Funding for 122 regeneration projects around the West Midlands is to be axed, a government agency has announced - but it refuses to say which ones are affected.

Advantage West Midlands, a quango funded by the taxpayer, has been forced to cut spending on regeneration schemes for three reasons:

• The Government has cut its budget by £48 million.


• The money it raises itself, through land and property receipts, is down by £21 million.


• Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has ordered it to focus the money it does have on measures that directly support industry, rather than regeneration.

Perhaps, then, it has no choice but to withdraw funding from some regeneration schemes which had previously been told they could expect it.

But the refusal to name the projects concerned is a pretty blatant attempt to limit the public relations damage by making it hard for us to report what has actually happened.

The people running the projects involved know who they are, as they were told in letters from AWM chief executive Mike Laverty earlier this week.

I can't see any reason why a Freedom of Information request couldn't be used to get the details, but hopefully AWM will see sense and just publish them before that happens.

Edit: AWM have sent me this statement:

"A list of projects to which funding is no longer allocated will be released on request by Advantage West Midlands shortly. The release of this information to the media is being delayed slightly in order to ensure that affected applicants have received notification and had time to assess the impact of the funding decision.

"Some applicants may already be in discussion with alternative funding providers. We do not want to compromise those discussions by announcing that those projects have definitely been cut, when in fact they might proceed through alternative mechanisms."

Birmingham City Council, the local authority that decided to ban the use of apostrophes in road signs, is spending a lot of money on developing a new website and when officials tested the super-duper IT they discovered.......yes, you've guessed it, there were no apostrophes.
That might not have been so bad, but there were no pound signs either - which was a bit embarrassing given that the new system is supposed to enable citizens to pay council tax bills on line and make inquiries about other services.

Former West Midlands Minister Liam Byrne is not a man to say something for no reason at all.
So when Mr Byrne made a point of mentioning planned housing growth in Birmingham, his audience ought to have taken note.
Addressing the Be Birmingham strategic partnership - a gathering of executives from the city council, other public bodies and business leaders - Mr Byrne characteristically laid into the Conservative-run city council for delivering below-average schools and for lacking in ambition.
And then, in a section of the speech almost thrown away he began to talk about the number of new homes Birmingham must plan to build up to 2026.

Deputy city council leader Paul Tilsley must have found it difficult to control his famously short temper when forced to listen to Hodge Hill Labour MP Liam Byrne's analysis of the state Birmingham finds itself in.
Byrne, who is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and a former West Midlands Minister, was giving a keynote speech at the annual summit of Be Birmingham - the city strategic partnership chaired by Coun Tilsley.
If anyone thought this would be the usual back-slapping gathering of the great and good, they were quickly disabused by Mr Byrne.

The inquiry into the collapse of MG Rover has completed its work - but we may still have to wait to discover what it says.

My colleagues on the business desk are working on a story reporting that the inquiry into the collapse of MG Rover has been completed, at a cost of almost £16 million, four years after it began.

The collapse of the Birmingham carmaker in 2005 directly cost around 5,200 jobs according to the National Audit Office, which measured the number of former MG Rover staff who signed on for Jobseekers Allowance. Their 2006 report (a 1.38mb PDF download) is here.

The Government has revealed that a new report setting out the findings of an official inquiry into MG Rover is now in the hands of Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, in a Parliamentary written answer to Richard Burden (Lab), the Northfield MP who has been increasingly vocal in demanding its publication.

Business Minister Ian Lucas said in the written answer: "The inspectors delivered their report on 11 June 2009. It will be for my noble Friend the Secretary of State to consider its findings and next steps."

The steps Lord Mandelson will take obviously depend on what the report says.

I say there could be a delay before it is published because the report's findings will determine whether any further action is needed. If it is needed, then the publication of the report could be considered prejudicial to that action.

This morning I and two fellow-conspirators set to work creating the long list for the judging of the 2009 Birmingham Post / Birmingham Future Power 50 list. To find out more about this initiative, go here.
Being a stats junkie, I thought it would be interesting to see what the balance is between different sectors: public / private, education vs arts etc.
This is what we've found so far, but please bear in mind the long list isn't completed until tonight (Monday June 22).

• Arts & Culture 17
• Business 41
• Media 10
• Public Sector 23
• Science & Tech 2
• Sport 3
• Third Sector 6
• Academia 7
• Grand Total 109

Coverage of MPs' expenses has understandably focused on the way that key details were blanked out.

Some of the worst excesses were only spotted because a newspaper obtained unofficial copies of MPs' receipts, with all the details intact.

As I have said in the Birmingham Post in the past, I was one of those people who had doubts about whether the Daily Telegraph was right to publish advance, leaked details of expenses claims - but was soon forced to agree that they were.

We always knew that the receipts would be censored before the official release. You can see how the process works in the video I made a few weeks back.

But I think some of the reports in today's papers, which suggest MPs simply got to choose what to delete, give the wrong impression.

I've written today, in a story which should go up on this website before long, about two MPs - Andrew Mitchell (Con Sutton Coldfield) and Liam Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill) - who actually asked for information to be public, and were told by the Commons fees office that it would be censored whether they liked it or not.

You've seen what journalists make of MPs' expenses claims. And you may have seen some of the claims themselves, when individual MPs chose to place them on their websites.

But on Thursday, June 18, the great British public will at last be allowed to examined every claim, in detail, when the House of Commons finally gets around to making them officially available.

The whole lot is going up on the website for people to examine.

Well, kind of. Because what you're going to get is the censored version (officially called the "redacted" version"), missing out details such as the addresses of homes MPs are claiming subsidies on.

So you won't know, for example, if MPs are claiming cash for properties in their constituency, or in London, or somewhere else entirely.

Neither will it be possible to tell if they have "flipped" properties - buying furniture for one home and then designating another one as their second residence, allowing them to get a second sofa.

Perhaps it doesn't matter - as the newspapers have already uncovered all the dirt.

But I'm betting people won't see it that way. This is a chance for the nation's bloggers to prove Gordon Brown is right about the power of the interweb and spot the stories the traditional media have missed.

At least, assuming they're not already sick to the back teeth of expenses.

The mind-numbing futility of life on the backbenches at Birmingham City Council has been exposed yet again, this time by the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over £15,000 salaries to the local authority's non-executive NEC directors.
When the matter came before the full council last week - with a recommendation to make the payments to city leader Mike Whitby, his deputy Paul Tilsley, cabinet member Neville Summerfield and opposition Labour leader Sir Albert Bore - most of the cannon-fodder councillors far removed from the very small Whitby-loop didn't have a clue what they were being asked to vote for.

No show at the leisure scrutiny committee from Birmingham city councillor Martin Mullaney.
The new cabinet member for leisure, sport and culture declined an invitation to come along and give his views on the sprawling portfoilo.
It was possibly the first time that the normally outspoken Moseley Liberal Democrat has refused to share his thoughts with anyone who is prepared to listen.
He was also unusually quiet at Monday's cabinet meeting, his second since being appointed, where he made no verbal contribution.