munich Agreement whilst committing to rearming Britain (that was of course vigorously opposed by the Labour party) . Everybody decries Munich as pacifism, but the reality that Chamberlain was acutely aware of was the pitiful strength of Britain's armed forces at the start of 1938. In February 1938, the RAF for example had 16 Hurricanes and precisely no Spitfires. The home defence radar systems were still being built and wouldn't be properly integrated to air defence control for another year. If Britain had declared war then, history would have been rather different.
I think that is a little unfair. In my experience, at least 80% of listed companies seem to have crap IT strategy (just think of a few yourself: BA comes to mind straight away). Technology strategy is really critical, and is really tough, even for professionals. A great CIO is at least as rare as a great CEO - maybe rarer because for a CIO there is no substitute for well-above-average strategic thinking combined with a full grasp of details, and apparently no way to get useful support from consultants.
The country really needs the level of competance of consultants to improve. There is no excuse for the crap the big consultancy firms provide in exchange for their ridiculous fees.
>> The country really needs the level of competence of consultants to improve
The problem is they are only out to make some money from it, they are usually long gone when the manure hits the fan.
The real issue is that mistakes like this are never learnt from....next week/month/year is will be someone else screwing up in the same way....
Simple solution, anyone who actively puts themselves forward for election should be banned from doing so. It just proves they have nothing better to do with their time as a result of not having any actual competencies they can call upon to make their way independently in the world.
Make it like jury duty. Select people at random and pop them into these roles for 6 months or a year at a time. They can make the arbitrary decisions just as effectively. Select them from another part of the country to avoid the cronyism.
It can't be any worse can it?
(Only half joking...)
《Make it like jury duty. Select people at random and pop them into these roles for 6 months or a year at a time.》
I would make it 10 years with decent pay and support staff. Every two years the longest serving 20% retire and are replaced so you have continuity. Silly enough that it might work and is certainly statistically more representative than the current beauty pagents. As far as I can see even replacing the current UK government with the inmates of Bedlam would have to be a marked improvement.
Sadly, it probably comes from the fact that competent people rarely want to work for the government. It used to be that civil servant was a very respectable career, and the job security was attractive enough for top minds to devote their life to working for the community. I'm not sure if this cachet is what led to low pay, but one way or another you can now have a much better life working for a private company, so a lot of the people working for the government are those who couldn't get a job anywhere else.
A good society should pay its civil servants well. This is a true investment for the future. Along with teachers, they truly create tomorrow's quality of life.
Sometimes willingly with overlapping Quango’s - step forward the double-edged sword of Devolved English Metropolitan Mayors - who overlap massively with councils but get vast swathes of money/grants/development aid that would previously have come to the council and spend it on some crazy schemes.
I've downvoted you. Can you tell me how you differentiate Civil Service and local government? In both cases funded by the tax payer and supposed to be working for the benefit of their society (I don't care if its the nation as a whole or a city or a geographical area which is why I used society). Is it purely a matter of scale or what?
"Can you tell me how you differentiate Civil Service and local government? In both cases funded by the tax payer and supposed to be working for the benefit of their society (I don't care if its the nation as a whole or a city or a geographical area which is why I used society). "
I'm a civil servant, albeit with 30+ years experience in the private sector. I can assure you that I do not work for the benefit of society. I have a code of conduct set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act of 2010, which amongst other things requires that all civil servants "serve the government, whatever its political persuasion, to the best of your ability in a way which maintains political impartiality and is in line with the requirements of this code, no matter what your own political beliefs are". And I do that day in day out. No matter how stupid, ill informed, short sighted, misguided, ill intended, reckless, or doomed-to-failure a politician's idea is, I work to implement their will. Before decisions are made, I do my utmost to provide them with the salient facts based on evidence and impartial analysis, if they choose to set rules that for example let them grant contracts for PPE to their friends or their local pub's landlord, then it's my job and that of my colleagues to implement their rules.
"-- A good society should pay its civil servants well. --
Agreed, but not so many of them."
That may be so, but compared to the sort of nations that are generally perceived to have less incompetent government, you'll find our public sector workforce is smaller pro-rata, and worse paid (data available via OECD "Government at a Glance" series), and substantially less well paid than equivalent roles in the private sector. IT, project management, procurement are obvious examples where the public sector doesn't pay enough, but it's true across most roles. There's a tendency for those outside the public sector to blame the adminstrators for sloth, the reality is that democracy (and any change) is slowly achioeved because there's due process, and because of endless churn amongst ministers - look at the hopless mediocrtiies we've had for years drifting from ministership to ministership, knowing nothing, learning nothing, messing things up and drifting on to the next gig. With the UK's government intentionally split between executive (politicians) and adminstrators (all public servants), every decision no matter how trivial has to go up to ministers, or has to be taken within a framework of rules they have approved. At a local level the same is true - Birmingham council's professionals will have seen this coming and would have known what needed to be done, but they didn't make any decisions, those all sit with the elected members.
