Birmingham City Council has confirmed it is putting six commercial shop units up for auction, the latest instalment in a sustained programme of asset disposals designed to plug a gaping hole in the local authority's finances. The move follows the council's effective bankruptcy declaration in September 2023, when it issued a Section 114 notice after equal pay liabilities ballooned to an estimated £760 million and a botched IT system implementation added hundreds of millions more to its bill. For a council once responsible for one of Europe's largest municipal property portfolios, the sale of six shops may look modest in scale, but it is emblematic of a much larger, more consequential shift now under way across UK local government.