It is funny that my hon. Friend says that. When the constituency committees were introduced in Northfield, they always met on a Saturday, which is not ideal in many ways, but it meant that I as a Member of Parliament was able to get to most of them. Interestingly, once the Conservatives gained a majority on that committee, they moved the meetings to weekdays. I can get to very few of them now. I occasionally attend meetings when they are held in the recess. Probably, after this debate, we will find that none is held during the parliamentary recesses. My hon. Friend makes a good point.

According to what I believe, and according to the council's own rhetoric, devolution is also about consultation and engagement with the people whom public institutions such as Birmingham city council serve in making the decisions that they make. If we are really brave, devolution may even be about taking those first steps along the road of empowering local people to make a difference to the shape of services in their areas and their neighbourhoods.

Everyone seems to sign up to the rhetoric of consultation and engagement, and often even empowerment. We see it scattered around goodness knows how many city council publications. Councils nominate themselves for goodness knows how many awards, praising their own achievements and creativity in these areas. Sometimes they even win those awards because their self-promotion often seems to make a compelling case.

Of course there are examples of good practice in Birmingham, but when I try to relate all the rhetoric to what I see happening on the ground in my constituency, there is a huge gap. Put bluntly, if it is difficult for a Member of Parliament to get a clear picture of what the city council is doing when, generally, MPs can get hold of financial reports, write letters to this committee or that cabinet member, or even hold a debate here in Parliament, what chance is there for an individual constituent in Birmingham, Northfield? What chance is there for the voluntary or community group that relies on funding controlled or commissioned by the city council under programmes such as the supporting people programme-for groups that are scared that if they rock the boat or question the city council too much, they will be out on their ear?

Let me give a few examples to show how difficult it is to find out what is going on in Birmingham. A couple of months ago, looking at a financial statement relating to the service plan for my constituency of Northfield for the coming year, I found a budget heading called "Community Arts". It is true that, at local level, there was a small community arts budget last year. It was for about £3,000. However, when I looked at the service plan for the coming year, £301,000 was listed as being cut from a budget that was only £3,000 in the first place. So I asked what it was all about. I did not understand. "Don't worry," I was told. "It doesn't mean that. You see, most constituencies don't have a community arts budget at all, so we have been told by the centre"-the centre of the council-"that this is where we should park the efficiency savings that we have to make."

I was not too happy about that. When I raised the matter again at the meeting of the city council's constituency committee for Northfield, which I was able to attend, on 22 September this year, I got a similar explanation. The minutes of that meeting record my response fairly accurately. They state:

"The Member of Parliament considered that this method of accounting made the figures completely meaningless and he requested that it be placed on record that he considered this arrangement to be unsatisfactory."

As I say, those minutes capture my sentiments exactly. However, I did not get anywhere nearer knowing what was going on-either at that meeting or when the minutes came out.

Another example of what I am talking about is a project called business transformation, which the city council says is about developing a fundamentally different approach to running its services, so that it will be more efficient and save millions of pounds. We are told that the programme is about getting resources to the front line and saving on central bureaucracy. It may even be one of those projects where the council has nominated itself for awards, and it may even have won one or two of them. Indeed, it may be an excellent programme, but I simply do not see the evidence on the ground-in my constituency.

I do know-from figures that I managed to extract from the city council after a lot of pushing, prodding and trying-that financing the cost of the business transformation programme means a cut to Northfield's budget in net terms of £55,000 in 2007-08, £89,000 in 2008-09 and an anticipated £241,000 in 2009-10. I have also been told by the council that the business transformation project will not hit front-line services, and that no savings will be made that are not, as the council put it, "encashable". But when I have asked who is doing the encashing, and how much saved money will go back to serve the people of Northfield and, in particular, go back to the budgets over which, at least theoretically, there is some local control, the responses have been esoteric to say the least.

The entire devolved budget for the Northfield parliamentary constituency is about £9.37 million, so a cut of £241,000, on top of other efficiency savings, is potentially pretty serious. Surely, therefore, it is not too much to ask for some straight answers to the question, "Exactly where has that money gone?" There is no evidence that only Northfield is experiencing such problems; my impression is that similar problems exist in every one of Birmingham's parliamentary constituencies.

Rumours abound about big changes to the way in which leisure centres in Birmingham are run and managed, but most of us will not know much about what is going on until contracts have been signed and things are presented as a fait accompli. In that context, I shall ask my hon. Friend the Minister some questions. She will be aware of the concern-it has attracted considerable press comment-about the millions of pounds of working neighbourhoods fund money that the Government provide to Birmingham. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government recently wrote to Birmingham city council's deputy leader, who chairs the Birmingham strategic partnership, to express his disappointment at the slow progress in using those funds.

Although I know of projects up and running in my constituency which simply would not exist if the Government had not invested that money, I too am concerned about the pace of spend. All too often, trying to get a handle on what is going on is about as easy as trying to knit fog. It is not easy to sort out why things are so painfully slow, and it is not easy to see whether, overall, working neighbourhoods fund money is being spent on what it should be spent on.

For the avoidance of doubt, I must state that I want the investment to continue. Indeed, I welcome the extra support that Birmingham has received from the Secretary of State in recent weeks, but that does not absolve the city council or, to some extent, its partner organisations from being far more transparent in what they do. I do not think that the city council is deliberately obtuse about these matters-either with me, with its partners in the Birmingham strategic partnership or with the people of Birmingham. Rather, the council is such a large bureaucracy, and so obsessed with its own rules and procedures, that it ends up understanding accountability only between different bits of itself, rather than to anyone else. That is a problem, and I say again that if a Member of Parliament often cannot find out what is going on, what real chance do the public stand? If local people cannot even find out what is happening, how will they have the chance to exercise any real influence over local decisions that affect them and their area?

I am not saying that opaque decision making comes out of only Conservative-controlled institutions such as Birmingham city council. These days the Conservatives spend much of their time talking about a "new localism" or a "radical decentralisation" of power, but we need to remember that there is still a huge gap between their rhetoric of decentralisation and the reality on the ground in Tory-led authorities such as Birmingham. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Cameron, talks about giving real power to local people, but his own Conservative colleagues on Birmingham city council cannot seem to manage to deliver that in practice. What does that say about how a Conservative Government would behave given that the Conservative party chairman, Mr. Pickles, has said:

"Our Conservative Councils will demonstrate how we will run the country"?

I guess that how the Conservatives deal with the gap between rhetoric and reality is up to them. People will have the chance to make a judgment about that in due course.

For now, I would like to ask for help from the Minister. I recognise that she cannot run Birmingham city council. However, I hope that the inquiries that the Secretary of State has made about the working neighbourhoods fund will bear fruit and that the results will be widely shared. I ask the Minister to ensure that in the DCLG's dealings with Birmingham city council, she reminds it that it has a responsibility to be far more open than it is being, including with the city's MPs. I also ask her to ensure that next time Birmingham city council nominates itself for a best practice award or for praise on an issue where there is DCLG involvement of some sort, she will look beyond the rhetoric and self-promotion to see if what it is saying in theory is reflected in what is happening on the ground.