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.
03:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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