The city centre tunnels are such a fundamental part of Birmingham’s road network it was never in doubt that their closure would become the hot topic of debate this summer.
The story might have been that the entire transport network has not imploded as some prophets of doom feared and that commuters have handled the situation pretty well.
But instead a story which hit the headlines was that a large proportion of the construction and engineering staff had been shipped in from abroad.
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Several builders have contacted our Fort Dunlop newsdesk saying that they had found themselves working alongside gangs of Portuguese workers and that this, at a time of high unemployment in the West Midlands, was a scandal. The whistle blowers came up with figures ranging from 200 to 400 for the foreign workforce.
With direct questions put to both the city council and contractor Amey, which has the £2.7 billion contract to fix and maintain Birmingham’s roads over 25 years, the answer came back somewhat cryptic.
Rather than telling us how many staff were from overseas, the reply came back that 70 per cent of the 1,000 strong workforce was from the West Midlands.
Other evidence and accounts appeared to confirm the figure of about 200 from abroad and the remainder from the wider 海角视频.
But it was only after the story broke, over a week after the first inquiries were made with the firm, that a further statement was issued saying that just 40 staff are from abroad – about four per cent.
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The obvious question is why was this not made clear at an earlier stage.
I was also told that all the jobs were advertised locally and that there were not enough applicants. It is difficult to believe that there is a shortage of construction and engineering labour in this region, one hardest hit by slumps in construction and manufacturing over the last few years.
And finally it was mentioned that some fire protection specialists were shipped in from a firm in Glasgow – which is fair enough.
There are questions to be answered about whether this is cheap labour, or whether the benefits system prevents people taking six weeks of work.
Following the story there was a fair bit of flak from people claiming that this was some kind of ‘Little England’ or 海角视频IP inspired agenda. But this misses the point.
These foreign workers come to Birmingham for six weeks, work 12 hour shifts and are put up in student halls. They are not spending their income in Birmingham and not giving that boost to the local economy. This is also doing little to lower the welfare bill our leaders are so worried about.
And even workers bused in from Liverpool, Scotland or London could be depriving locals of work – and some of those locals might be Poles or Portuguese who spend their money in the locality.
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That is why the city council’s Labour administration is making local employment, where possible, a condition of major new contracts – because where the public sector is spending vast sums of taxpayers money, surely it should be to the benefit of that taxpaying public.
That means reducing local dole queues where possible and giving trade to local businesses. Labour backbencher John Clancy, in his failed leadership bid, would have even gone further and suggested replacing these big public sector contractors, like Capita or Serco, with local networks of small and medium sized businesses – ensuring that the shareholder’s slice of public investment also stays in the locality.
The matter spilled over into Cabinet this week, where there was a degree of schadenfreude in the reaction of Lib Dem leader Paul Tilsley.
As deputy leader of the council in 2011, he found himself under fire for the Service Birmingham contract which allowed up to 100 IT jobs to be shipped to India. Under pressure there was a u-turn and the jobs returned to Birmingham, with the taxpayer footing the extra cost.
Coun Tilsley now found himself able to return the favour to the Labour administration, but was handled with a swift rebuttal. Cabinet member for contracts Stewart Stacey pointed out that the Amey’s foreign army was hired under the terms of a contract signed in 2010 and then left himself a hostage to fortune by announcing that Amey is set to sign his new social charter under which there would be no influx of foreign labour working on the tunnels in 2014.
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One of the final council meetings before the big summer getaway saw leader Sir Albert Bore ‘grilled’ over his leader’s statement by the governance and resources scrutiny committee.
His statement earlier this month had talked of the summer service reviews of education, social services and leisure centres, talk of transport plans, the housing shortage, employment initiatives and other pressing policy areas.
But what emerged was another hour of naval gazing. Due to holidays there was only one opposition member, Tory Robert Alden, trying to trip up the leader. He was accompanied by six Labour councillors giving it the atmosphere of a generally good natured affair. It quickly became dominated by the merits of the council’s devolution project.
“I have never felt so optimistic about the future,” said Coun Marje Bridle in a typical response.
Fierce scrutiny indeed.