Currently there's massive problems of recruitment and retention, high internal turnover, all caused by political decisions around pay. In some parts of the public sector vacancies against established strength are around 25%, menaing things are not done at all, or done much more slowly, or to a lower standard. Factor in the quality of politicians and the plethora of stupid "grand gesture" decisions like HS2, or avoidance of decisions on say nuclear power or housing, and you can perhaps appreciate that it's a Cat in the Hat style mess. Neither the current shower, or the shower-in-waiting have any answers, it's a uniparty of ineptitude and refusal to address the difficult but important, as well as refusal to take responsibility. Far better to brief the Daily Vile that all problems are caused by public employees working from home than address issues like the creaking railway system, underinvested road network, or the botched efforts to decarbonise the energy sector.
Maybe it's in part at least down to the pay distribution. The workers at the bottom of the heap doing the actual hands-on work on statutory minimum or worse, outsourced to organisations that bill the local authority twice the hourly rate they pay the workers. How motivated are they to do a good job? And when it all goes wrong, on the occasions where the executives, earning upward of 10 times as much, are actually held liable for their organisation's failures, they depart with a golden parachute and their "years of experience" is qualification for a similar job elsewhere. So they too have no motivation to manage the organisation competently.
I agree about the outsourcing.
I started my working career at a local council, and at the time, almost all work was carried out by council employed people. When councils were forced to bid for their own work against outside suppliers (so-called DLO schemes), ultimately their own operations were undercut by outside suppliers (often unfairly by the outside suppliers bidding below cost), and as a result they lost the ability to bring work back in, as they had to make the workers they previously employed redundant, and thus lost any chance of getting the work back any time in the future.
Once the council's were unable to do the work themselves, they were opened up to price gouging by their suppliers!
The problem is top down as always....
It appears at the top of the Civil Service you get obscenely rewarded, a job for life, a gold-plated pension and no accountability whatsoever. When you screw up big time there's an enquiry funded by the taxpayer which is a complete whitewash. The key summary is "yes, we made a mistake, we are deeply sorry, we know we have to do better, lessons have been learned..." and then on we go. If you are high enough in the pyramid and manage to screw up on a consistent basis you can eventually be sure of an honour in the New Years List...
Pay them well for what? Incompetence?
The level of incompetence among the teaching profession is astounding! Education has become the prime example of the old adage "Those who can do, those who can't teach!" It is widely known here in the US that when young people go into Uni and start failing out of their chosen major, the gravitate into Education.
Re: public service, at least in the US it is nearly impossible to fire someone in public service no matter how much they screw up! Between Civil Service laws meant to protect them ans the Civil Service Unions you need to commit a felony to even be considered for termination.
I have no issue with paying people what they are worth, but paying people more just because they occupy a certain position or profession with no accountability is just more socialistic equity nonsense.
Re: Elected Officials, maybe if your decision that costs the tax payer billions, or (as we see in the US) costs private businesses their livelihood due to lack of enforcing the law, resulted in jail time, we would see these people put more care into their decision making.
"I'm not sure if this cachet is what led to low pay"
I think the root of the problem is that whenever economics push a government into a policy of pay restraint the only place they can actually implement that is in the public sector which progressively slips further back in pay which naturally gets reflected in who they can recruit.
When we built the predecessor SAP solution it was not simple but we did make it work and not 400% over budget while late, too.
Understandable that BCC would choose a non SAP solution if they were not aware of Fiori UI which is a revolution in UX, and didn't understand the S/4 Conversation opportunity to return to Standard processes wherever possible.
Fundamentally the competence of implementation partners is key as well as making informed decisions.
Without the discipline to Fit to Standard directed from the top the mistake of excessive customising would just be repeated with woeful risk and total cost of ownership results.
A sad waste of public funds and fully avoidable .
I have said this before -- but here we go again.
Local Government accounting is not the same as normal company accounting.
All spending must be traceable to a "vote in chambers" and to the individual members who voted for it.
On top of this many of the employees have legal powers, obligations and liabilities. Some can take away your children, order your house to be demolished, shutdown your business etc. etc.
So HR in local government is vastly different from any other organisation.
