A former adviser to Birmingham City Council has said that the Commonwealth Games hosted in the city last year was “a step too far” after the authority announced it is effectively bankrupt.
Max Caller is a former non-executive director of the council who was appointed by the government in 2019 to help solve its financial issues.
Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme on Wednesday, Mr Caller said that he and others had advised the council not to host the Games in the city in 2022 and instead focus on existing “serious problems”.
On Tuesday, the council, Europe’s largest local authority, issued a section 114 notice, which means all new spending will stop immediately and is likely to lead to cuts of several services.
There is a limit to the amount of political and managerial capacity, and if you're spending time doing the Commonwealth Games, you cannot cope with the serious problems that you already face.— Max Caller
Mr Caller said: “I want to take nothing away from the people and the city for delivering an absolutely amazing event.
“But there is a limit to the amount of political and managerial capacity, and if you’re spending time doing the Commonwealth Games, you cannot cope with the serious problems that you already face.
“The advice that I gave and the others gave to officers and members at the time was that this was likely to be a challenge too far.
“It’s not that they didn’t have really good people doing the Games.
“It’s that all the other things that our local authority has to do to make the games work diverge from solving the problems that already existed.
“So if it were me, I wouldn’t have done it.”
The council has been grappling with an equal pay bill which is now estimated to be worth more than £1 billion and is growing by millions of pounds every month.
The problem has been growing for several years and has been compounded by an £87m in-year financial budget gap and a £100m bill to fix its IT system.
Mr Caller said that councils with financial problems must do “the boring really well” in order to survive, but that even prior to his appointment the authority “didn’t address any of the underlying problems”.
He said: “From 2015, there was an improvement panel, which didn’t make the council do what was necessary to change its ways.
“And 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.
“Nothing is impossible if you’re totally focused on doing that rather than something else, but it is really difficult.
“Generally it means that you’ve got to rein back services, you’ve got to sell assets, and you’ve got to shrink the council to pay for it and get back to a stable base before you can move forward and do new things.”
He added: “But (the council) didn’t address any of the underlying problems and those problems had been around since before 2015.”
“There was no coherent action plan to address this, and the reality is that authorities in trouble just need to focus on doing the basics.
“You can’t do nice things if you haven’t done the boring really well.”
It remains unclear as to whether jobs will be cut at the authority, which has pledged to keep statutory services running amid the crisis, with unions calling for urgent talks.
It means you have to really trim back services, you are selling off assets and you are destroying some basic infrastructure, which wouldn't have been necessary if you'd have done things in a sensible time— Max Caller
Its leader, Councillor John Cotton, told BBC Radio West Midlands that “tough decisions” would need to be made but that he was committed to addressing the issues.
Mr Caller, who had previously worked with the London Borough of Hackney after it issued a section 114 notice in 2000, said that there would need to be serious cutbacks that could have been avoided.
He said: “It’s just really difficult.
“It means you have to really trim back services, you are selling off assets and you are destroying some basic infrastructure, which wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d have done things in a sensible time.
He added: “You’ve really got to focus on sorting out the problems and do nothing else.”
