It's one simple, chilling sentence in the suicide note left by Stephanie Bottrill from Solihull early on the bank holiday weekend before the 53-year-old was hit by a lorry on the M6 near her home.

Because of the government's changes to housing benefit, she had been told that she would have to find an extra £80 per month in rent.

On the face of it this was a classic example of the under-occupancy on which the government is determined to clamp down.

Her children had moved away from the three-bedroom house. She now lived alone so the taxpayer had, in effect, been subsidising her spare rooms.

But the house had been her home for 18 years. She had become increasingly worn down by illness and money worries and the reduction of her housing benefit appears to have been the last straw.

Her tragedy has inflamed still further the argument raging over the government's welfare changes in general and in particular, over what Labour call "the bedroom tax" and the government call "the spare room subsidy".

The Department for Work and Pensions say they do not comment on individual cases but in broad terms they are trying to introduce fairness into the system.

Their concept of fairness includes discretionary payments to local councils to help them cushion the effects of the changes for those individuals who find themselves at the sharp end of these measures.

In the West Midlands alone these payments total over £11m.

And when ministers use that word "fairness" (increasingly the major F-word in the debate about benefits as we head towards the next general election) what they also mean is fairness to the general taxpayer.

They point out that the cost to the Exchequer of housing benefit has doubled over the past 10 years. It now stands at £23bn, some £10bn less than the entire defence budget.

Recent opinion polls suggest the government's benefit changes are broadly supported by two-thirds of the electorate and the more Labour oppose them the more David Cameron is emboldened to ridicule the Opposition.

"It's supposed to be the Labour Party. But now it's the Welfare Party," he declared in a heated exchange with Ed Miliband during a recent session of Prime Minister's Questions.

But so often the real impact of politics comes not on the floor of the House of Commons but out in what we like to call "the real world".

Tragedies such as the one that befell Stephanie Bottrill have the potential to cut clean to the heart of a debate that has the potential to intensify still further.

A year ago, a welter of speculation followed an address in which high-speed rail was conspicuous by its absence.

Was the government quietly driving the project into the sidings because of the furious opposition it had encountered in the shires, not least among Tory backbenchers?

So this speech represents an emphatic answer - not just one but two bills on HS2.

The so-called hybrid measure which would give Parliament's backing to the first phase between London and Birmingham but also a surprise second bill, preparatory legislation which would accelerate the flow of money into detailed construction design work, ecological surveys and compensation payments for residents and businesses along the proposed route.

The head of the local transport authority Centro, Geoff Inskip, was quick to see this as a clear signal of the government's determination to press ahead.

"This is exactly what we wanted to hear. A continuing commitment and tremendous news for the West Midlands," he enthused.

And the Birmingham and Solihull chambers of commerce said it was time for local firms to get their act together and compete for £33bn worth of contracts.

It is equally significant politically, especially after last week's strong showing in the county council elections by UKIP and Green candidates for wards on the proposed route through Staffordshire and Warwickshire, respectively.

But in Parliament itself, all the MPs with seats on the line still represent only a minority voice. The scheme commands an overwhelming consensus among the three main parties there.

Increasingly, the debate appears to be shifting away from whether or not the line should be built at all, to the compensation arrangements and detailed work on softening its environmental impact.

This will be among our main talking points in this week's Sunday Politics programme. I will be joined by the Conservative MP for Redditch Karen Lumley, a member of the Commons Transport Select Committee, and by the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, Tristram Hunt, who has been calling for a reversal of the decision not to give his city its own dedicated HS2 station.

And I hope you will join me too from 11:00 BST on BBC One this Sunday, 12 May 2013.

Yet if there is one subject that is inflaming political debate in two of our major local authority areas where they're going to the polls next Thursday, it's HS2.

So far Warwickshire has generated most of the headlines, especially in the towns and villages on the line of the first phase between London and Birmingham.

But now that second-stage lines to the north have been proposed, the 'Y-shaped' pattern spells double-trouble for Staffordshire's politicians. Unlike Warwickshire, they have two proposed HS2 corridors: one would run close to the M6 past Stafford; the other would follow the Trent Valley route via Tamworth.

Just as in Warwickshire, the county's current Conservative leaders have parted company with their Westminster top brass by coming out against it. Both complain that without an HS2 station in either county it would be all pain and no gain: all the disruption and economic impacts without the benefits of direct access to high speed services.

Last month, Staffordshire's county council incurred the wrath of HS2 supporters by organising a conference for local residents and business people. They said it was to explain the financial, economic and environmental implications of HS2 but their critics saw it as more akin to a campaigning event staged at public expense.

Will the ruling Tory group's opposition to HS2 be enough to avert a potential kicking by voters whose homes and livelihoods are in the front line? Remember the leadership of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats at Westminster support HS2 as strongly as the Prime Minister, so why should the Tories take the worst of it?

The two major parties which are entirely unambiguous in their opposition to HS2 are the Greens and the UK Independence Party: UKIP, currently riding high in the polls, are fielding more candidates in Staffordshire than the Liberal Democrats while the Greens are fielding more than the Lib Dems in Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

Factor-in the latest opinion polls suggesting a further turning-away from from the three biggest parties and you can see why UKIP and the Greens are being touted as the 'None of the Above' parties: the Liberal Democrats, so often beneficiaries of protest votes in the past, are now a party of government, so definitely 'One of the Above'!

You can see why HS2 adds yet another element of intrigue to the proceedings. Just like the proposed line itself we have never been this way before, with a genuine four- or even five-party showdown.

Next week's elections could help answer another of the big questions surrounding the politics of HS2: does it travel? Or is it really confined to that relatively small, if vocal, communities in direct line?

With one year to go until the European Elections and the General Election just 12 months beyond that, it will be fascinating to find out whether or not voters in our shire counties are ready to drive an express train through traditional party political loyalties.