So Oracle foisted on them a bog standard ERP system designed for a company that bought stuff, manufactured other stuff and sold it.
Its also possible that many of the other screw ups could have been avoided if they had a working accounting and HR system.
And Birmingham Council is somehow unique among all councils in the UK, Europe or the world in this ?
We have local government associations who provide guidance, advise and allow councils to knowledge share precisely so they aren't out there completely in uncharted territory buying technology they dont have a hope of understanding themselves.
I refuse to believe that Oracle somehow foisted a completely unknown system, with unknown limitations on them.
It is more likely instead that Birmingham council requested a system that they knew they'd have to modify (modernise ?) their processes to use, but then got stuck in the perennially expensive mode of trying to fit their existing work practises into it, probably because their workers didn't like the change, to a system that has had to be heavily modified to cope with it.
Unfortunately professional services and consultancy will always do what the customer asks, even if the customer is wrong and it costs them many millions more in the long run
Existing work practices are mostly legal requirements set down in 1820, and processes have been updated over the course of 200 years to comply with existing laws on a sporadic basis with extra bits added here and there. Because of an innate horror of adjusting processes, nobody actually knows which bits are being done for what reason, and none of the "legal requirements" that have been put in have ever been removed when they are completely obsolete and pointless.
So nobody actually knows why they are doing something, or what it might affect if they change it.
In other words, it's an ill managed shambles and digitalising it highlights the issues.
A good way of keeping on top of this would be to require each rule, working practice or whatever to have a rationale - we do it this way because it's required in Act so-and-so or we don't do it that way because it would fail to deal with this and that. It would provide a basis for reviewing practices against changing legal or regulatory environments and a count for manglers who want to impose their own bright ideas.
This is why I keep pushing for updates to our standing orders to be phrased "As per the 2010 Local Government Act, the Town Council shall...." etc. Otherwise, most of our standing orders look like we've written them ourselves and are things we can chose to change to whatever we want.
"And Birmingham Council is somehow unique among all councils in the UK, Europe or the world in this ?"
Probably in size. But there ought to be a good business in providing a system which has been designed from the ground up to deal with local government requirements*. Unfortunately there's a better business in flogging one-off customisations of something that wasn't designed for that purpose.
* At worst a system designed for local governemnt should require less customisation where the assumption fails.
《What is it with governments, national or local? How do they bollox it so often? This looked like the win was easy for Oracle but the challenge is to come up with the goods.》
One observation I would make is that the business processes of many public entities are often irrational verging on insane.
Rather than reforming or replacing those processes with some sort of rational standardized practice that can be accommodated with off the shelf software they embark on a futile attempt to remodel the software to reflect their dysfunctional processes.
I don't doubt in this case both parties were equally capable upbolloxers.
Ah but that's such an unfashionable view, the commentards on this site generally seem to prefer Lib Dem and crap all over the Tories despite Lib Dems not having any real experience running a modern government, nor any sensible policies since they can promise what they like from the sidelines never having to deliver it. It matters not that Labour generally break the bank and make seriously bad economic decisions and revert to the socialist type of giving everything away. What goes on at Westminster is a world away from local authorities and their work to survive and keep going despite what some Muppets who are a disgrace to their respective parties down in the bubble are up to. There's Conservative values and Socialist values that we constantly bounce between in this country regardless of how the centre ground is fought, and we are much the worse for flip flopping from one to the other everytime the floating voters get bored.
Both seem unaware that Northamptonshire (Con), Thurrock (Con), Woking (Con), Croydon (Con) have gone under. Also Kent (Con) and Hamptonshire (Con) are about to go under.
Also both seem unaware as to how councils are funded.
Anyway, you may now return to praising the Tory's exemplary experience in running a modern government. Hope you don't mind lumps of concrete falling on your offspring's head.
"Hope you don't mind lumps of concrete falling on your offspring's head."
Or on your relative, who is in hospital - a hospital near my workplace is thought to have about 60% of it's buildings made from RAAC, and yet it is still open...but the entire place will need to be bulldosed and replaced piece by piece, which will take years...and there's nowhere nearby to site temporary buildings.
Also:
Maybe your apartment building going up in flames...
Or your local beach being covered in sewage...
Or your roads being criss-crossed with pot-holes...
oh and how about being charged to drive your vehicle into your local town, though why you would want to do that god only knows as many shops have or are closed down and some have moved to out of town retail parks...thereby depriving the local council of more business rates and causing funding gaps.
In the cunning plan of successive governments, the shire counties have been starved of central government funding so that the inner cities can get lots more just to keep them happy.
