Birmingham city council’s chief executive has said there could be “catastrophic consequences” for some people in the city because years of cuts have forced it to slash funding for key services for vulnerable people.

Mark Rogers, who runs the biggest council in England, said the effects of six years of austerity meant Birmingham’s youth service had “all but gone”, homelessness prevention services had been cut by so much that rough sleeping had quadrupled, and far fewer elderly people were eligible for care at home.

In an interview with the Guardian, he also said a network of children’s centres designed to serve the city’s most deprived communities had been dismantled so that now only the “super-deprived” were being helped, and even these remaining services were under threat.

Rogers said the council had reached “a deadly serious situation for too many vulnerable people who face the prospect of not having their needs met”. He said that as a non-elected official it was not his place to use words such as “catastrophic”, but added: “We are fast reaching the point where there could be catastrophic consequences for some people.”

The council has almost halved its headcount since 2008, from around 24,000 to 12,500, and says staff numbers could be as low as 8,000 by 2020. By that point the council will have made £800m worth of cuts since the era of austerity began in 2010, and expects to have lost 50% of its grant from central government.

Eligibility for adult social care has been restricted so that only people with “substantial and critical” needs now receive help. Rogers said: “We are having to be much more stringent about that eligibility. We get the legitimate criticism that people providing home care support are only there for 15 minutes.”

As the government debates how to bridge a vast national social care funding gap, this year another £28m was cut from Birmingham’s adult care budget of £230m. The council is still cutting 10% a year. “The big disaster that is coming is if the government doesn’t do anything for social care,” Rogers said.

He said 2017/18 would be the toughest year yet for the council, with expected reductions of £113m to the council’s overall budget, on top of the £650m already cut since 2010. “It is the seventh year of cuts and next year has the last huge slug in it.”



He said he regretted the cuts he had been forced to make to important services, and listed half a dozen areas. In addition to social care, he singled out cuts to homelessness prevention services as one of the reasons why rough sleeping in the city had quadrupled since 2010. This month a homeless man died on the coldest night of the winter so far, and charities said the risks of more people dying were “massively increased” because of the cuts.

Rogers also highlighted cuts to council youth services. “The youth service has all but gone. In 2010 it would have been seen as one of the exemplar programmes in the country, we would have had dozens of youth services. Now we have just two youth centres, with the possibility of further reduction.”

He said Birmingham was in the “unenviable position” of competing with Liverpool to be classified as the city in England worst affected by local authority cuts, but councils throughout the UK faced similar difficulties. The Local Government Association said councils in England and Wales had dealt with a 40% real-terms reduction to their core government grant between 2010 and 2015, and had made a total of £20bn in savings, losing 350,000 full-time staff members.

“We are not desensitised to what’s happening, but we have got used to having to do this systematically. We need to take the least worst decisions that we can,” Rogers said.

Birmingham town hall and council HQ. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Birmingham had 40 advice centres in 2010; now there are just four. “I think those information and advice and guidance services that help people who haven’t quite tipped into severe distress are the things that I most wish we still had.

“We know the more impoverished someone is, obviously, the less money they have, the less ability they have to travel around to find help and advice. We had quite an extensive network of neighbourhood advice centres, council-funded places where people could get advice on a range of issues, particularly housing. We have consolidated them down to a very small number.”

The council has not reduced bin collection services, and libraries and sports centres so far remain largely unaffected, so the scale of the cuts is not visible to many residents. Around 80% of the council’s budget is spent on 20% of the population, the most vulnerable people who are most reliant on state support (and who are often least able to protest against reductions in services). “It is those vulnerable people who are disproportionately hit,” Rogers said.

He was concerned about ongoing cuts to the children’s centres in the city. The council has put the remaining services out to tender and is looking to recontract at a considerably lower cost, with further cuts of at least 10%.

“They have halved already in number. They were designed to serve the most deprived communities; now they are serving the super-deprived communities and that is under threat because of the need to save,” Rogers said.

The survival of some nursery provision is also under threat. This was a particularly sensitive area, he said with an unhappy laugh, “given that giving children a good start is one of the council’s priorities”.

Rogers was also sorry about cuts made to environmental health inspections. “We are doing far less monitoring than we would like to around basic food hygiene and safety. We haven’t seen an increase in food poisoning yet but we have removed the preventive aspect of that work, giving advice on how to keep restaurants and cafes fit for serving food, so we know we will have a less safe picture in the future.”

The former leader of Birmingham council, Sir Albert Bore, warned of the difficulties to come as soon as cuts were announced, predicting the “end of local government as we know it” and sketching out a graph he dubbed the “jaws of doom”, with one line showing the needs of residents soaring and a second showing funding plummeting, creating an image vaguely evoking the open mouth of a crocodile about to bite. Now that the council is in the midst of the funding reductions, the predictions no longer feel alarmist.

This year will be the most challenging because all the easy savings have already been made. The council’s huge downsizing so far has mainly been achieved through voluntary redundancies and by not staffing unfilled posts, but the next wave of job cuts is more likely to include compulsory departures. “We could be as low as 9,000 or 8,000 by 2020,” Rogers said.

He refused to subscribe to the Conservative argument – voiced most powerfully by the former communities secretary Eric Pickles – that local government was previously bloated. “I don’t subscribe to the language of being fat or flabby,” he said, although he acknowledged that “with hindsight we could have spent that money with greater efficacy”.

He believed the imposition of large cuts was not simply a response to the 2008 banking crisis. “Deficit reduction enabled first the coalition and then the straight Tory government to pursue a straight Tory objective of a smaller state.”

Rogers said he was not personally depressed by the work he had to do, but recognised that his colleagues were under intense pressure. “I know that at this time of year in particular, large numbers of staff will feel seriously worried, as they should be, about their job security, because every year the council has had to get smaller.

“Keeping your professionalism, while all around you each year there are fewer services, fewer staff, is one of the great challenges for every leader. How do you maintain the confidence of your staff when their jobs seem to be constantly under threat?”