She had just become the Opposition Leader. I had recently graduated from university and was entering the hallowed portals of Broadcasting House in London for the first time. I was one of the candidates shortlisted for a news traineeship, the equivalent of an apprenticeship in broadcast journalism.

On top of a searching interview, I was also to face a rigorous test of my news judgement, in competition with all the other would-be David Dimblebys.

The exercise took the form of a series of news agency print-offs, presented to me at random intervals, detailing the twists and turns of the recent Conservative Leadership contest: the initial assurances from "friends of Ted Heath" that he had the support to see-off his challenger; then the first indications that the vote would be much closer than originally expected; and finally the sensational outcome: Britain was to have her first female Leader of the Opposition.

My challenge was to translate these fast-changing, often contradictory, updates into coherent scripts which would have been fit for broadcast while the epic was being played out.

Thank you Mrs T. I owe it all to you.

This was just the first of many occasions when her life story provided a context for my own career in the foothills of political journalism.

By the time she was elected prime minister four years later, I had become a news reporter with BBC Northern Ireland.

I was assigned to cover her first visit to that troubled province. I found myself with about a dozen other accredited journalists in a minibus travelling through the centre of Belfast behind the prime minister's cortege.

Security could not have been tighter.

So imagine what went through the minds of the panic-stricken security teams when she suddenly ordered her bomb-proof Jaguar to stop so that she could plunge into the crowds thronging the pavements around Donegal Square.

Police officers threw an impromptu cordon around her, but not before I had somehow contrived to get myself inside it, my portable tape recorder over my shoulder.

The result was my first major exclusive, thanks again Mrs T.

She told me she had come to meet the "real people" of Northern Ireland. The interview was an emphatic affirmation of her determination to serve as the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; this, remember, was a time when the security forces were contending with so-called no-go areas in many parts of the province.

Spin forward another five years to the miners' strike. I was reporting live for BBC Breakfast from Littleton Colliery near Cannock in Staffordshire. Lorries carrying coal were running the gauntlet of striking miners picketing the colliery gates.

Entire families had been divided, brother and against brother, father against son. When brick-ends started hurtling perilously close to my unprotected head and to those of my cameraman and sound recordist, a police superintendant marched sternly towards us with a warning that his officers could no longer guarantee our safety. On our heads be it.

It was, of course, Arthur Scargill not Margaret Thatcher who had called the strike. But the scenes played-out again and again during that year of misery in mining communities were far removed from the vision of Britain she had projected when she quoted the Prayer of St Francis on entering Downing Street for the first time.

By that time I had also witnessed the now-notorious mass meetings in Cofton Park near the Longbridge car plant in Birmingham. "Red Robbo & Co" used to choreograph their "unanimous" shows of hands heralding the inevitable strikes that did so much to reinforce perceptions that Britain had become ungovernable and was in terminal decline.

Mrs Thatcher's admirers believe that curbing the power of the unions was just part of the economic modernisation over which she presided.

But at what cost to regions like ours?

Her detractors remind us how we endured year after grinding year of anguish as "lame duck" industries were left to go to the wall; unemployment trebled between 1980 and 1984.

But her admirers believe the pain was a necessary evil to save this nation from an even greater catastrophe: in hastening the end of mining and other "rust bucket" industries, they argue, she managed to make us leaner and fitter, faster.

This debate will go on for years.

Only with hindsight did it become clear that the years immediately after the defeat of the miners and running-up to her third election victory in 1987 represented the high-water mark of the Thatcher era.

I was there, on the "inside track" at Westminster, to experience this extraordinary period in politics as a BBC lobby correspondent under the legendary Political Editor, John Cole.

While Mrs Thatcher was carrying all before her, the Opposition Leader Neil Kinnock was fighting energy-sapping battles on separate fronts: rebuilding Labour's electoral support after their crushing defeat under Michael Foot while also rooting-out Militant, which he believed was becoming a cancerous "party within a party".

The Prime Minister, by contrast, cut a commanding figure.

I remember one Friday I was holding the fort in the correspondents' office: as usual, the heavy-hitters in the team had begun their weekends early.

Out of the blue, an interview with the PM was required within a very tight schedule in order to make the teatime TV and radio news. A cacophony of instructions from assorted producers and editors rang in my ears as I sat down face-to-face with the Iron Lady in Number Ten.

The interminable technical checks finally took their toll on my nerves. I had been doing my best to hide the fact that I was struggling to bring those proverbial "butterflies" under control.

But she registered it in an instant and with an air of practised insouciance, she announced: "I think we'd just better get on with this, hadn't we."

Now, and for the last time, thanks again Mrs T.

These councils are significant players in their own right, they are responsible for major services including schools, roads and refuse disposal.

However, often the professional number-crunchers and political soothsayers regale us with their interpretations of the wider electoral significance, we should never lose sight of the huge influence these councils have on millions of people's lives.

That said, let's get down to some serious soothsaying.

Inevitably, we shall be looking to see if the Conservatives lose as many seats as their current poll ratings suggest; whether or not Labour will be major beneficiaries; or will UKIP pick-up support from both of them? And what of the Liberal Democrats?

Our four shire counties (Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire) and one unitary authority (Shropshire) all go into these elections with substantial Conservative majorities, so Labour strategists are managing expectations carefully.

Realistically, their challenge is to make significant inroads into those Conservative majorities, especially in Staffordshire and Warwickshire.

The other powerful factor at work beneath the headline story is that both the Conservatives and UKIP are coming off an especially high base year.

The last time these seats were contested in 2009, David Cameron's Tories were riding high in the polls while UKIP's support was boosted by the European elections being held at the same time.

This could make it difficult for UKIP to maintain any sense of momentum this time, despite their encouraging poll ratings; while for the Tories it may emphasise how their support has slipped between then and now.