My own county (Hampshire) gets very little money from Westminster when compared on a per capita basis to inner cities/unitary authorities.
The result is that in these counties/districts, services have been axed. If they aren't then they are being funded out of reserves which is madness.
I stood for election as a local councilor in 2015/2016. I was elected but as soon as I saw the books, I knew that we were fighting a lost cause. We had an across the board 12% cut in funding right at a time when we needed more money for critical services. I didn't stand for re-election.
Thats how it goes in UK local government, all the responsibility none of the power.
Every year Westminster foists a whole load of new obligations on them and then cuts the budget.
If they try to make up the shortfall by increasing local taxes ( rates ) the voters complain and businesses leave for the greener pastures outside town and the high streets die.
If you think Hampshire is bad, you ought to look at Somerset, where much of the local funding for policing ends up in Bristol, and you now don't see police in the rural environment at all, and NHS spending gets concentrated in two hospitals that are meant to serve the whole (large) county.
It;s only going to get worse, as the county now has a single unified local and county council which will prioritise the large towns.
Already we see the streets not being swept, leading to grass growing out of almost all of the gutters of the residential roads, and even on the roads themselves outside of Taunton, Bridgwater and Yeovil.
Hampshire has unclassified (not motorway, A or B roads) better than many of the main A-roads in Somerset.
I will raise you with Northamptonshire.
Corby in North Northants and Northampton in West Northants had old borough councils that were bailed out by the rural districts when they were made into the 2 unitaries, but they still snaffle the vast majority of all spending. And council tax across the unitaries have gone up steeply to fund the towns at the expense of the (schools and bins only) rural spending. (Yes I know that social care is a legal requirement, but they get around that by providing it all in the towns.)
"There's Conservative values and Socialist values that we constantly bounce between in this country regardless of how the centre ground is fought, and we are much the worse for flip flopping from one to the other everytime the floating voters get bored."
The same happens in the USA, between Republicans and Democrats...
At least with dictatorships, there's usually only ONE person to blame, whereas in a typical two party system, the flip-flopping means the incumbent party almost always blames the previous incumbents.
Except the Conservatives aren't conservative, and Labour aren't socialist. They are both just minor variations on the globalist, corporatist cadre which serves its own interests and that of its paymasters (and those who will give the MPs some nice, well-paid non-exec directorships when they retire from parliament, or get booted out at an election).
It's shame you chose to reiterate Tory propaganda instead of the facts. Fact is, every Tory government has broken the bank on every occasion they have been in office and Labour have always balanced the books. Yes, they presided over a disastrous period a lifetime ago as they tried to stimulate the economy and keep many old industries ticking along, but that is well and truly last century, and outweighed by the numerous shambolic Tory deficits that have happened since.
So I was dreaming when Dennis Healey went cap in hand to the IMF almost four years after coming to power in 1974? When Maggie T took over the coffers were empty.
Yeah, Labour are good at balancing the books.
Yeah, it still hurts that we were limited to a pay rise of £6.00 per week.
Not the first time a labour chancellor was mislead, in 70 they were given poor figures around the election which were subsequently upgraded to a huge surplus. Of course the conservatives then created a huge trade deficit; over heating economy from tax cuts, the oil crisis, striking miners and the scene was set for the remainder of the 70's from the resultant inflation.
Never going to happe in a FPTP political system.
You can vote to keep your MP in
Or vote get them out.
But you can't effectively choose who replaces them because your best (only) chance is to vote the runner-up last time and hope the other parties know this and don't push their campaigns too hard (that's not a "pact" because they don't withdraw and you can still vote for them if you want to) so they don't split the oppostion vote and the same old MP gets in yet again
Sounds cynicl?
You want to do better?
TBYG
It is the "..and their mates" which I think is the main problem today.
The Tories have been reduced to complete and total corruption - doing whatever they can to release money out of the national coffers to give to their extremely rich (and almost entirely really foreign) donors. Sure, Labour also have a bunch of mates to feed but I, for one, would welcome a different set of corruption, to see how it goes. At least a higher proportion is likely to end up in British pockets, maybe even spread around more pockets.
It used to be that Labour was the idealistic choice but was so incompetent no one with any sense could vote for them. Now the Tories have levelled the playing field by showing even greater incompetence!
True. A large part of the problem circles around to the fact that governments (of pretty much any stripe) have spent years cutting revenue (i.e. taxes) and raising them to something sane is unpopular with The Man On The Street.
Of course for The Man On The Street raising the 45% rate (or even part of the 40% rate) isn't going to make much difference, but it will bring in a little more cash, which will make rebuilding schools/hospitals/the NHS/NATS/etc easier (if not easy). Still, I'm sure the 25% corporation tax rate couldn't possibly be adjusted without the country collapsing in dire despair!
