Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council is the UK's largest local authority by population, serving more than 1.1 million residents as a metropolitan borough council. In September 2023 it issued a Section 114 notice, the formal declaration that a council cannot balance its books, after equal pay liabilities of about £760m and a failed IT system exhausted its reserves. The IT failure was the overrunning implementation of an Oracle system.

The notice brought government intervention. Ministers appointed commissioners in October 2023, WHO took direct control of budget-setting and service cuts. Spending since has run under tight constraint, with asset sales to raise money.

Birmingham's case ended the idea that Section 114 notices were a theoretical last resort. Before 2023 only a handful of authorities had issued one. It remains the largest local government insolvency in UK history and the comparator for every council failure since, including Thurrock, whose losses of about £1.5bn from failed investments were weighed against Birmingham's ahead of the 7 May 2026 local elections. When Nottingham filed its third notice in March 2026 without a parallel commissioner appointment, the contrast with Birmingham was read as a sign of how central government grades a council's underlying position.