Birmingham City Council spends around £9m a year on ‘external’ legal services because it does not have enough in-house lawyers. The authority has around 190 lawyers, more than any other council, but still has to be propped up by private law firms. Kate Charlton, the city solicitor and monitoring…

A failed move to block the city council’s controversial Birmingham Clean Air Zone has cast light on further details surrounding the scheme. Last week the opposition Conservative group applied for the proposed charge to be ‘called-in’ for reconsideration by the Labour-council’s cabinet, after raising a raft of issues with…

West Midlands Mayor Andy Street has said the British government should provide state aid for firms such as Jaguar Land Rover after Brexit. State aid could mean the government allowing the firm to pay lower taxes – or simply giving it cash to keep it afloat. It comes after…

Birmingham is to move to fortnightly rubbish collections while the dispute with trade unions rages on. The Labour-run city council cabinet today (Tuesday, January 15) agreed a series of contingency measures to reduce disruption. Council leader Ian Ward (Shard End) described the on-going industrial action by Unite the Union…

A Sandwell councillor has been cleared of a hate crime after the Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges of racially/religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress. Cllr Bob Piper was supposed to appear at Walsall Magistrates Court tomorrow (Wednesday, January 16) to answer the allegation he used the term ‘Sieg…

Coun Mahmood, a member of the Labour council’s inner leadership team, says he can’t support the city council’s decision to take legal action against the bins unions. He acted after the council’s Cabinet announced this morning that it was taking legal action against the unions Unite and Unison for…

Birmingham Royal Ballet has revealed who will be its new director. Internationally renowned ballet dancer, Carlos Acosta CBE, will be taking up his new post as director in January 2020. He will be following on from David Bintley CBE, the current director, who announced last year that he would…

Worrying statistics have revealed a rise in the number of reports of Walsall adults in care being subjected to physical abuse or neglect. A report going to the social care and health overview and scrutiny committee on Thursday (January 17) shows that Walsall safeguarding adult board dealt with 1,620…

Hundreds of people in Birmingham and the Black Country are being admitted to hospital with Victorian diseases like rickets, gout, and cholera. Exclusive figures from NHS Digital show there were at least 655 occasions in 2017/18 on which people were treated as inpatients in hospitals in the area for…

Children in care across Birmingham are nearly five times as likely to be convicted of a crime as other children in our region, exclusive analysis by BirminghamLive has revealed. The latest government figures show that 5.0% of children looked after by Birmingham council were convicted or cautioned for a…