But the Tories may privately reassure themselves with the notion that low turnouts are often thought to favour them over the other major parties, given that there are no other elections to provide a collateral boost to the overall number of voters this time.

The other question lurking in the woodwork stems from my opening explanation about the four county councils and one unitary authorities that are going to the polls.

Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire are all upper-level authorities in a two-tier system with district councils like Cheltenham, Tamworth, Wyre Forest and Stratford-on-Avon underneath them.

By contrast Shropshire's unitary council is responsible for the full set of local services.

Supporters of the unitary model, notably Lord Heseltine in his recent "No Stone Unturned" report, say it is far more efficient and easier for voters to understand.

Is it not confusing for voters, for example, that the districts collect their refuse and the counties dispose of it?

Lord Heseltine wants an active debate about more councils going the way not just of Shropshire but also of Herefordshire, Telford and Wrekin and Stoke-on-Trent: these last three are not going to the polls this year by the way.

He may be pleased to know it is already under way in Gloucestershire and Lord Heseltine certainly believes that with pressure on councils to share and merge more of their operations during this age of austerity it is an idea whose time has come. We shall see.

And what of HS2? It is the issue that dominates politics in shire counties like Warwickshire and Staffordshire. So how will it play into this campaign? Will angry voters on the proposed route see it as their chance to give the government a kicking?

It's not as simple as that of course.

For a start, the Conservative administrations in Staffordshire and Warwickshire have both come out against the project.

But for another, all three main parties at Westminster are strongly in favour of it. Leaving UKIP and the Greens to champion the opposition to it here.

All of which adds spice to the run-up to the general election, just over two years away, and the European elections in 12 months' time.

It was this same combination of elections last time round which offered a self-fulfilling prophecy that the skids were under Gordon Brown's administration.

One fundamental objective for our current leaders will be to prevent the general idea getting around that history may be about to repeat itself.

The Labour government ran into trouble over lone parents' and disabled people's benefits. I remember talking to an employment secretary in the Blair government while the debate was raging over their "Welfare to Work" programme.

"It's just so complicated," he told me, "fraught with unintended consequences. It's like one of those jigsaw puzzles where whenever you put one piece in place, another one pops out."

But there is general agreement that the evolution of our system of benefits, allowances and tax credits under governments of one shade and then another has become increasingly piecemeal and haphazard, resulting in the chaotic tangle we have today.

That is why ministers want to simplify and rationalise it.

Their 'Big Idea' is the Universal Credit into which a range of benefits are being subsumed. Housing benefit, for example, will become just one of its major elements.

It is part of the Government's radical reorganisation which is about to come into effect.

And of course, it's not just about streamlining. Inevitably, in these straitened times, it is also about cutting costs.

"And so it should be", according to most people surveyed in recent opinion polls.

Ministers tell us the cost to the public purse of housing benefit alone has doubled over the past decade. Benefits and tax credits account for by far the biggest single chunk of all the UK's public spending - £230bn out of £709bn.

The government assures us that making savings is only part of the story.

It also wants to target help where it can do most good. So alongside the introduction of a benefits cap, the disability living allowance morphs into the personal independence payment which will continue to rise year-on-year for the remainder of this parliament. Some existing 'in work' benefits are also due to be up-rated.

This is the vision the coalition hopes we will buy into.

But the controversy raging around it continues to develop. Over the past few days we have heard warnings of grave hardship and deprivation from organisations as diverse as the Child Poverty Action Group, the National Housing Federation and the Citizens Advice Bureau. Church leaders have also made their feelings known.

But it is from pressure groups and campaigning organisations that the most outspoken opposition is coming.

Labour leaders clearly sense they have to tread carefully. Partly because of the party's own record while in office, partly because they do not want to find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion, and not least because it is becoming increasingly clear that whoever forms a government after the next election will have to continue implementing the general austerity drive for years to come.

Though some in Labour's ranks are agitating for a more aggressive approach, the prevailing line of attack against the government appears to be less about welfare reform in principle and more about whether or not the measures are being implemented intelligently, fairly or competently.

Take for example the debate surrounding what Labour call the 'bedroom tax' which they say penalises some of the most vulnerable claimants. Labour's view is that it is a policy which is simply ill thought out.

For the record, ministers counter that it is a benefit not a tax. They would rather we call it a 'spare room allowance' and point to the widespread issue of under-occupation while so many people have no bedroom of their own.

When the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Liam Byrne, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill intervened in the debate this week, it was significant he again berated the government over how it was implementing the changes, not over whether they were right or wrong.

"Under this government," he said, "the Department for Work and Pensions hasn't got the first idea what it is doing. Ministers simply do not know what impact their housing benefit changes will have."

Shropshire is one of the areas chosen by the government to pilot some of the most radical features of the new system. In this case, the council tested the system through which housing benefits will be paid directly to many of the claimants, except for the most vulnerable including the elderly or those with disabilities.

The council told the BBC's Sunday Politics Midlands programme recently that the project had been extraordinarily hard work. Social landlords in the area were worried that paying benefits direct to claimants rather than to their landlords could put their income streams at risk which in turn could undermine their efforts to invest in new affordable housing.

Ministers, for their part, argue that direct payments encourage claimants to develop a responsible approach to the management of money and so equip them better for the world of work.

We are about to discover who is right and who benefits. At a time when money is so tight for government, claimants and taxpayers alike, the stakes could not be much higher.

For his fourth, his choice of outfit had changed. Not for him the blandishments of the Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable in support of "good borrowing" for spending aimed at triggering growth.

In the language of the Treasury, Mr Osborne told us his budget was "fiscally neutral overall".

In plain English, this means that any investments in pump-priming infrastructure projects, including capital construction schemes, had to be funded by savings in government spending as a whole. Hence the £2.5bn of extra cuts announced for most Whitehall departments the day before.

But having donned his fiscal straitjacket, Mr Osborne is nevertheless doing quite a lot of wriggling around inside it.

