She's the most powerful woman in Birmingham and making the city great again is personal

Joanne Roney goes deep on why saving Birmingham City Council is the final stop in a lifelong journey

Exclusive: First interview with Joanne Roney, the managing director of Birmingham City Council - in full

Welcome back to Inside Birmingham with Jane Haynes. Today’s newsletter is wholly about Joanne Roney, the woman with unarguably the toughest job in local government right now. She has taken on the task of lifting Birmingham City Council, its staff and its residents out of the doldrums of crisis.

Appointed six months ago as managing director (chief executive in old money), she has kept a low public profile since and this is her first interview. A shorter version of this interview can be read on the BirminghamLive website but this is your opportunity to read it in full, in an ad-free format. If you enjoy it, please do sign up so you get future newsletters direct to your inbox.

I intend to continue to offer a regular opportunity for you to enjoy longer reads like this, some for free, alongside exclusive content and opinion pieces for paying subscribers. It would make my day if you chose to subscribe in any way you can afford.

Squaring the circle - the girl from Shard End who’s back to make a difference

Shard End bursts with memories, distant and recent, for Joanne Roney. Some of her fondest are set in the old Shard End library.

It was here that her mom, a dinner lady, would bring her and some of her five siblings after school on cold evenings for a warm, and a read, instilling in her a lifelong love of literature and learning that she has never shed. “It's where we came every evening, with my mom, and she shared the power of reading to expand your imagination and to learn. It's never left me.”

Her memories are of the library that opened here in the 1960s, since replaced by a modern alternative - a higgledy piggledgy place to explore, with hard wooden seats and none of today’s mod-cons. “It was warm and I loved it. I still read three books a week on average, I’m a phenomenal reader.” (She’s currently navigating Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, but the classic Wuthering Heights is her go-to ‘desert island’ choice.)

Born into a loving but ‘far from wealthy’ family on the post-war Shard End council estate, one of six kids, the young Joanne’s main ambition as she reached the end of high school was to ‘get a job’. She was bright, but nobody in her family had gone to university, nor had the people she knew; leaving school at 16 and earning money was the natural step into adulthood.

She landed an apprenticeship in Birmingham City Council's housing department and was doing okay until, aged 17, she was involved in a horrific car crash. According to the Birmingham Mail reports of the accident, Roney was a back seat passenger in a Mini with three girlfriends, heading home after a night out in April 1979, when the car clipped a kerb and spun out of control down the dualled Coventry Road in Sheldon. The young driver died and another passenger was seriously injured when the vehicle ‘somersaulted’ across the carriageway, ending up on its roof. The tragedy added to mounting pressure at the time to make wearing seat belts compulsory, which eventually happened in 1983.

Roney escaped with cuts and bruises, but the crash was life changing. “It was a really pivotal moment for me. Surviving that very dramatic crash, I think when you’ve been through something like that at an early age it clearly affects you.”

In the aftermath, Roney was struck with a realisation that she had to make something of her life to justify her survival. “It made me ask ‘what is my life for, what am I here for’ and I think it turned my life around actually, in terms of what I was doing with my life. I don’t know where my life was going until that point, but I started to commit to work and took on those training opportunities.

“I have very vivid memories of lying in bed and thinking ‘you have got to sort your life out, what are you doing with your life’.”

Through that trauma, and ever since, Roney says her family has been ‘the bedrock of my life’, with Shard End the family base. Her mom, widowed when Roney’s father died four decades ago, remained in the family home on the estate up to her recent death, in her 90s. Roney has also recently lost another lynchpin of the family, her beloved brother Joe, who died suddenly in 2022 from a heart attack. The raw emotion of the loss is still etched on her face as she speaks of him. “We were very close, it’s been very difficult.” A tattoo etched with his initials on her forearm keeps him close.

Family gatherings are frequent, big and noisy. Roney herself is single and, despite that wealth of family support and friendships, relies on and depends on only one person - herself.

‘I have made my life what it is. I only have me to depend on. That’s actually very empowering. There are moments in life when your personal life falls apart, or things haven’t gone the way you hoped, and what you rely on is your personal resilience, an ability to pick yourself up, and I have that.

“I have a lovely, brilliant family, but it’s just me here and my one guiding principle is always to be true to myself. My personal integrity is the most important thing I have, the thing I hold dear. I lead through personal integrity, hugely. There’s no other side to me, what you see is what you get.”

Asked if she looks for that in others, she concurs. “I will front difficult stuff for my staff, but I hold them to account to deliver. I am clear in my expectations. I think I’m tougher than people might think too.

“I think my superpower is my relationships with people. If people underestimate me, or think I am a soft touch, they do so at their peril. I know what I’m made of. I know what I’ve overcome to get here. This hasn’t been handed to me.

“I was often the only woman in the room. I have fought for equality and diversity all my life. I know what shields and weapons I carry and I’m not afraid to use either.”

The confidence in her ability that Roney now exudes was not easy to find, and she still has ‘inner doubts’, she confesses. I suggest that’s a very typical trait among working class women who have ‘made good’.

That feeling of ‘am I good enough’ is hard to silence, she agrees, and she sees it in other women from similar backgrounds. “I think I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had role models who have been incredibly supportive, and I’ve also had that drive inside me of wanting to get on.”

She speaks warmly of the legendary Bob Kerslake (author of a damning critique and recommendations for Birmingham City Council in 2014 that remains a touchstone), who was in charge at Sheffield Council when she was deputy chief executive. Even in that lofty position, she didn’t imagine ever making the step up to be number one.

“It definitely took him saying to me ‘you should be a chief executive in your own right’ and he encouraged me on that pathway. We all need someone like that in our corner.”

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Roney chose the library as our meeting point after being asked to pick somewhere meaningful for her. She is make a powerful advocate for the importance of libraries, especially in less well off areas of the city. Yet Shard End’s one of 14 local libraries where the council plans to cut opening hours to save money, with seven more at risk.

It’s an irony not lost on Roney, who knows tough decisions are ahead. In 2024 the council had to sign off £149m of cuts to services, axe up to 600 jobs and sell off multi-millions of pounds worth of land and property assets, while putting up council tax by 9.99%. The library cuts were part of that.

In 2025 the challenge is repeated. This time the council is about to sign off another £148m of cuts to come into effect this coming year, with children's services and adult social care bearing the brunt. There will also be another 7.49% council tax rise.

It’s a huge job, which might explain the price tag that comes with it. But Roney, then CEO of Manchester City Council and a recent winner of ‘chief executive of the year’, says the money wasn’t a factor. She could have stayed put and possibly planned for early retirement, and enjoyed an easier life.

"There was no need for me to leave Manchester. It was well functioning, high performing, great stuff was happening, with brilliant, visionary political leadership. It's an exciting place, I loved it, love it still.

“I told myself if you’re going to give all that up you've got to be really clear that you can only come to Birmingham if you can make a difference. If I don't think that's possible, I'm not coming.

"I'm coming here to close the circle. I know it might sound trite, but I owe Birmingham City Council the career and the life I've had. They invested in me as a 16 year old and gave me opportunities and the career I've had and all that goes with it.

“So yes, Birmingham is in difficulty, there was lots of noise about it being in the last chance saloon, was it too big, was it going to be broken up, is this job doable, but I just couldn't shake off the pull to come back to where it all started and give it my absolute best and give it my absolute all.

“I was confident that I knew the city and I had enough experience that I could translate to the challenges that it faced around financial service design, improvement, culture change and transformation. I knew I'd got a track record of doing that, not just in one place, but in four or five places, so I was confident. I still am. The jury will be out on whether I can do it.”

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Six months into her role, has it matched her expectations?