Head of housing goes in Birmingham shake-up
The former director of housing at Birmingham Council will leave next year following a management shake-up at England’s largest local authority landlord.
Elaine Elkington will leave the council in February as a result of the council collapsing three of its directorate positions into two earlier this year.
The homes and neighbourhoods division - which was headed by Ms Elkington and managed Birmingham’s 64,500 council homes - environment and culture and development directorates have been rolled into two new directorates. These are development and culture, headed by Mark Barrow, and local services, led by Sharon Lea.
The new structure was put in place by Birmingham’s new Labour administration, which seized control of the council from a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in this May’s local elections.
This week, council leader Sir Albert Bore warned that Birmingham would have to make £600 million of cuts and may have to axe another 1,000 jobs on top of the 1,100 already announced over the next four years. Blaming the government’s austerity measures, Sir Albert said this could lead to the potential scaling back of core services.
The council has not revealed which services are likely to be hit by any future cuts.
