Birmingham has been legally constrained to raise taxes at a maximum of 5% per year, even with the massive inflation in the past few years. A 10% increase this year (what they are asking for) will still put them at an (inflation adjusted) lower tax rate than 2019.
Further, rates are arbitrarily constrained by central government on a value for money and/or starve the beast basis. Councils are in theory free to raise taxes less than this, but in practice the maximum increase is way less than the annual increase in what it actually costs councils to provide services[0]. Coupled with an almost complete removal of government grants (which used to represent ~35% of council income) councils have been cutting everything that moves and still circling the drain. This has been going on since 2008. Every council issuing a Section 114 notice has its own local reasons for getting to this point now, but frankly the whole sector has been buggered.
TLDR: proposition 13, but imposed by central government instead of the voters, for all possible sources of income except user fees rather than just property taxes, and with no reduction in legal responsibilities to discharge.
[0]: The most expensive local government services are intrinsically staff heavy and so suffer from Baumol's Cost Disease. Teaching class sizes are basically limited to 30, for example, and require one qualified teacher each. Child protection is the other biggest expense.
Cut everything, and I do mean everything down to the bone.
Fire half of all government employees in every ministry tomorrow. Then a year from now fire half of the ones that are left. Stop hiring for the next 5 years.
Then stop providing any services that do not involve foreign relations/military/most public infrastructure.
Yes, I'm talking all those licensing requirements, NHS, welfare, etc... Eliminate them all tomorrow.
I can assure you that 10 years from now when the government is 1/10th of what it is today things will still be running.
See, the government in the UK has already stopped proving a good number of services. Policing is limited to extreme cases, schooling is meh, public healthcare is meh at best, and the list goes on. So where is all the tax money going?
Which they should stop.
So we have a shortage of doctors, nurses and hospital places.
Currently the state keeps a lid on costs because it sets the wages of about 1 million people nationally (more or less, its complicated, but doctors are paid in grades, and those levels are nominally set nationally, same with nurses, however scotland, wales and NI have some level of independence.)
We have huge pent up demand (7 million people on the waiting list)
And we have a limited and shrinking skilled workforce.
It takes a good 12 years to train a doctor. 6 to train a nurse.
what do you think will happen to wages when the whole thing is privatised?
Yeah, so privatising healthcare isn't going to make things cheaper. especially as the NHS is pretty cheap per head by EU standards.
This is akin to political suicide though. Remember, the conservatives' Brexit battle cry was 300 million pounds for the NHS.