After a series of passionate appeals by the Conservative MP for the home of brewing, Andrew Griffiths of Burton, Mr Osborne found enough scope to cut the price of a pint by 1p and to scrap the duty escalator altogether - a real crowd pleaser in a Tory marginal.

There is also the promise of major infrastructure investment in what Mr Osborne called "the great arteries of Britain". The details of the expected upgrade to relieve congestion on Midlands motorways like the M6 will have to wait until the spending review in June.

But his support of Lord Heseltine's call for control of billions of pounds of government and European growth funding to be devolved to local decision-makers, piloted by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, will not cost Mr Osborne a penny.

The money, which will go into a single pot, will come from disentangling an existing spider's web of central government handouts.

But for local Labour leaders, Wednesday's key numbers are not the chancellor's calculations. They are the unemployment figures which went up by 4,000 in the West Midlands during the quarter from November to January.

At 8.7%, the region's unemployment rate remains stubbornly at about the same level it was last year - the third highest regional figure in England.

The Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency is one of the worst-affected. Its Labour MP happens to be the shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne.

He told the BBC on Wednesday that an average family in Britain has had a £1,200 a year pay cut under this government.

He said: "That's why we need real action to kick-start our flat-lining economy with help for people on middle and low earnings not tax cuts for millionaires."

For his part, though, the chancellor is also using this Budget to put pressure on Labour to explain what they would do instead.

Raising the income tax threshold to £10,000 to take more low earners out of tax altogether; cutting Corporation Tax to 20% by April 2015 - these are all designed to convince the government's supporters that they are listening to the appeals both of business and of people at the bottom of the earnings league who are struggling to get on.

Mr Osborne's Budget statement is also intended to smoke out what Labour's response would be if, in May 2015, it became their turn to put on that fiscal straitjacket.

Alternatively it's seen as a prescription for "sustainable development" with "strong protections" for the environment.

The government's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is due to come into force on Wednesday, 27 March, 12 months after it was unveiled by the Chancellor, George Osborne, in last year's budget.

And now the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has thrown its weight behind calls for the implementation of the NPPF to be delayed by a further year because it says most councils need more time to prepare for it.

The CPRE's policy and campaigns director, Neil Sinden, warns: "The consequence of not having an adopted plan is likely to be increasing numbers of applications decided by appeal to national inspectors instead of on the basis of locally agreed plans.

"This could not only result in poorly planned developments but further delays to the planning process as well. This is the opposite of the localist approach to planning the government has promoted since the election."

Research for the Sunday Politics Midlands on BBC One has established that more than two-thirds of the councils concerned have no local plans in place.

Of the 34 Midlands unitary, county and metropolitan district councils required to have plans in place before the end of the month, just 11 have so far managed to do so.

They are: Dudley, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Rugby, Sandwell, Shropshire, South Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Telford and Wrekin, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Wyre Forest.

Among those who have yet to have their plans approved by the Planning Inspectorate are three of the giant Metropolitan Districts.

One of them is Coventry, whose Labour council leader John Mutton admits it's "a mess".

'Speculative developments'

But he blames the Planning Inspectorate which turned down the city's proposed plan on the grounds that it had not secured adequate agreements from neighbouring local authorities, an interpretation which Mr Mutton hotly disputes.

"The government introduced the Localism Bill which is supposed to be about local councils making decisions based on local knowledge and then we have a planning inspector who not only ignores our local knowledge but also interprets the legislation in a way no one expected.

"The 'duty to cooperate' suddenly becomes the 'duty to agree'. Well that may never happen between authorities."

The real danger, according to the Home Builders Federation, is that if councils do not have viable plans in place guaranteeing specific local safeguards, they risk losing control of what is built in their area.

They say the much looser NPPF would offer more scope for haphazard or unsustainable speculative developments to go ahead.

The government shows no sign of back-tracking by offering a stay of execution on the NPPF.

The Planning Minister Nick Boles reports "good progress" by those councils who have yet to have plans approved by the Planning Inspectorate:

"Up to date local plans provide certainty to both local residents and local firms, and we have offered councils a range of practical assistance to help them get up to speed.

"There are strong protections in place for the Green Belt, open countryside and areas of outstanding natural beauty when considering applications against the planning framework as a whole."

Underpinning this issue is the wider debate about our planning rules: how to preserve democratic accountability without putting an unnecessary brake on economic activity, especially job creation.

Business leaders have long demanded a relaxation. As Lord Digby Jones once memorably put it: "If those great crested newts are so rare, why do they always seem to crop up wherever you want to build anything?"

This will be one of our main talking points on the Sunday Politics from 11.00 on BBC One on Sunday 17 March 2013.

But it did not take long for her to launch into a salvo of quickfire questions during which he looked for all the world like the man in the dock.

Was he mainly "a process and procedures man"?

No he was not. He had been involved in the running of hospitals for many years.

Was he aware of death rates at Stafford at the time?

Again, he was not. Mortality rates were not among the main indicators used to measure hospitals' performance then.

But he did have one big regret: that he had not met the Cure the NHS campaigners when concerns first emerged and the Healthcare Commission stepped in to investigate higher than expected death rates there.

Complaints, he said, were "a very important source of information" and it had been a mistake not to follow them up.

Since then, the Cure campaign for him to go has intensified. Members staged an impassioned protest during last week's meeting in Manchester of the NHS Commissioning Board, which was addressed by Sir David himself.

Julie Bailey, the prime-mover behind the campaign, denies he is being made a scapegoat.

"A scapegoat takes the blame for something of which he is innocent. David Nicholson is not innocent," she said.

Sir David told the MPs he was not going anywhere. His commitment to the NHS constitution and to its patients made him the best man to see through the challenges facing the health service.

This is certainly not how 20 MPs - who have signed a Commons motion urging him to stand down - see it, among them Jeremy Lefroy (Con) Stafford; Aidan Burley (Con) Cannock Chase; Bill Cash (Con) Stone and Andrew Griffiths (Con) Burton.

But how representative are they?

Most MPs I talk to on and off the record, on both sides of the House of Commons, are not convinced his departure would achieve anything.

Pat McFadden, the Labour MP for Wolverhampton South West, said that Stafford was really a failure of management within the hospital itself.

As Sir David pointed out time and time again to the committee, he was responsible at that time for the supervision of more than 50 local hospitals across the West Midlands.

No less significantly he retains his support at the top. He has been instrumental in delivering the government's complex health reforms now being rolled out across the NHS.

Minutes after the Health Select Committee hearing, Downing Street said David Cameron had been "impressed by Sir David's knowledge and understanding of the NHS and by what he had delivered in terms of results".

Sir David, they said, had "properly apologised for mistakes made at the time by the regional health authority".

So, "safe for now" appears to be the upshot. But as one former senior health manager told us, don't be surprised if in a year or so from now, once the heat has died down, Sir David quietly steps aside.

Suspend your disbelief.

Seven West Midlands councils are being awarded a total of more than £10m between them for each of the next five years.

They are among the winners of a nationwide beauty contest: and being famously "in the eye of the beholder", the star of the show is literally rubbish.

The Weekly Collection Support Scheme was launched by the Communities and Local Government Department a year ago to encourage councils to bid for extra funding on condition they introduce, retain or re-instate weekly bin collections as their first priority along with a list of other environmental and efficiency commitments.

The money will become available from April.

Here's how it stacks-up and what each of the winners have promised in their bids.

The sum of £29,785,495 for implementing a recycling reward scheme for households, introducing weekly recycling collections to over 100,000 households who currently have a fortnightly recycling service and supporting weekly residual waste collections.

The sum of £1,025,000 for introducing a recycling rewards scheme to every household and university halls of residence in Coventry, helping increased participation in the existing recycling and composting schemes, and supporting weekly residual waste collections.

The sum of £1,807,792 for introducing plastic bottles and cardboard recycling, a free-of-charge recycling collection for schools, and a recycling rewards scheme, whilst supporting weekly residual waste collections.

The sum of £1,672,195 for introducing a separate glass recycling collection while supporting weekly residual waste collections.

The sum of £2,959,038 for supporting a weekly residual waste collection and moving from fortnightly kerbside sort to a fortnightly co-mingled collection for recyclable materials. This will expand the range of recycling collected and reduce the number of receptacles needed for householders.

The sum of £14,311,759 for supporting weekly residual waste collections for 88,231 households and increasing the frequency of recycling collections from fortnightly to weekly, introducing further recycling services across the city and constructing a Fuel Preparation Plant.

The sum of £2,570,234 for encouraging recycling through the introduction of a recycling reward scheme while supporting weekly residual waste and food waste collections.

(Source: Communities and Local government department)

For the record, only two of the councils, Malvern Hills and Solihull, are Conservative-controlled, the rest are Labour-run. So ministers are unlikely to be accused of looking after only their friends.

But they should resist any temptation to trumpet themselves as the government that saved the weekly bin collection.

Of our Midlands list, only Stoke-on-Trent would be re-introducing weekly bin collections, subject to their study of how they would implement them.

For the rest, it is a case of guaranteeing they will continue as they are, at least for five more years.

But the government's critics see a deeper concern lurking beneath the government's largesse.

One Green Party councillor in Solihull told us that this extra money was being offered with tight government strings attached, while spending on other local services like adult day centres were having to be pruned radically because of the budget cuts.

What does this say about "Localism"? "Top down more like", say the government's opponents.

Could it perhaps be that ministers reckon bin collections are a much more potent issue on the doorstep, literally, than are most other local services which concern fewer people?

The theory goes that being associated with the retention or resumption of weekly bin rounds enables the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles to strike a popular chord while diverting attention from his austerity measures elsewhere.

It used to be said as a joke that most people just wanted councils to get on with emptying the bins.

Many a true word.

But what does this say about our democracy? Is this why Sir Albert Bore, the Labour leader of Birmingham City Council warns that we are facing "the end of local government as we know it"?

This will be among our main talking points on this weekend's Sunday Politics Midlands, when I will be joined by the Conservative MP for West Worcestershire, Harriett Baldwin and the Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East, Pat McFadden.

And I hope you will join me too, from 11:00 on BBC One this Sunday, 3 March 2013.

EZ's were one of his big ideas for regeneration when he was in the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

Their long-term benefits were questionable then, so what's different this time?

That's what I asked the Chancellor George Osborne during his visit to the city's Assay Office, which will be moving from its present outdated premises into a state-of-the-art building in the Enterprise Zone next year.

What's different now, he told me, is that the government, local authorities and the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) will all be putting their full weight behind the drive for Birmingham to offer a real alternative to London for inward investment. They aim to bring-in nearly £3bn every year, creating 40,000 jobs.

Businesses setting-up or expanding into the zone will benefit from a variety of Treasury-funded tax breaks, light-touch planning regulations and high-speed broadband. The LEP will be allowed to keep the proceeds from the local business rates to help keep up the momentum.

The real test of this will be whether Birmingham can succeed in generating prosperity for the wider region surrounding it, for the Black Country and Coventry, where council and business leaders have long argued they need an economic boost just as much as the "Second City" itself.

It is what we all say after any catastrophic event and we have been chorusing it again and again in the days since publication of the Francis Report on Stafford Hospital last week.

But how confident should we be, especially now that 14 hospitals in England are under investigation because of higher than expected death rates over the past two years?

Could another Stafford be lurking on the list?

Put yourselves in the shoes of patients awaiting treatment in the three Midlands hospitals to be examined: George Eliot in Nuneaton, Queen's Hospital in Burton-upon-Trent and the Dudley Group of hospitals.

