When Max Caller applied to be the chief executive of Hackney Council in 1999, the listing called it the “worst job in local government”. But, according to Caller, even that morose description downplayed how bad things really were. Relations between the council and its east London residents were the lowest they had ever been. The bins were rarely emptied, the streets unclean, and London Fields lido lay derelict.
“The offer to residents was terrible,” Caller told me when we spoke via video call from his home in London. Dressed in a smart blue shirt, he leaned back in his chair, arms folded as he recounted his five decades working in a local authority. “When we arrived [in Hackney], there was no leadership. It was a hung council, which in those days meant they never took a decision. In three years of blood, sweat and tears, it was turned around. You look at Hackney now and you can’t imagine how bad it was.”
Almost 25 years later, Caller, 74, is well known as the government’s chief council fixer, having also restored order in Slough, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets, where he oversaw an inspection. He describes himself as the “poster boy for best value”.
Caller is now a year into a five-year term as the lead commissioner at Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe. The council, which faced potential liabilities of almost £1bn, declared effective bankruptcy in October last year. Birmingham was just the latest in a long list of bankruptcies: five other local authorities have found themselves in the same position since 2021, and the financial outlook is poor for many others across England. Between 2009-10 and 2019-20, government grant funding for councils dropped by 40 per cent in real terms.
Caller was brought out of retirement to take on the role at Birmingham by Michael Gove, then the levelling-up secretary. He is overseeing the council’s transformation from a struggling local authority to a fully functioning one. Under his leadership, a statutory intervention has been made, meaning national government is involved in its running, appointing commissioners with powers over council business including finances and recruitment.
It was in the early Noughties as chief executive of Hackney that Caller first experienced this process. “Hackney was the first authority to be subject to directions [from government]. They couldn’t afford to let local authorities behave that badly.” He worked closely with Jules Pipe, recently elected council leader when Caller arrived and now one of the deputy mayors of London. Hackney’s problems were pervasive and acutely felt by its residents, who had begun to resent the council. Caller and his team completed a survey of residents to gauge their feelings about the authority. “It was fascinating,” he said. “They uniformly said the council was terrible. It didn’t collect the bins, didn’t repair the houses, didn’t clean the streets.” When he broached this with the council’s staff, he heard a different story: “When we talked about this to the employees, they said, ‘No, we’re doing a great job. [They’re] the wrong sort of residents. We need different residents. They don’t appreciate us.’”
Caller is resolute, however, that Hackney’s decline was not the fault of residents but the inevitable culmination of a breakdown in governance. He explained that as a result of the hung council, no single person had overall control and decision-making had ground to a halt. “Officers stopped even thinking that members might take decisions, so they were just doing stuff on their own,” he said. This is a sequence of events with which he has become familiar in the course of his career. “The whole thing had just disintegrated. We had to build local government from the ground up.”
Caller’s career in local government had humble beginnings: an engineer by trade, his first job in the early 1970s was working on a project feasibility study for the (since abolished) Greater London Council (GLC). The project in question was the Thames Tideway Tunnel: a 25km super-sewer built to intercept sewage spills from the toilets of inner London. “I started working for the GLC of late lamented memory in 1972,” he said. “I wanted to get my professional qualifications as quickly as possible, and they offered a really good training programme.”
Construction on the super-sewer was finally completed earlier this year, 50 years after Caller was commissioned “to work out whether we could solve the problem – and you could. Fifty years later, and look, we’re building it, which tells you everything you need to know about infrastructure in the UK.”
After leaving the GLC, Caller remained on the London local government circuit and moved to Merton Council, where he was involved in the development of Wimbledon town centre. Four years after moving to Barnet Council to become the borough’s chief engineer, he was made the council’s chief executive in 1989.
In Birmingham, Caller and his team have a great challenge ahead to turn around the council before the end of the five years Michael Gove has given them. The council’s problems are deep and, much like in Hackney, have had dire consequences for the city’s residents. It is currently faced with a £760m bill for equal pay claims and a struggling flagship IT system, which experienced 8,000 issues in its first six months and is projected to cost the council £100m – five times the original estimate. But Caller makes clear that these two issues are symptoms of a wider problem rather than with the presiding cause. “In the past, they had set budgets which they said they were going to live with, and then never lived with them. That’s the main cause of the financial crisis now.”
He emphasises that “the symptoms of failure in every authority are always different, but underlying [them] there are always three things in common”, which are “failures in governance, failures in leadership and a lack of honesty in communication”. In Birmingham, this manifested in staff members feeling unable to raise the issues they identified. “If it’s a career-limiting position to be honest about what’s going on, no one will address the problems. If you cover everything up, nothing ever gets better.”
Only the prospect of improving the lives of local residents, he says, could have led him to abandon his retirement to become a commissioner in Birmingham. “I believe in local government. I want residents to get a good result. We can’t afford to let them down.”
In Hackney, a good result is precisely what Caller delivered. “I think the thing that signalled change… was London Fields Lido. When I got there it was a pile of rubble. It had been closed for years. It was never going to be reopened.” Now the lido is one of most beloved outdoor swimming spots in the city, a hub of community activity described by some residents as “the peoples’ pool”. He looks back on the project with fondness: “People now talk about going to London Fields Lido. Getting that open just demonstrated that Hackney Council could do proper things.”
For now, the prospect of a similarly enduring community project seems unlikely in Birmingham, where planned cuts of £300m were recently announced. But Max Caller has ambitious ideas for the local council that dragged him out of retirement.
[See also: Raja Shehadeh: “Israel is trying to make another Nakba”]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire