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It's been another difficult week for local government.

Birmingham City Council announced it needs to make up to 600 redundancies

to help balance its books,

and Middlesbrough Council decided to apply to the government

for £15 million of emergency funding to avoid effective bankruptcy.

Also this week, new figures have been released showing just how much debt some local authorities

hold, and it's a lot.

From 2000 to 2018, two councils declared themselves unable to balance their books.

In the last five years, 11 councils have followed suit.

Given the responsibilities of local government, that feels serious for many of us.

So just how bad are things?

And is the problem local or systemic?

Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.

First of all, let's start by identifying which councils have been in trouble recently

with Paul Lynch, who works for the BBC's shared data unit.

Paul Lynch, can we begin by going through what's happened at some of those councils that have

had to effectively declare themselves bankrupt?

You may have heard this term effective bankruptcy used by a bunch of news outlets to describe

when a council has issued what's called a section

114 notice. It's not really bankruptcy. It's just become a shorthand to describe this legislation

that was part of the Local Government Act back in 1988. This is when a council can't meet

...