The chief executive of the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, Paula Clark, told us: "We welcome the review as we believe it will give further reassurance around the safety and quality of our services.

"Current independent analyses show the trust is not an outlier and is within the expected range. The trust is committed to ensuring the best possible care of all patients."

One recommendation which arose three years ago from the first of Robert Francis's two inquiries is Healthwatch.

The government has since written it into the Health and Social Care Act. From April this year there will be one of these new-style watchdogs in every metropolitan, shire county or unitary area.

They will be independent, able to employ their own staff and there will be a strong emphasis on volunteer membership representing the authentic voice of the people.

Their remit will be to investigate the concerns of health and care service users, with statutory powers to enter hospitals, care centres, GPs surgeries and dental practices to see for themselves how they are working.

They will replace the soon-to-be-defunct Local Involvement Networks (LINks) with wider powers aimed at preventing the sort of failure of local scrutiny which we saw in Stafford.

Robin Morrison, chair of Engaging Communities Staffordshire who will be responsible for Healthwatch in the county, said: "The people of Staffordshire deserve a powerful voice and this is exactly what we will give them."

But the chief executive in charge of the Midlands' biggest super-hospital, Dame Julie Moore of University Hospitals Birmingham, told last weekend's Sunday Politics programme that Healthwatch would succeed only if it had credibility and involved people with experience in delivering health services.

To get the inside track on how the promised culture change is being delivered in the NHS, BBC Stoke's Political Reporter Phil McCann has been granted access to film in the Queen's Hospital in Burton-upon-Trent.

And you will be able to see his report for yourself on this weekend's Sunday Politics Midlands from 11.00 on BBC One this Sunday 17 February 2013

And once again, David Cameron used what is no longer the hardest word in politics. He said he was "truly sorry" for what had happened to the patients and their families who had been victims of these "appalling" failures.

"We need the words of the patient to ring out", said Mr Cameron, announcing a new powerful figure, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals for England, rather like the healthcare equivalent of OFSTED in our schools and colleges.

He also wants the rules to be toughened-up so that managers can be sacked if patient care falls below what Mr Francis calls "fundamental standards".

But a deeper question forming in my mind as I listened to the Prime Minister came into sharper focus during the interview I have just completed with Mr Francis himself.

He told me how "distressing" he had found the culture of secrecy and complacency which led to thousands of patients being cruelly neglected and 400 others, possibly many more than that number, dying dreadful deaths that could have been avoided if only the hospital had been functioning properly.

His answer is a greater transparency, a "duty of candour", and an emphasis on compassion at the heart of the so-called "caring services", especially nursing.

Invaluable though these qualities undoubtedly are, how can you legislate for them, especially when the government is engrossed in the latest radical NHS shake-up?

As the political debate develops, I expect Labour will stress the impact of the so-called "Lansley reforms" on the process of applying the lessons to the NHS as a whole.

Equally the Conservatives will be focussing on the target-driven agenda imposed by the then Labour government which they say put undue pressure sure on managers to slash budgets and cut staffing levels in pursuit of NHS Foundation Trust status.

The government say they will now take stock of Mr Francis's findings and so will we, on this weekend's Sunday Politics programme.

I will be joined by arguably the most powerful person in the health service in our part of the country, Dame Julie Moore, the Chief Executive of University Hospitals Birmingham. Also with me will be the Conservative MP for Stourbridge Margot James and the Liberal Democrat MP for Solihull Lorely Burt.

And I hope you will join us too, from 11:00 on BBC One this Sunday, 10 February 2013.

Eric Pickles MP.

The local government secretary's blandishments to councils about embracing the enterprise culture represent the flip-side of his increasingly well-worn coin; that they must accept drastic reductions in their revenue support grants without burdening hard-working families with further increases in their council tax bills.

"Freeze, freeze, freeze!" This was his message in Monday's Daily Telegraph in which he told those authorities "who put up their stealth tax by 1.99% to avoid our 2% referendum threshold" that they need a reality check.

He warned those using "loopholes" that they would "lose out" out next year.

It is all calculated to pile yet more pressure on council leaders to devise their own resourceful responses to the ministerial mantra: "working smarter", "doing more for less" and, of course, thinking creatively about tapping in to their revenue-generating potential.

There is only so much you can do with parking charges and library fines.

So one Midland council is taking Mr Pickles at his word, thinking big and going into business.

Shropshire Council has set up a wholly-owned company called Inspiring Partnerships and Enterprise (IPE) into which they are hiving-off many of their services.

Ultimately, they hope most of the council's 6,000 staff will be transferred to the new venture.

According to the council's Conservative leader Keith Barrow: "We are in a better position than many other councils because we are getting on with things and looking to do things differently rather than cut services.

"The establishment of a new council-owned company to provide services at a public profit which can then be invested back into the council is just one of the ways we will do this."

Already they have started cooking school dinners for other local authorities. Among the services they plan to transfer to IPE, are information technology, human resources, property services, facilities management and finance.

If they have the expertise, why not see what it can fetch on the open market?

One obvious concern is the dilution of democratic accountability when services are delivered through arm's length companies rather than "in-house", under direct political control.

The profit motive has never been a comfortable bed fellow with government, either central or local, as the official blog of the University of Birmingham's Institute for Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) points out.

It said a relationship of suspicion and unease dates back to the days of the East India Company which, by 1830 "had become a government in all but name".

The blog goes on: "The power of the company was such that it has led to a deep-seated suspicion of the profit motive in the private sector and individuals that has remained in national and local government ever since - whichever political party has been in control."

Until now, in Shropshire that is.

The Local Government Association (LGA) describes the scale of the council's ambitions as "unprecedented".

But will it work?

Will it really deliver revenue streams sufficient to offset the effects of those cuts in government grants?

The council does not expect it do to so this year as initial set-up costs take their inevitable toll.

