Can Birmingham residents trust Max Caller and Michael Gove?
Max Caller and his band of commissioners, appointed by Secretary of State Michael Gove, have our city's fate in their hands - is this a good thing?
Local government veteran fixer Max Caller, 73, was officially ‘retired’ and planning a big holiday when he got a call from the office of Secretary of State Michael Gove asking him to take on just one more challenge. He’d barely had time to get out his slippers.
The prospect of turning around the fortunes of beleaguered and broken Birmingham City Council, the biggest unitary authority in Europe, was too tempting to shun. But while he now beavers away at solving the council’s multitude of problems, is he a force for good for Brummies? Can we trust the man dubbed ‘Max the Axe’ to do right by the city’s residents?
In this full and exclusive long-read, find out what he thinks on equal pay, finding a new chief executive, the Oracle crisis and why he met a multi millionaire investor to discuss a land deal but has no plans to meet ordinary Brummies.
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And what about Michael Gove? He’s the Secretary of State who ordered Caller in to Birmingham, is ultimately his line manager, and has the final say in what happens now. He is also the man who is organising a full public inquiry into the Birmingham crisis - with the final say on who leads it and what its terms of reference will be.
Can we really trust Gove to ensure the inquiry is fair and impartial, and will it fully examine the roles of council officers and Government officials in the meltdown, when he already seems to have made up his mind about the outcome? (Hint: it was all Labour’s fault).
He has already used the crisis here to make political jibes and launch attacks on the council leadership, just as his Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has done. Even Andy Street could not resist using the plight of the council to score political points in the run up to the mayoral election.
Gove’s office also allegedly planted a story with the right wing Telegraph on the eve of the mayoral elections claiming he was bringing in a former police chief to run the inquiry - a ploy to generate a ‘police chief to investigate Labour council’ headline. Is that a fair way to go about ‘supporting’ Birmingham City Council, or is its plight fair game?
Before I get into today’s main event, I wanted to share an urgent update for Inside Birmingham regulars. Two weeks ago I told you the story of Nia and her family, trapped in awful living conditions inside a house provided by Birmingham City Council as part of their ‘temporary accommodation’ portfolio.
You can read the full original version here.
The family home in Northfield was a disgrace. The ceiling in the downstairs bathroom was riddled with black and white mould caused by a leak somewhere inside the bowels of the house. A few metres down the hall, Nia’s 53 year old father lay huddled in a jumper under his duvet on a hospital bed. He is recovering from a rare, life threatening blood disorder that landed him in acute care for over 18 months.
Nia, 19, had greeted me at the door with a beautiful smile and a warm hug. I tried not to get her hopes up. “I can’t promise by telling your story anyone will listen or do anything,” I warn her. “But at least you are here, and listening,” she says. “That counts for a lot.”
It turns out that someone was listening. The city council dispatched its repair team to the property the next day, who drew up a list of urgent repairs. They promised to act fast. An occupational health report also highlighted that the property is unsuitable.
But before any work was done, the bathroom ceiling fell in. Water dripping from a leak above onto the mould had finally brought it down.
Despite this calamity, the solution put forward remains the same - patch it up. There is ‘nowhere else for them to go’, say the city council, overwhelmed by demand for homes.
I’m in discussions now with the city council’s housing lead councillor Jayne Francis and stand with Birmingham Fair Housing Campaign, who are demanding an urgent reaction. But, as anyone with any connection to the city’s housing crisis knows too well, this family are far from alone.
I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks visiting some of the worst affected properties in the city and speaking to those with the power to do something about it. If you want to join the conversation please comment below or email me jane.haynes@reachplc.com
A big thank you to all those who have put their faith in me and become paid subscribers. Your support is hugely appreciated. You can still get a super-cool half-price discount - £20 for a year’s subscription by clicking here. Signing up helps show this kind of insight from inside the city’s political heartland is needed. You will also help us expand our ad-free email newsletter offer.
TRUST AND HOPE: Will Max the Axe be the saviour of Birmingham?
Before he was even appointed to lead a Government intervention at the broke city council, Max Caller (rhymes with valour) had been doing the rounds of the media to offer up his thoughts on Birmingham’s financial meltdown.
He’d spent time at the council back in 2019 as one of a panel of non executives providing external support, so was well placed to have a view. (Incidentally, questions remain about how that formidable team of experts signed the council off as being in good health, given what has unfolded since.)
Caller contended that Birmingham had made a massive error choosing to host the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and that he had told them so back in 2019. It was ‘a mistake’ and a ‘distraction’. "The problem with councils that are in trouble is they just need to focus on getting better, rather than trying to do nice new things," he said last year. "There is a limit to the amount of political and managerial capacity and if you're spending time doing Commonwealth Games you cannot cope with the serious problems that you already face.
"You can't do nice things if you haven't done the boring really well."
It was music to my ears. The previous summer’s Games had been a delight (especially if you were one of the many local politicians who got a free pass), and it gave a great platform for the city to sell itself to investors and potential employers, But I’d grown heartily sick of hearing it trumpeted as a symbol of a ‘golden decade’ ahead, while simultaneously reporting on whole communities living in crisis, pensioners barely able to afford to eat, kids in poverty and filthy streets. I’ve yet to see compelling evidence of a trickledown impact on the city’s deprived communities.
