West Midlands NO! Campaign

In 2007, the West Midlands NO! Campaign received a tip-off that the powers that be were intending to legitimise their city region quango by registering it as a limited company.

To try and force the people behind this secretive, undemocratic quango to be more open about what they were doing we registered Birmingham, Coventry & Black Country City Region at Companies House and said that we would hand the name over if they came clean about what they were doing.  But rather than go public with their plans and explain how much it was costing taxpayers and how much local accountability was going to be lost to yet another regional quango, they retired to their council chambers to lick their wounds and maintained the veil of secrecy.

The city region quango has now launched a website - cityregion.org - and is still calling itself Birmingham, Coventry & Black Country City Region despite that name no longer being available to them.  Their website informs us that their budget is over £370,000 for the 2008/09 financial year and funded by equal contributions from each local authority involved - a bargain for the 2m residents of Birmingham, not so good for the 160k residents of Telford who will be paying 8 times as much per head of population for the privilege of being told what to do by a quango that is duplicating the work of any number of existing quangos.

The majority of people in the West Midlands and England as a whole do not want regionalisation and they do not want an ever increasing percentage of their taxes wasted on unelected, undemocratic quangos that take decision making further away from the people they elected and bring nothing new or of value to their lives.

It is high time our elected representatives were reminded that they were elected not to build empires and feather their own nests at the taxpayers expense, but to serve the people who elected them.  The directors of the Birmingham, Coventry & Black Country City Region will therefore be taking advice on how to best protect the name that belongs to our company and would like to remind the following directors of the illegitimate city region quango that the directors of an unincorporated organisation are jointly and severally responsible for the actions of their organisation:

• Councillor Mike Whitby, Birmingham City Council
• Councillor Ken Taylor, Coventry City Council
• Councillor David Caun, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council
• Councillor Bill Thomas, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council
• Councillor Ken Meeson, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council
• Councillor Andrew Eade, Telford & Wrekin Borough Council
• Councillor John O’Hare, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council
• Councillor Neville Patten, Wolverhampton City Council
• Mike Beasley, Learning & Skills Council
• Nick Paul, Advantage West Midlands
• Councillor David Smith, West Midlands Regional Assembly
• Glyn Pitchford