Bizarrely, the corporation tax rate seems to have been over 40% in the 1980s (proprietor: M. Thatcher), which is obviously a misprint in the history books or something!
Taxes are now the highest since most people remember.
The problem is that government is spending money on private agencies charging tax payer premium rather than expanding in house developments.
Simple example - NHS can't pay nurse a market rate, but they can pay market rate to agency to supply a nurse.
Agencies are milking the tax payer dry and only answer is to raise taxes further.
Removing the cancer of IR35 loophole could put a stop to this.
And hve been.
For decades.
It's the same old scam.
"Oh we can't afford another permanent nurse (with their training and patient)"
Oh no
But you can afford an agency person at 4x the price to the NHS (not that the nurse will see anywhere near that).
"NHS can't pay nurse a market rate, but they can pay market rate to agency to supply a nurse."
And the agency charges at least double what they would have to pay to employ a nurse - even allowing for overheads. Been there, done that, seen the figures.
Bu then the agency bosses also have to make a living; they are not running a charity.
"... It has to be from thin air..."
Or are you so forgetful about the magic money tree??
This has been used so many times in the past and we got by, just about....after all, we are all still here, even if we're suffering the worst inflation in a generation.
What we actually need is to stop wasting money on white-elephant projects (HS2 anyone?) and actually invest in people (and not AI) so that they have worthwhile jobs and they can then pay some taxes and we start balancing the books.
For instance: The UK govt *could* have nationalised the shop chain Wilko, saving 14,000 jobs. And by keeping it open, I am sure that customers would flock back and support the business, thereby ensuring it's survival. But the UK govt failed it's people again.
After all, the UK govt did this for a number of UK banks !! But then that's just helping out the Tories mates, and ensuring the top knob people keep getting their annual bonuses. :-(
"For instance: The UK govt *could* have nationalised the shop chain Wilko, saving 14,000 jobs. And by keeping it open, I am sure that customers would flock back and support the business, thereby ensuring it's survival. But the UK govt failed it's people again."
I'm unsure whether I'm missing the sarcasm, or some loon is actually suggesting this would be a good idea.
> I'm unsure whether I'm missing the sarcasm, or some loon is actually suggesting this would be a good idea.
The punchline was on the following line, about the government bailing out the banks with taxpayers money, to keep them in business and protect jobs. No questions asked.
Wilko goes bust, you shop at an alternative such as B&M.
Your bank goes bust, you don't get your salary, your bills don't paid, and your mortgage gets bought from the administrator by some glorified loan shark who immediately doubles the interest rate. Saving the bank isn't about saving it's employees, it's about saving you.
Any bank in that distress would go into special measures and be supported by Babk of England. and you would still get paid, still have bills paid, money would still churn.
Eventually broken up like Northern Rock - but they would not be allowed to fail - almost regardless of money issues.
"Saving the bank isn't about saving it's employees, it's about saving you."
Yet this is exactly the case where the government should step in and take over (nationalise) the bank. That way it saves both employees and clients, but penalises the directors / owners who ran the bank into the ground. It can always be re-privatised later on. Or do what the Swiss did with Credit Suisse - skip the nationalise-reprivatise and directly arranged for a takeover by UBS. Again in this case, the losers are the people who invested in CS, but them's the breaks in the market if someone invests in an unsound company.
But what most governments did in banking crises was to bail out the banks by creating and loaning to them vast amounts to keep them afloat. If there is no jeopardy for directors or shareholders, why would their behaviour change?
The government bailed out the banks by forcing them to issue new shares which it bought, so the shareholders did lose out as their shares were diluted by a large amount (since the share price had dropped so low the banks had to issue a large amount of new shares). This is why the government ended up owning a large amount of shares in several banks.
I know the answer to this one.
It wouldn't.
Which is why this will happen again. The products will be called something else but the aim will be exactly the same.
Game the rules to allow a bigger proportion of the depositors funds to be leant out beyond the agreed safe level set by the bank regulators.
The Banking industry has successfully conned persuaded HM Treasury and the UK BoE that it is "Special" and "too big to fail," But George Soros noted "Capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without Hell."
In real businesses in receivership staff will be made redundant but business will continue to be done. The a receiver gets appointed (or the UK Govt handles this through the Office of the Official Receiver) and it's assets get auctioned off to cover its losses.
The best thing to improve UK banking stability in the future would be for the BoE to state clearly a) No more bailouts b)Begin active planning for what to do chop up a bank and sell off it's assets.
