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Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 4 months ago by filoria@lemmy.ml to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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[-] Apollonius_Cone@lemmy.world 60 points 4 months ago

Years of accumulative Conservative cutbacks will do that to a society. Where's your empire now, Britain? Pathetic.

[-] Rade0nfighter@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

No doubt fiscal policies put this (and other) councils on the back foot, but it’s reductive to ignore that the thing that tipped them over the edge was bureaucratic incompetence combined with being fucked by the Oracle Corporation.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/birmingham_city_council_oracle/

[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 12 points 4 months ago

Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization."

I guess no one could have predicted that a public-private partnership would be bad for the public?

[-] JustCopyingOthers@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 months ago

I don't know how valid this is, but I heard county and district councils use government bonds to secure more favourable loan terms. When Liz Truss upset the UK bond market the cost of borrowing rose as the value of their bond assets dropped. The county council where I live is now spending as much on servicing debt as it is on fixing roads. (Roads, although not the most important responsibility of local government, are a visible indicator of their capability.)