Legal action is being taken after commissioners sent to oversee Birmingham council blocked scrutiny of a controversial decision to close adult day centres.
An application for a judicial review has been brought in the names of Robert Mason, 63, and Jenny Gilbert, 50, who attend day centres for adults with physical and learning disabilities in the city.
The legal challenge argues there was an overreach by the commissioners, in breach of the Local Government Act, when they refused to allow three separate applications by elected council members to “call in” a cabinet decision to close four day centres for further scrutiny.
James Cross, acting on behalf of Mason, his uncle, who attended a day centre in Harborne for 45 years, said the commissioner had “made a mockery of local government” by overriding the established process and preventing full scrutiny of the closures.
“From our point of view, the local democratic process was removed because of their direct intervention,” said Cross. “Scrutiny is essential for local democracy, especially when a cabinet decision is made by 12 people out of 101 councillors.”
After the council declared itself effectively bankrupt in 2023, the government appointed a team of six commissioners to oversee its daily running for up to five years, until October 2028. Collectively they have been paid nearly £2m in fees and expenses by the council since being appointed.
They are led by Max Caller, nicknamed “Max the Axe” for his tough approach to pushing through cuts at cash-strapped local authorities.
There was an outcry in March when four of the nine council-run adult day centres in the city were closed as part of swingeing budget cuts, with the MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Preet Kaur Gill, saying the commissioners had “shut down democratic scrutiny” by refusing the call-in requests.
Caller said there was “pre-decision scrutiny” over the day centre closures, and it would have cost the council £100,000 a month to delay.
Cross said: “I put forward a proposal for Harborne day centre where it would be turned into a community hub, so that outside of the day centre hours it could be used to generate income. They just didn’t want to know.
“There’s no innovative thinking, it’s just straightforward, yes, we’ll cut that. But it’s short-term gain in terms of finance, for long-term pain, because you’re just kicking the situation further down the road.”
A court hearing on 21 July will determine whether the judicial review can go ahead.
With increasing numbers of councils struggling financially, there are now commissioners in place at six other local authorities: Croydon, Tower Hamlets, Nottingham, Slough, Woking and Thurrock.
Jonathan Carr-West, the chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU), said the commissioner model was “very much the favoured mechanism of the last government and is being continued by this government” to intervene in struggling councils.
“When people say that it takes away local democratic control, that’s true, that’s explicitly what it does because, in a way, the point is to say: we’re going to send in people who don’t have to worry about being elected and can make the really tough decisions,” he said.
“In Birmingham, where they’ve entirely defunded cultural services, where they’ve cut children’s services by a further 25%, local politicians just wouldn’t be able to make those tough choices. [Commissioners] are not accountable or invested in the long term.”
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He said commissioners “very much operate within a certain managerial paradigm, and they’re not intended to be there to innovate”. Analysis by the Local Government Chronicle last year found that almost 70% of commissioners sent into struggling councils were male and more than a quarter had not worked in local government for four years or more.
Carr-West said the use of commissioners was not a “scalable” solution to the problems facing councils. “It feels like a sticking plaster approach, and possibly one that stores up problems for the future, rather than actually a real transformation process,” he said.
“We still have a third of councils across the country saying: ‘If nothing changes in the way we’re funded, we will go bust within the next five years’.
“Well, you can send Max Caller to two or three councils, but you can’t send him to a third of the councils in the country. It can’t be a system-wide approach to rescuing local government.”
In June, the local government minister, Jim McMahon, said he was minded to send commissioners to run Croydon council as its finances were “deteriorating rapidly”.
The move led to a backlash among councillors, with the executive mayor, Jason Perry, saying “unelected Labour commissioners could override local democratic decisions, including forcing tax hikes and cuts”.
The commissioners in Birmingham have been contacted for comment.
