By Jane Haynes

Copyright birminghammail

An emergency meeting has been called by Birmingham City Council after a BirminghamLive expose about troubling delays to its problem-plagued, multi-million pound IT system, known as Oracle. The special meeting of the council’s audit committee has been arranged at short notice, for Monday night, so officers can set out exactly is going on after whistleblowers raised the alarm over delays. Members of the cross party committee will receive an update on progress. READ MORE: Major update on Birmingham City Council’s £171m IT project as whistleblowers say ‘it’s a mess’ Insiders contacted BirminghamLive amid concerns about the knock on impact of delay on the whole programme’s launch date of April 2026. They were also concerned that those responsible for scrutinising the project did not have sufficient knowledge of this specialist area to properly govern it. The Oracle project has been plagued with issues since it was first launched in 2022. It went live despite multiple warnings and then failed spectacularly, leaving the council unable to keep reliable accounts and open to fraud. What was originally an £18m upgrade to a new cloud based finance, HR and digital enterprise resource planning system has instead racked up a bill of more than £170 million to put right, including a full re-implementation. It was said to be a major contributory factor in the council’s de facto bankruptcy in 2023. A report to the council’s Cabinet, appearing the day our story was published, gave the scheme a clean bill of health and did not mention any major hold-ups. It had a RAG rating of ‘amber’ because of its complexity but there was otherwise nothing problematic to report, it said. But in reality the critical Income Management System, which records all incoming payments and tallies them with bank records, has been dogged with problems and delayed four times, most recently after failing quality checks. Officers told us the scheme was ‘a mess’. In response to questions following publication of our story, finance chief Carol Culley admitted there had been significant hold-ups. She denied misleading councillors, telling them the Labour leadership and the independent chair of the audit committee Andrew Hardingham had been alerted to the delays. But she said the decision was taken not to inform members more widely until a solution and new implementation date was agreed. Culley said: “We did not want to brief with false information in advance.” Cllr Roger Harmer, Lib Dems group leader, referred to our article to ask why senior councillors were only being made aware of delays to the IMS through the press, and how much members and staff could trust the governance and transparency around the project. “The staff have had to whistleblow to journalists to highlight that things were off track,” he said. It was an example of the council still not embedding the ‘cultural change’ required to ensure openness. “We are now two years into the process (since promises of improvement) and still hear concerns about lack of cultural change – when will we see real progress on this,” he added. While Cllr Robert Alden, Conservatives group leader, said it was only because of insiders leaking to the press that the truth had come out. “That is very concerning.” Ms Culley responded that the council had clear whistleblowing processes in place, and that a lot of work was being done across the council to ensure there is an ‘open and transparent culture’ at work for staff. Monday’s special meeting will be available to view remotely through the council’s online webcasting site.