Things aren’t so magnificent for Labour across the seven metropolitan borough councils that comprise the old West Midlands county. To recapitulate the anthem that accompanied their general election victory in 1997, for Labour in the West Midlands nowadays it’s not so much a case of Things Can Only Get Better as whether they could conceivably get any worse.

In last June’s local authority elections, Labour only retained power within its Black Country heartlands of Sandwell and Wolverhampton. Meanwhile Conservatives who previously had solitary Solihull to boast of took control of Coventry, Dudley and Walsall.

In the most significant electoral outcome, the Conservatives also assumed leadership of Birmingham City Council. Termed the “progressive partnership”, the alliance of some 39 Conservative and 28 Liberal Democrat members forming a majority of the city’s 120 councillors ended a long period of single party rule by Labour in the city.

If this wasn’t bad news enough for Labour, earlier this month a judge ruled that the election of six Labour councillors was surrounded by “widespread fraud”. All six strenuously denied rigging the June 10 poll in the Bordesley Green and Aston wards – but Richard Mawrey QC, presiding as an election commissioner, ruled the results void. “The [postal voting] system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that it’s wide open to fraud,” he said.

Nevertheless, the recent change to Birmingham’s political administration has certainly brought some fresh energy and drive to improving service performance. However, the “progressive partnership” will need great clarity of focus to turn around the fortunes of a large and complex city authority with a gargantuan annual net budget of £1,360m.

The Audit Commission has consistently judged Birmingham’s performance as “weak” and its housing and children’s social services now rank amongst the poorer performers in the country. Birmingham City Council is landlord for the largest stock of public sector housing in the country, yet its performance is amongst the worst with two out of three properties not meeting the decent homes standard.

Elsewhere, the four Black Country authorities of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton are proving that co-operation can be extended across both party political and authority boundaries in pursuit of common sub-regional goals.

Although evenly split between Labour and Conservative, all four council leaders are fully behind collaborative efforts to advance the regeneration of the Black Country. The vehicle for this, the Black Country Consortium, is a partnership that embraces the public, private and voluntary sectors to co-ordinate a range of initiatives within the sub-region. The vision is to effect an urban renaissance across the authorities over the next 30 years.

But the failure of the North East referendum, combined with increased Conservative representation as the largest group on the regional Local Government Association, has kicked any aspirations for an elected West Midlands regional assembly deep into the long grass. Another factor at work may be the strong sense of being English: According to a 2001 survey conducted by National Statistics, 61 per cent of the region’s population describing themselves as such, compared with a 57 per cent figure for England as a whole.

The region’s local authorities do, however, appear to speak as one in voicing unhappiness with the slice of the cake they receive in revenue funding and central government support in comparison with other English regions. Such sentiments are felt keenly on major infrastructure issues such as transport that are decided at national level.

Apart from changes to the political balance and funding pressures, the quality of services delivered by local authorities within the region has seen a marked improvement in recent years. Although the councils concerned are more steady achievers than local government trailblazers, the pattern of improvement under the Comprehensive Performance Assessment is clear.

Two years ago both Coventry and Walsall were tarred with the lowest “poor” status for performance. In its latest assessment the Audit Commission judged Coventry City Council to be one of the fastest-improving local authorities in the country.

Currently categorised as “fair”, auditors say that the City Council is “well placed to further improve”. In the short term the revised methodology for weighting the Comprehensive Performance Assessment may exert as much influence as recent changes in political control, whose impact will take between two and three years to filter through.

To some extent Conservatives will be enjoying the fruits of work begun under previous administrations – but if things can only get better for Labour, the message from authorities across the West Midlands is clear – ‘The Only Way Is Up’.