For councillors who fight for us
- Use the council’s £893m reserves and borrowing powers to scrap the planned £97m worth of cuts and restore and expand services and council housing.
- Reject council tax increases on residents to make up for cuts in central government funding.
- Organise door knocking, protests, public meetings and strike action to demand more funding from central government to fund services and a home building programme on a long term basis.
- Freeze loan repayments to Central Government while lobbying for the funding Birmingham needs.
- Restore local democracy - refuse to work with commissioners in cutting services and attacking the council workforce
Housing and urban planning
- Start a mass council housebuilding programme on the 124,000-plus homes worth of brownfield land in Birmingham.
- Use the council’s borrowing powers to purchase empty shops, homes and brownfield sites to be converted into genuinely affordable council housing, retail units and community spaces as part of reinvestment in our local high streets.
- For genuine democratic community decision making on the design of new housing and regeneration of existing estates.
- Less unaffordable luxury flats - more family friendly homes and accessible designs for the disabled and elderly.
- Bring housing maintenance back in house to improve quality of repairs and accountability to tenants.
- A compulsory register of private landlords across the city, with properly resourced enforcement and tribunals to stop rent hikes and unsafe accommodation.
- Close loop holes with ‘Exempt Accommodation’ and ensure specialised staffed homes for those needing extra support.
- Stop the £750m fire sale of public land and buildings.
- Make Birmingham an age-friendly city (e.g. repairing pavement slabs, providing accessible toilets and regular places to sit down), which also benefits people with mobility issues and the general population.
- Use funds from the council’s £207.3m highways reserves to fix the pothole crisis.
- For the creation of more free ‘third spaces’ such as fully funding libraries and parks alongside the opening of more green spaces and community centres.
- Reverse cuts to arts funding, with genuine community oversight to ensure communities across the city can engage in a diverse range of culture
Health
- Increase support for people with mental health and addiction struggles, including more support centres based in the community.
- Preventing isolation and mental health deterioration in the community by providing council run community hubs offering workshops, group activities and local events.
- Reversing the cuts and closures to Day Care centres - so family carers can receive respite.
- Lobby central government for an increase in funding for hospitals – stories of malpractice and poor care due to underfunding and a lack of staff
- Lobby for increased support for people have been sectioned, including beds close to home
- Lobby for better mental health support, particularly providing better prevention support for those who are struggling but not yet at crisis – improving this will also help people manage in many other areas of their life.
- Provide benefit advisors and reopen benefit advice centres to support people to apply – benefits are crucial to preventing mental health crisis.
- Lobby against the Central Government’s dehumanising attacks on disabled people on benefits.
Jobs and education
- Reopen Connexions to help tackle youth unemployment.
- Reopen and build more youth centres with qualified staff to support young people and to run accessible services aimed at teaching life skills (such as cooking and cleaning) as well as developing hobbies (such as gardening, reading, sports etc).
- Bring more council services in-house and make them democratically run for better protection for staff and better-quality service for residents.
- Bring in a £15/hr minimum wage for council workers and make it a condition of tendering for council contracts.
- Lobby for a real living wage and guaranteed hours and workplace rights for all staff at bars, restaurants and clubs as a condition of their licence.
- Lobby for guarantees on pay and site safety with trade union access as part of granting planning permission to developers.
- Lobby for protections for gig economy workers as part of licensing conditions for taxi and delivery platforms.
- Support delivery drivers with safe and segregated cycle routes.
- Free training for people who need (e.g. due to a disability) or want to retrain for a new role.
- Reintroduce quality council apprenticeships and accessible jobs for the disabled, providing trades and skills for life.
- Support establishing democratically run local co-operatives (e.g. coffee shops, tailoring shops) in council-owned buildings and re-invest profits into training and community projects.
- More funding, better training and better safety measures for support workers.
Parents and children
- Funding for nursery/childcare centres – open more and resource existing ones with Sure Start-style support for parents.
- Bring SEND services in-house to improve service and efficiencies, including better planning of transport to and from schools, ensuring drivers are DBS checked.
- Additional financial support to schools to reduce class sizes.
- Bring academies back into public ownership for better education, and for all school funding going into education, not executive pay.
Transport and environment
- Support a fair deal for bin workers protecting pay, working conditions and safety.
- Keep black bin collections weekly and scrap the garden waste and bulky collections charges.
- Expand street cleaning - to create more jobs and to keep litter off our streets.
- Free travel for under 18s as a step towards free, integrated public transport for all.
- Lobby for nationalised public transport of rail, metro and buses.
- Build new cycle routes and improve safety for cyclists.
- For significant investment in and expansion of bus priority measures to speed up journey times
- Increase frequency and number of bus routes in line with new housing and industrial developments.
- For community oversight and input into new bus routes and transport planning.
