I can tell you for free that there is no way BCC have got the smarts to run this project.

However they do know the pronouns of all the people on the project and have made sure anyone who doesn't agree isn't upsetting the safe work space.

In Birmingham? I thought they only needed gender information to to decide who was a real person and who should be covering themselves

Indeed, and these are the same muppets who can't even organize rubbish collections.

You've been downvoted for attacking the abomination that is pronouns.

Asking people to remember something unique about every single person they interact with is not reasonable. People just want to get on with their jobs. No-one sets out to deliberately misgender someone, or upset someone, gender rarely matters or has any place in the workplace when it comes down to doing actual work.

People generally do care about other people to the extent that is doesn't cause an unnecessary burden on them. We've gone too far the wrong way with trying to accommodate every single last person's sensitivities proclivities and requirements as if they were the only people that mattered.

We are all human beings, be nice to eachother, yes you are unique in your own way, but along with every single other one of billions of people in this world, you are not more special than the person next to you.

We are not at the point in humanity where we have the luxury to add more complications to every day life without something going pop somewhere. Life is stressful as it is without worrying about whether you've accidentally misgendered someone or used the incorrect pronouns (why would it even come up) because you didn't see it on their email signature before meeting them.

Most people if they don't know if the person they are meeting is a man or a woman or someone who is transgender is quite capable of not putting their foot in their mouth and would say they/them automatically. Expecting people to adhere to anything more than that is just plain unreasonable.

As much as I dislike personal pronouns, people who rant off-topic unprovoked about them are worse. It's a subject best ignored.

To bring this back on topic though: Oracle now has hundreds of billions in debt thanks to its AI follies. So much that it is being [1]sued by its own bondholders for misleading them about the size of its debt.

£144M will not make a dent in that, and it looks likely that Big Red could go pop, especially if they were to replace staff with chatbots to try and save costs. There is scant chance that they will ever deliver this project.

If I were BCC, I'd be going back to SAP, or perhaps paper (call it a cyberattack preparation exercise), and suing Oracle for the mess, pro bono if possible as they might not be in a position to pay up.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/oracle-sued-by-bondholders-over-losses-tied-ai-buildout-2026-01-14/

Uh Oh. As if by magic, the next story appears on El Reg

[1]Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/oracle_td_cowen_note/

OP was on topic, in that the council have spent time and money to tick the boxes on superficial culture war stuff, but failed comprehensively at the basics of council operations: paying people the right money (law suit), implementing software (Oracle), and emptying the bins. And they have cost the people they are supposed to serve an enormous amount of money by their failure. They should all have been fired for this, and banned from holding public office for the rest of their lives. But politicians always get away with stuff. And ordinary people pay for their failure.

Most people are indeed willing to refer to other people by the pronoun they prefer, but, unfortunately, some aren't, which is essentially bullying, and is unreasonable behaviour. We should all just live and let live (and, as you say, just use "they" at first, if you're not sure).

(But what does annoy me about the Patronising Pronoun Police is their pedantic and completely pointless obsession about laboriously spelling out the [1]declensions of their preferred pronoun. It's mindless unthinking wokier-than-thou virtue-signalling cult-following behaviour. Knowing how "he", "she", or "they" declines in all of the other grammatical cases is something that we have all known since childhood when we learned to speak!)

[YAAC, I'm none of the above ACs]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

And there’s no finishing line in sight.

Not even close to record levels of bad from councils unfortunately.

Not when you've got the likes of Thurrock where quite obvious corruption syphoned off similar amounts.

Has anyone told Birmingham to procure a system that should work?

Have they missed that in the contract?

Is it just one manifestation of a public body which has simply grown too big for its own good? Looking at the Wikipedia article it seems to have grown by agglomeration of a whole lot of borough councils, probably in the name of "efficiency" and then taken on the role which the county council formerly played in 1974. If my own post-1974 lot were this size I could easily envisage them making a mess on this scale; as it is they just have to be content of messing up on a smaller scale.

I dislike this argument. There are much bigger organisations in the world.

But maybe there's something in it: they're big enough to be have lots of complexity, but not big enough to be able to smooth out the "bumps"?

