The situation in Birmingham City Council is worse than commissioners expected, a report to the secretary of state has claimed.

In the first report to levelling up secretary Michael Gove, written last month, the commissioners claimed Birmingham had been ‘slow to understand the scale of the financial difficulty it has created for itself’ but was starting to respond to the intervention.

It said: ‘There will be inevitable setbacks along the way, and it is too soon to have confidence in the outcome.