No BAU. The Board all go. All of them.
There will be another banking crisis within the lifetime of most Reg readers.
Bankers are that greedy and the rating agencies will help them do it.
Again.
"I'm sure the 25% corporation tax rate couldn't possibly be adjusted without the country collapsing in dire despair!"
IIRC just 6 years ago it was 17 or 18%, then was raised by 1% a year to 20 before getting bumped to 25. The combination of capital gains and dividend rates in combination with corporate rates means that for most company owners / investors, taxation is quite fair with respect to employees. It's only the giant international companies with armies of tax lawyers and multiple layers of nested company structures that have the capacity to play silly buggers with HMRC.
I'm pretty sure that 'back in the days' even personal taxation was quite higher, not sure about UK but in the US the highest tax band went as high as 90%
So true!
Just remember the note left by Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, when the last red rabble were booted out, "Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left"
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money!
Of course, we're doubly screwed nowadays since there's barely a cigarette paper between the ideologies of the two major parties.
Quote:
"Just remember the note left by Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, when the last red rabble were booted out, "Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left"
You are aware that this is a standard treasury joke left by both parties whenever they are booted out... except the daily wail seems to think that only labour leaves it
Another quote:
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money!"
Yupp it is... especially when the banks are bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions, and yet an industrial company (sheffield forgings) that makes vital bits of infrastructure cant get an 80 million loan from the government for some plant investment because aforementioned banks refuse to lend the money to a company that actually does something.
And if you're all wondering why it is that so many of our 'leaders' are completely and utterly useless, look up Pournelle's law of bureaucracy
We don’t have a competent government. Neither the incumbent or the party waiting to step in to have a go.
Never at any time I’m my life have I witnessed a decent term of government in the UK.
So when I hear these discussions where the two ideologies are pointing the finger at each other
I just think “shut the fuck up you bunch of gullible wankers”. Neither side has a leg to stand on.
"There's never been any "socialism" in UK."
How about the Labour party's postwar nationalisation programme, that left us with a string of monolithic, monopolistic poorly performing state enterprises? That was classic social ownership of the means of production. Worked our rather badly, I'm afraid, as have almost all forms of active state involvement in the economy in any country.
Is there a different form of socialism you'd prefer?
Party in control Years
Labour 1974–1975
No overall control 1975–1976
Conservative 1976–1979
No overall control 1979–1980
Labour 1980–1982
Conservative 1982–1984
Labour 1984–2003
No overall control 2003–2012
Labour 2012–present
So stop with your bullshit a go-Labour trolling.
Overlapping Tory Metropolitan WMCA Major in Andy Street, impacts of Tory Central Government forced austerity on council budgets
https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/05/birmingham-city-council-what-went-wrong-what-happens-next
As I see it the biggest problem on both sides of the pond is central government finding to local governments.
In most cases that funding comes with strings attaches, and it is not guaranteed. I for one would rather see an end to central government funding to local government, resulting in a lower national tax and then increase local taxes and keep that money local.
But that will never happen.
I wonder if there's something significant in "largest local authority in Europe". We've had an ongoing process of merging local councils into bigger and bigger entities, obstensively driven as cost saving, but does this just result in creating huge and unweildy behemoths that collapse under their own weight? North Yorkshire was unitaryised last year, pushed through as cost saving, but it's already £100 million in the red.
Yes.
It means they have enormous purchasing power and could (if they knew what they were doing) get very good deals on all sorts of stuff and generally be a huge source of good in the greater West Midlands area.
If they had a f**king clue what they were doing of course.
It also means that they become even further distanced from the people they are supposed to be serving - this is already noticeable in North Yorkshire, which is geographically the largest English county, has several distinct regions and only two towns of any size (Harrogate and Scarborough). A unitary authority is not a good model in this case, and as expected the "consultation" which approved it was designed to give the required answer.
"one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization.""
Well, colour me surprised!! Who could ever have thought that!! Oracle and SAP are both monolithic unflexible beasts, in theory cistomisable, in practice customisation requires half a decade of blood, sweat, tears, and complex ritual dances at full moon that require hundreds of (highly paid) consultants to get just right
> The council has made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support
Try this strategy: Stop giving Oracle money.
> In 2021, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison said Birmingham City Council was one of a number of successful wins
Just look at how much he won.
It may have been cheaper to hire a coding team and build it from the ground up, rather than buy a square peg for a round hole. At the very least include a penalty clause in the contract, so the cost goes down, not up, with every week they go past the deadline. If they won't do that, they have no faith in their product and you shouldn't buy it.
