Birmingham City Council's financial crisis and the subsequent cuts to services and rises in tax rates has lead to outrage amongst many across the region. Here today outside Victoria Square demonstrators have gathered to express their aggravation towards the authority.
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00:00 I'm here today as the Joint Branch Secretary of Birmingham Unison protesting about the
00:06 Council's proposal to cut £300 million in the budget. We've already had over a billion
00:12 pound cut from our budget over the last 10 years and so we're really struggling to provide
00:18 services that people need in Birmingham. Another £300 million worth of cuts is completely
00:23 unacceptable. Things are going that we really do need, community libraries for example,
00:29 we've got 35 at the moment, they're talking of cutting that down to 11. It's really quite
00:33 shocking. We don't know quite what is proposed for next year but there's more cuts planned
00:38 for next year. We could lose things like our leisure centres, our parks. Everything that
00:43 the Council provides is basically being looked at to cut and what we're saying today is we
00:49 want the Tories to fund the £1 billion they've taken from our budget. So essentially this
00:55 is a protest against the Council's decision to cut the budget which harms the most vulnerable
01:00 people of the society and on top of that they're trying to tax everyone through the politics
01:05 of increasing the Council tax by 21%. Meanwhile it is clear that the money is not spent in
01:11 the best way because for example they had this IT system that they created which was
01:16 worth around £130 million and I know some professionals who work in the IT industry.
01:21 There's no way that a simple programme that just keeps track of accounting and everything
01:25 is going to cost that much. So in a way I just want to make sure that the Council is
01:29 accountable on what they're spending on rather than trying to find an excuse to tax the working
01:34 people. Following the issuance of the Section 114 notice last September, Birmingham City
01:40 Council saw the appointment of commissioners to address the financial challenges faced
01:44 by the authority. In order to address the budget gap of more than £300 million over
01:50 the next two years, the decision was made to rise Council tax by 21% and make cuts to
01:56 many services across the region. What do those demonstrating today believe should be done
02:02 to address this gap? Well the fact is that local government cuts year on year have been
02:08 unsustainable for a long time. The general programme of austerity since the 2008 crash
02:14 has been hurting local councils really bad. It's not just Birmingham that's going to be
02:21 going under, other councils have gone under this year and there's probably going to be
02:26 quite a bit more go under. They've tried to say Birmingham is somehow special but we're
02:31 not. One in five councils in England are facing bankruptcy at the moment. That's actually
02:36 63 local authorities. So the idea that you could bring commissioners in to 63 authorities
02:44 and that would be a fix, actually I think local government is broken for that many councils
02:49 to not be able to manage. It's not to do with mismanagement, it's literally to do with not
02:54 having enough funds to be able to provide the things that people need and that's councils
02:58 all over the country. The government has got to step in, they've got to start funding local
03:03 government properly.
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