Local authorities have a much more diverse set of functions and responsibilities that most commercial organisations. They are the ultimate in vertical integration, cradle to grave. Education, housing, social care, roads, cleansing, planning. Some of it defined in statute. Some of it generic enough to be off loaded to third parties, much of it jealously guarded and kept in house. And at the top elected officials with no requirement for practical qualifications in the things they are responsible for.

What could possibly go wrong?

I doubt if BCC is unique in being a complete cluster-duck. Its just they are the most obvious due to being the largest. What I really don't get is why each authority has to develop its own IT solutions. They all do the same thing more of less so it should be one size fits all. Deity knows how long it'd take to get agreement and build that though.

I'm absolutely not tarring everyone with the same brush, nor painting with broad strokes when I say the following (it hopefully goes without saying that the vast majority of the public sector contains amazing people doing amazing jobs).

HOWEVER... it also contains a ton of complete fuckwits (who remain completely oblivious to the fact that they're a fuckwit - despite everyone else in the department knowing it). These are people who simply wouldn't be employed at the level they're employed at in most private sector companies (some not employable at any level!). Incompetent people tend to get found out quicker. Sure, nepotism reigns in the private sector, you get idiot owners, and so on, but a random fuckwit who was employed beyond their capacity, sticking to a job like a fly to shit, is FAR more common in the public sector.

There are people in positions that they are 100% not suitable for and they'll probably stay there for the rest of their lives (or worse - get further promoted).

The Peter Principle applies the same as it does anywhere (private sector included), but the public sector is just different. It hits harder. Departments are often scared stiff of unions (and again - not knocking unions, I've been in and around them myself), and then you have things like demarcation, great in theory, but it also leads to fuckwits finding niche roles, holding on to them with dear life, and preventing anyone else from intervening in the chaos that ensues. You have people cross promoted across departments with zero experience (I've worked somewhere where a library manager was promoted to lead a Cloud Computing team - zero IT experience! He flapped about for a year, mostly hiding in his office, then got promoted to something else he wasn't remotely qualified to do).

I could recount 50 other stories like this. I'm sure anyone who has ever worked in the public sector will have similar tales.

When things work, it's because a bunch of talented and skillful people made it work in spite of the fuckwits. Unfortunately that isn't always the case - there's only so many fuckwits you can carry and it isn't an even distribution. If you're lucky you only have one or two to deal with, but just a few incompetent people in the wrong position can drown entire departments.

Is the fuckwit to talent ratio worse than the private sector? And if so, why?

Depends on sector - I don't think it's too controversial to say that investment banking particularly and sales generally, tends to draw a lot of fuckwits in the private sector.

And our Lords And Masters are planning to make all councils "big" in the name of efficiency.

(nobody say "gerrymandering")

The people trying to implement this do not know what they are doing.

Also, the people who keep approving the budget increases do not know what they are doing.

At some point, both groups should be held to account. But they won't be. Maybe a few very low-hanging fruit. But none of the people at the top.

This is just a pile of rubbish.

Ask any Brummie.

Heads need to roll. Preferably mounted on poles in the city centre.

That's how many nurses? How many SEND places? How many potholes?

nurses are not employed by the council

Most of the roads in Birmingham are the responsibly of the highway agency and not the council

Meanwhile BCC has plans to flatten at least two districts: Ladywood and Druid's Heath. Ladywood was flattened in the 1960s, when 19th century slums were replaced with 20th century slums, that they have failed to maintain, warranting the building of 21st century slums. They plan to pay for this by judicial robbery / no-fault eviction of owner-occupiers, on the grounds that they "form al ly" own the land, when probably they form er ly owned it and then sold it, ie they are illiterate as well as incompetent and arrogant.

They spent years and untold millions re-paving the two main squares, making it very difficult to walk through them. Now they've dug up New Street, the principal shopping street.

Oh, and I have a year's recycling piled up in my garden (being fortunate to have the space for it). Even though they can't resolve the bin strike, they have decided to give everybody four bins, supposedly for different kinds of recycling.

Yeah, but Left-wing so A-OK, no bad people here.

Yes I know councils of all stripes can be useless, but the lack of censure seems to be a particular attribute.

Costs less. Works fine. Doesn't get hacked. Needs no AI. Works with any writing instrument. Can easily be indexed and stored. Doesn't need to be upgraded. Available from your local shop. Forms can be printed easily on any printer.

Someone should work out how much they would have saved if they used paper, supported by standalone, non-networked systems running basic Works software, where required.