Even worse with local government pay scales. I was emailed a job vacancy three times over the summer:
Role: Senior Business Support Officer
Hours 37 hours per week
As a Senior Business Support Officer, you will have a wide range of responsibilities, playing a crucial role in providing day-to-day supervision and support to Business Support staff, ensuring efficient and effective financial, business process, document production, and excellent customer services support to both internal and external customers of Children's Services.
blah blah blah ... £11.59 per hour.
For the benefit of overseas readers, that's a smidgen over minimum wage.
I've worked in IT for a British multi-national company for the last 21 years. (in the US)
In the 00's I was offered the opportunity to apply for a position in the UK, after researching the cost of housing, cost of living, and the salary offered it would have been a 25% realized pay cut! I respectfully declined!
Y'all do not pay well for IT folks. Not at all!
I have always advocated for IT staff in large organizations to implement information systems from the ground up on a high-quality "ERP development and execution framework."
This strategy comes with premise.
1. A bunch of code is not even an ERP framework, but just a pile of software programs, such as those so-called "big ERP" written in Python or Java, that only a large number of experts can possibly maintain or extend.
2. The recipe for failure is to buy a German-made ERP framework that is so complex that few people in the world fully understand it. Even for a large number of programmers, building applications on this framework using ABAP, cousin of COBOL, would be nearly impossible within ten years. When I looked at IDES about ten years ago, its database contained 12,000 (obsolete? contradicting?) tables if my memory serves.
I have no idea what actually happened in this case, but I have observed how IT costs tend to mount up in both the public and private sectors.
The supplier bids low to win the contract, knowing that the customer really has no idea what their true requirements are. Every change is chargeable, and so the costs mount. Some changes are extremely expensive but turn out to be critical.
The IT f**kup first, althouth it has been discussed in other forums
Highly customised SAP installation (been in for > a decade) is decided to be replaced with vanilla Oracle system
No customomisation. So they can continue to load upgrades.
Not sure how much documenting of the exiisting system they did, or how much mapping of existing tasks to new Oracle system. Not nearly enough I'd say
Genius f**king plan.
In the process they also discovered a small number of people with empty 2nd homes, who they dropped a 3x basic council tax bill backdated to 2013 in some case, which was as far as the regs in the ammended version of the Local Govt Finance Act 1992 allowed them (From 0 debt to 10s of £1000s instantly. Yes that is legal. And there is no appeal process I'm told. Quite the Kafkesque nightmare in fact)
But the big one was the notion that the Equal Pay Act (1970) somehow didn't apply to them. :-(
They tried to sort that one out a decade ago.
F**ked that up and now it's come back to bite them again.
I say get the stupid f**king halfwitted Councillors (and the Senior staffers who advised them) who are still alive and were resposnible for each tranche of f**kwittedness and make them pay.
Sure the Council won't get all the money they need but a bunch of misogynistic Aholes being made bankrupt sends a pretty good message for the future.
F**king retards.
That's a little more than £8000 for each employee working for the authority.
Astonishing waste of resources - and no matter how sneaky Oracle may have been, it is beyond belief that a public body could spend more on an ERP system than many tech companies spend on their entire stack. Incompetence on the most industrial, shameful level.
As a CIO for a national transport organization, I would like to say that if your existing ERP is SAPECC, just go for the path of least resistance. Upgrade to SAP S4/Hana Finance and get the full suite of HRIS from SuccessFactors and also S2P from Ariba to handle all your source2pay needs. Gone are the days of "best of breed". Just sweat the current ERP platform that you are on and automate everything within that platform. I would never recommend any organization who already runs their entire ERP in SAP to migrate to a different ERP system, especially when they are in so much debt. Am very much surprised that the CIO of Birmingham Council would do such a thing.....
>” I would never recommend any organization who already runs their entire ERP in SAP to migrate to a different ERP system”
If you are downsizing or being demerged, I have recommended migrating to a different ERP system.
Did this for a client who had been spun out of a SAP user organisation. SAP had no tools or real interest in this migration, the competition however were and had the toolsets (and experience) to successfully migration, which was achieved in 6 weeks.
Never understood why people buy standard packages like Workday and then decide to write blank cheques to have it bent out of shape to cope with their spechul way of doing things. Top tip, if you are doing something that no one else does, you might just be the baddie.
Local governments love dishing out freebies in order to win re-election, but eventually those generous handouts become a cash consuming monster that no one can control. The social welfare budget is typically half of the budget and seemingly immune to any attempt to inspect it - paying £200 per day per pupil for taxis to take children to school due to their anxieties about travelling on busses etc soo adds up.