But unless, and until, it can prove it is paying dividends, the council will be vulnerable to accusations that they are gambling with taxpayers' money and with important local services.

This will be one of our big talking points on this weekend's Sunday Politics Midlands, when I will be joined by Caroline Spelman, the former Environment Secretary, the Conservative MP for Meriden and by Michael Cashman CBE, the Labour MEP for the West Midlands.

And I hope you will join me too, from 11:00 GMT on BBC One this Sunday 3 February 2013.

Their poll rating has never been higher: 16% according to a recent Survation poll in 'The Mail on Sunday'. Nigel Farage's party will undoubtedly be buoyed by their increasing popularity. But it's Labour who have the biggest cause for celebration.

Because when UKIP prosper, it's usually at the expense of the Conservatives rather than either of the other two main parties.

In a week dominated by David Cameron's long-awaited 'big speech' on Europe, one of Britain's top pollsters, Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, calculates nine local Conservative MPs whose constituencies are not normally considered front-rank marginals could lose their seats in 2015 if UKIP maintain their current ratings.

UKIP would not win the seats themselves, but they would draw enough support away from the Conservatives for Labour to capture them.

Professor Curtice says the local Tory MPs who could face defeat because of UKIP are:

Karen Bradley.................Staffordshire Moorlands

Andrew Griffiths............Burton

Mark Garnier...................Wyre Forest

Margot James................Stourbridge

Chris Kelly........................Dudley South

Jeremy Lefroy..................Stafford

Karen Lumley...................Redditch

Mark Pawsey....................Rugby

Christopher Pincher......Tamworth

Add to this the possibility of Conservative voters switching to UKIP in seats currently held by Labour. In the last general election, the margin of defeat for second-placed Conservatives was lower than the number of votes cast for UKIP in six of their local target seats: Dudley North, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Solihull, Telford, Walsall North and , Walsall South. So the UKIP factor threatens to make it harder still for the Conservatives to secure their longed-for overall majority. Conversely, it may also strengthen the possibility Labour's chances of securing a majority themselves.

That's why the Conservative MP for Lichfield and former government whip Michael Fabricant is suggesting an electoral pact with UKIP with the promise of an 'in-out' EU referendum.

So far his recommendation has met a stony official silence from his party and a firm rejection from the UKIP leader.

Nigel Farage says "it's war" with the Tories.

But if the poll ratings continue as they are, could more and more Tory MPs be open to persuasion about a deal with UKIP? What would it take for Mr Farage to shoulder arms?

How likely is it that UKIP's current popularity will sustain through to polling day in 2015? How will they emerge from a heightened level of public scrutiny?

I will be putting these questions, and many more besides, to Professor Curtice himself on this week's Sunday Politics programme. I will also be joined by the Conservative MP for Mid Worcestershire, Peter Luff; the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, Shabana Mahmood and Bill Etheridge who will be UKIP's candidate in one of those seats where the Tories narrowly missed-out last time, Dudley North.

And I hope you will join me too, from 11.00 on BBC One on Sunday morning, 27 January 2013.

Is it, as he implies, a question of party politicians trying to get their own back because he was elected as an Independent?

I suspect the answer may reflect a clash of cultures. In his new-style executive role he is quite within his rights to appoint his chosen deputy without any semblance of an open or transparent selection process.

But this is clearly at odds with the selection processes of local government.

Ultimately, he is not accountable to individual local authorities and the Police and Crime panel reflecting all the councils in the area cannot veto his decision.

Perhaps the real test will be whether or not his embarrassment threshold is sufficiently high for him to tough it out for another three-and-a-half years.

"If you keep your council tax frozen, we'll give you a grant equivalent increasing it by 1%."

Last year, the overwhelming majority of councils were persuaded. Out of 35 in the West Midlands, only three defied the government with council tax increases confined to Telford and Wrekin, Stoke-on-Trent (both Labour) and Lichfield District (interestingly, Conservative).

Just before Christmas, the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles told the Commons that councils had "a moral duty" to maintain the freeze next year as well, in order not go back to what he called the "years of hurt" when council tax bills had doubled under Labour.

But the signs are his blandishments may be less effective this time. In the West Midlands region 10 local authorities are considering a council tax increase in 2013-14: Birmingham (Labour), Cannock Chase (Labour), Coventry (Labour), Dudley (Labour), Herefordshire (Conservative), Lichfield (Conservative), Malvern Hills (Conservative), Tamworth (Conservative) and Telford & Wrekin (Labour)

So what has changed?

In the case of our largest authority - Birmingham - the answer is party control. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was replaced by Labour. But four of the other councils are Conservative-controlled, including Lichfield, which is expected to defy Mr Pickles for a second year.

The bigger difference is the increasing pressure on local authority budgets, and confirmation that the spending squeeze will last until 2017 at the very least.

Birmingham's Labour Leader, Sir Albert Bore says councils will be left with no option to decommission some services altogether. He says the government grants received by his council are being cut twice as sharply as the English average.

He calls it "The Jaws of Doom".

One jaw is the reduced spending power because of those cuts in government grants and the general condition of the economy. The other, the increasing demands placed on local authorities by the weakest and most vulnerable in the community who need their services most when times are hard.

"Big City" councils also have generally fewer revenue-generating opportunities than those in more affluent areas where fewer people depend on local services.

It all adds to the general sense of injustice

But the government is not alone in believing that many local authorities could do more to ease the burden they place on hard-pressed council tax payers.

In a recent interview on the BBC's Sunday Politics programme, the Conservative Leader of Staffordshire County Council, Philip Atkins, was adamant that many of them had a way to go yet in learning from private businesses how to do more for less.

Mr Atkins said more services could be merged across local boundaries such as in Bromsgrove and Redditch who share a chief executive.

But the more I hear of these exchanges, the more I see a bigger political picture emerging.