Caller was named as the lead commissioner in the House of Commons by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, in September last year. His appointment was ratified soon after. Our first meeting ahead of his official first day was in the lobby of a hotel near Centenary Square and I remember being immediately struck by his confidence and instant grasp of the issues at hand. This was not a man wracked with self doubt, I thought, or who was likely to mince his words.
In his withering assessment of what had gone wrong in Birmingham, and the pain ahead, he said then:
* The Government was RIGHT not to bail out the city by giving a free handout, even if it was to save innocent Brummies from the dire impacts of tax rises and lost services
* The council was WRONG to host the Commonwealth Games while facing an equal pay disaster
* It has NO IDEA what its financial situation is or what its equal pay bill really looks like (and it still doesn’t)
* It has WASTED MONEY on grand projects
* There is BAD NEWS ahead and 'more dead bodies to uncover' before recovery is done.
He said the situation in Birmingham should serve as a warning to voters: "When you vote for local councillors, you need to realise they are responsible for running your city. It is a serious responsibility, and people sometimes only realise that when it goes badly wrong."
That interview drew a fierce reaction on social media. One suggested, very rudely, that he came across like a ‘macho prick’. Another said he would ‘ruin Birmingham’. His comment about voter choices was widely interpreted as ‘this is your fault Brummies, and you will now pay’. Some comments fell into my inbox and DMs from trusted sources around the country, alleging Caller had a way of working that was ‘unnecessarily abrupt’. “It’s his way or the highway,” said one.
Seven months on from that first encounter, he is at pains to correct any suggestion that he personally ‘does not care’ about Brummies. Quite the opposite, in fact.
His entire focus, he says, is on lifting up the council that serves them so it becomes again ‘the best in the country’ - because that is what residents need and deserve. “Every council in the country (including Birmingham) needs to remember it is there for the citizens, and that’s what drives me, always.
“It is all about the people, so when you say that I don’t care about these people, then you really don’t understand my motivation. My motivation in my entire career in local government is that it is the people that matter, even if that’s hard for the council.”
It’s why he insists on the highest levels of performance from officers and members, driving them on to act quickly - and that might not always win him friends. “In every single intervention, it is really hard work. But the end result is a better council. No matter how fast this council is going (on its improvement journey), it will not be fast enough. This council has got itself into a difficult place and its citizens deserve better.”
But what those deserving citizens have so far got out of intervention is a whole heap of trouble. A 9.99% council tax hike, a mass sale of council land and property, hundreds of council job losses and a devastating series of budget cuts have been the result since Caller and co arrived.
Public consultations are now taking place that will result in library, youth centre and day centre closures, cuts to services for children and young people with special needs, and there is more pain to come.
On who is to blame for those looming cuts, Caller is clear. “Every single proposal in the budget is a council proposal. Commissioners did not dictate what they should be - the council chose to put them forward,” he said.
I point out we now have Labour councillors who voted for a budget that guaranteed the closures of libraries and youth activities, the loss of home to school transport for older teens, the axeing of early help contracts and the shutting of day centres yet are now lobbying ‘to themselves’ to keep them open or pressing for a rethink. You gave them no choice but to back a budget they hate and feel is damaging to communities and families, I suggest to Caller.
“The council has a £300 million plus income gap over two years. By law they have to bridge that gap. They have been allowed to have Exceptional Financial Support from the Government with conditions imposed, and the council signed up to those conditions to allow them to set their budget. That was their choice.
“They could have alternatively set their own budget and done different things and not accepted EFS, and they would not have the constraints they have now. But the council’s choice was clear.”
And the pain is not over yet. At least £70m more has to be cut in the next year, he reminds me.
Given the ‘falling axe’ will hurt the most deprived communities hardest, why is Caller not meeting with residents or exploring the city’s underbelly for himself to ‘truly understand what we need’?
“The council is running Birmingham, not me,” he says. “Our job (as commissioners) is to help the council take good decisions, get it right and deliver them. If we (commissioners) put ourselves in that place (of going out and meeting residents, visiting community groups, understanding their needs and wants), there is no space for the council. It has to do its job.” It is ‘not my job’ to be out speaking to residents, he adds. That’s what the council is meant to do.
The same ‘keep our distance’ rule did not seem to apply when it came to answering a call for a meeting from Tom Wagner, chair of the new owners of the Blues, I point out. Caller confirms that he agreed to meet with Wagner and his team ahead of the football club’s owners putting in a bid to buy the Wheels site in East Birmingham.
He defends his decision and maintains he played no part in agreeing the final purchase price. As Inside Birmingham readers will know, the same land had attracted a land value of £81 million back in 2021, only to be sold to Wagner’s company for around £50 million. Read that full post here about why its value plummeted.
Says Caller of the interaction: “Mr Wagner asked to meet me and I agreed to meet him but I was not involved in the negotiations. He wanted to get his professional team to set out his overall proposals to the council, with me present.”
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