Because "one size does not fit all"!
Oracle is famous for convincing entities that their product will be 'fit for purpose' in areas it is not! Be that government or, in my personal experience, construction. It just isn't! Then after getting the contract they try to shoehorn it in with their army of poor consultants who invariably fail to understand or implement the needs of the customer.
This ridiculous scenario is played out up and down the country. Councils are suckered into expensive, complex bespoke systems that probably won't work.
The reality is that Birmingham council may be bigger than the others, but their functions are the same as every other council.
Yes, Birmingham may have more dustbins, but the task of arranging to empty them is only different in scale.
What is needed is to find a LA with a working system and replicate that (with local data and scaled to suit). Not to reinvent the bespoke wheel at huge cost and risk
Have to agree. There's an institutional myth that because you're large, you're somehow magically more complex.
What is usually true is that you have many more people clinging onto their jobs and somehow unable to describe what they actually do - instead you get a long conversation about how they deal with a large department of people all faffing around on the same job. In turn, most of that size (not complexity) is only there due to historical staffing increments, not the complexity of the job they perform.
Another problem occurs in IT. You get new IT management who, when they arrive, want to bring in the "things" they are familiar with no matter how unfit they are.
I remember a CIO that was hired who was obviously an Oracle fan boy who insisted on replacing a vertical solution with Oracle Financials. It was an unmitigated disaster and still is!
I had a relation who started work with her local borough council as an Administration Assistant.
On the first day she asked her boss what she should do - "Get anything you want from the Stationary Stores, make a cup of Tea and read a book."
After 2 months of doing nothing her boss left and she was automatically promoted.
She asked a new boss what she should do - "Organise a replacement for your old job"
"But I didn't have anything to do" "But we have a budget for that position and so it must be filled"
"What do I do after I have employed the replacement?" "Manage them"
My relation left after another month of not doing anything.
WOW...I don't know the ins and what Oracle are doing but that headline seem highly provocative and zealous especially when no one else in the news has mentioned anything about it!
It seems very strange that the headline exclusively focuses on a company that makes up a partial contributor to the issues and costs and even that may have been caused by the council and not by whowever is proving systems such as oracle
I'm sure many IT professionals have seen the same but, I've been involved with councils that have caused huge delays and overruns as they had internal issues that caused cost overruns.
In fact without any substantive detail or any other information this entire you can only say its very contrived,. Pretty questionable reporting here, it seems very suspect on the motives of this headline
“ It seems very strange that the headline exclusively focuses on a company that makes up a partial contributor to the issues and costs and even that may have been caused by the council and not by whowever is proving systems such as oracle‘
I dunno, could it be because El Reg is primarily an IT related publication and hence tends to focus on those bits of the story which its contributors and readership have a specific competence and/or interest in?
The Oracle of Delphi was famously obtuse and easily bribed. All the tales I can remember lead to hardship and (usually) the ultimate downfall of the protagonist after acting in response to a consult with The Oracle.
I always thought that Oracle was a strange choice of name for a business - but maybe it’s deliberate!
AFAIK Calderdale uses Oracle, but they've built it all themselves inhouse. There's enough talented software developers who love to live and work in the region to make this a realistic solution in the long term. Trying to make SAP manage anything but shop floors is doomed from the start.
With a private enterprise the success is judged on its ROI. With a political body it judged upon its management being returned to office without any reference to the very long term. Political bodies are also liable for capture by a dream, goal, or a wish to make things right (!). If the polity disagrees in theory out they are gone and no harm done. The actuality is the moment the capture happens the new process starts and if cancelled the following day its funny but some long term debt is on the books; whereas, the private corporation goes off on some different track come the next reporting quarter, a management change.
There problem is the something for nothing ideology. The masses want energy ever available but a rates below the capitalized costs. Smooth highways but why must you work at some other time. Swift clean trains that stop where wanted always all for mere kopeck or two. All these a political is rationally responds BUT political rationality is not economic rationality.
If these IT decision makers and government officials adopted PostgreSQL and the pay-for-value strategy known as a "zero-failure ERP implementation strategy," citizens would not have to bear this financial loss.
1. Let your IT staff implement your project.
2. You hire only one consultant to train your IT staff in all the necessary skills to implement your project on top of a quality ERP development and execution framework. Try to limit the total training days to 5, unless your IT staff does not have PostgreSQL, basic accounting, and large database design skills.
3. If the majority of your IT staff or end-users who are mainly civil servants are not satisfied with the above ERP software during the implementation process, you will not buy that ERP.
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