The government clearly want to bind local authorities into the UK deficit reduction process, to 'take their share of the responsibility' as ministers put it. But is it also about making sure the blame is shared. Devolved, even?

So the number of Conservative-run authorities planning council tax increases represents a serious challenge.

But Labour's leaders have a struggle of their own.

They are increasingly focusing on building-up their credibility on the economy in the run-up to the 2015 General Election, accepting that deficit reduction must continue into the next Parliament but devising ways of distributing the pain more fairly, they'll say, than the present government.

"Fairness" I predict, will be the political buzz word over the next two years.

Fairness to local authorities.

Fairness to council tax payers.

Or maybe just equal unfairness to everyone.

Last summer, the government announced the current council tax benefit system was to be scrapped and that councils would need to have their own replacement schemes in place from April.

Birmingham say they cannot meet the £11m pound cost in full, hence the 20% contributions.

Ministers believe this will encourage councils to try harder to get people back to work.

But local Labour council leaders see it as yet another example of the government hitting the poorest and weakest the hardest.

Hundreds of patients died needlessly while health managers were slashing their budgets in pursuit of NHS foundation trust status during a four-year period until 2008.

It's bound to put further strain on relations between the National Health Service and its political masters which have become increasingly fraught under the then Labour government and now under the coalition.

Asked if all the main parties had lost public confidence on health, the inveterate Worcestershire health campaigner Dr Richard Taylor didn't hesitate: "You've hit the nail on the head," he replied.

Dr Taylor, you'll remember, was elected as independent MP for Wyre Forest in 2001 and again in 2005 on a tidal wave of public outrage over the downgrading of Kidderminster General Hospital.

Now the state of the debate on the NHS has lured him out of retirement as the co-leader of the National Health Action party. It is planning to field candidates at the next election in seats which have figured prominently in arguments about health.

Stafford has a significance all of its own.

Could Dr Taylor stand there himself? He has so far refused to rule himself in or out, but don't be surprised if a unique political career has one more attempted comeback left in it.

Recent leaks to the Sunday papers suggest the Stafford inquiry will be more about the NHS as a whole than just one hospital. It's expected to call for better training of nurses, improved management and greater transparency.

Both Labour and the current coalition governments have struggled with a fundamental political contradiction. The limitless expectations vested in the NHS by voters are not matched by a correspondingly unlimited readiness to pay for it.

I've seen how successive generations of politicians have wrestled with this herculean challenge.

As health secretary in the Thatcher government, Norman (now Lord) Fowler told me if the health service were like a rev counter in a car it would have been running in the red zone under successive governments.

One of his successors under John Major. Stephen Dorrell, did his best to redefine the cost of the NHS to the public purse in terms what he called "the best-value health service".

But let's not lose sight of the hard reality on the ground.

Local MPs know their constituents demand nothing less than a comprehensive range of services at their own local hospital.

Region-wide or even county-wide alternatives will always be a hard sell politically, whatever the merits, or demerits, of concentrating resources in fewer, bigger, centres of excellence, or of sharing certain services across a federation of hospitals.

There are precious few votes in these arguments for MPs battling to retain their seats.

So too will the recurring arguments about so-called 'health rationing' and 'postcode lotteries' as yet more high-tech, high-cost treatments become available, but at what price?

But none of this stops our politicians from calling for an open an honest debate about the NHS.

With over two years to go until the next election, perhaps now is the time for them to start having one. And my hunch is that the Francis report on Stafford could be the touchstone.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is doing his best to anticipate the likely arguments by calling for a renewed drive on standards of patient care and a warning that managers who fail to deliver them will lost their jobs.

But will he pre-empt calls for yet another round of reorganisation to be heaped on top of the changes already being so controversially implemented by the coalition.

There are bound to be further demands for the NHS to be more tightly regulated, although former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn recommends instead greater openness, better public reporting and more honesty from health managers the moment things go wrong.

This will be among our talking points on this weekend's Sunday Politics West Midlands, when I will be joined by Labour MP for Walsall South, Valerie Vaz, a member of the Health Select Committee.

I hope you'll join us at 11:00 GMT on BBC One this Sunday, 13 January.

With the UK braced for a threatened 'triple dip' recession and in danger of losing its cherished AAA credit rating, the boss of British Airways Willie Walsh has now added his voice to the criticisms of the chancellor.

He says quite simply: "I do not see an agenda for growth in this country."

Even the Conservative former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine was forced to deny his 228-page report No Stone Unturned, unveiled in Birmingham six weeks ago, amounted to an attack on Mr Osborne.

But mingling with his audience of business, political and trade union leaders in Birmingham Town Hall, I found many of them thought there was no other way of interpreting his call for dozens of government initiatives to be scrapped.

He recommended the savings of £49bn should then be merged into a regeneration fund. Local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) would then be encouraged to bid for a share of it.

Sitting at Lord Heseltine's side on the stage that day was the chairman of the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP, Andy Street, also managing director of John Lewis.

Like a determined shopper, elbows out, at the Boxing Day sales, Mr Street seized his chance to get to the front of the queue.

He secured the agreement of his colleagues on the LEP to write to the prime minister suggesting Birmingham could pilot Lord Heseltine's new localist agenda, in partnership with the region's public and private sectors.

His letter represents the start of what one LEP insider describes as "the necessary choreography". The next step is Mr Cameron's reply which they hope will promise a generous share of Lord Heseltine's proposed pot worth several billion pounds, they hope!

Then it would be up to local leaders from the chambers of commerce, councils and public and private sector partners to decide where to invest in the local ventures which they, rather than Whitehall, see likeliest to create jobs and regenerate communities.

Our business correspondent Peter Plisner will be asking if Birmingham is about to claim this economic jackpot in the Sunday Politics Midlands from 11:00 GMT on Sunday, 16 December 2012 on BBC One.

I will be joined in the studio by Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham, the former trade minister and director general of the CBI, and Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston.