By Professor John Clancy and Professor David Bailey
2nd January 2026

West Midlands Pension Fund insider spills the beans:
an £11 billion surplus.

Open warfare at the West Midlands Pension Fund.
It's 200% funded!

When you've filled in a hole - stop digging! Part 2

Open warfare at the West Midlands Pension Fund as insider spills the beans that it has a whopping £11 billion surplus and so is overfunded by almost 100%

Solihull FCA Chartered Accountant who is a voting Pension Fund Committee member emails BlogsFromTheBlackstuff.com with the inside story and shocking statistics.

We can reveal exclusively today:

• The £22 billion West Midlands Pension Fund is 200% funded.
• The fund has hoarded at least £11 billion to become double-funded but is not ready to let go of taxpayers' money.
• It has almost double what it needs, and should have, to pay all its pensions now and into the future.
• Massive contribution cuts revealed, but committee members believe this is still not enough, and still too slow.
• Solihull already told that their contributions will fall by over a third.
• Democratically-elected councillors in conflict with unelected managers.
• Fund managers and investment managers have refused to listen to his advice as a highly-experienced and respected chartered accountant committee member.
• He says their figures have vastly underestimated investment realities.
• Birmingham’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Commissioner missing-in-action and haven't even questioned the decisions.
• He's really surprised they haven't.
• The Fund has deliberately created a 20% buffer to prevent further cuts to contributions which has not existed before.

This morning we received a quite extraordinary and unsolicited email at BlogsFromTheBlackstuff.com in response to our recent blogs.

It came from the Tory member of the West Midlands Pension Fund committee for Solihull, Councillor Leslie Kaye. He holds the prestigious FCA letters after his name as a fellow chartered accountant. So he knows his stuff.

It is an astonishing intervention.

Whilst mostly he put the position in measured terms, reading between the lines we can see that there's been an almighty bust-up at the pension fund, verging on open warfare. This seems to be a battle between the managers of  the fund and the non-Wolverhampton committee Councillors.

This communication to us appears obviously part of it.

Councillor Kaye must be highly commended for speaking out. He has done the pension fund, its members and employers, as well as the citizens of Solihull, a great public service here. He has taken his fiduciary duties very seriously indeed and has exercised them appropriately. Others on the committee should follow his lead, and stop this scandal snowballing further.

Despite some ‘diplomatic’ language, Leslie Kaye FCA, does not mince his words at times.

He told us that the fund has almost twice the assets it should have to pay pensions. It is almost 200% funded;

“the WMPF.. [is]..substantially over-funded. The existing £22bn investments plus anticipated better investment returns has switched the fund from an under-funded state, to cover the anticipated liability nearly two times over” [emphasis ours]

Mirroring our analysis over the last 12 months he says:

“Since 2008 central banks ran a sustained period of artificially low interest rates (Quantitative Easing) which reflected in poor investment returns. There was a need for larger employer contributions to fill the investment returns gap to meet the calculated liabilities. The recent return by central banks to "old normal" interest rates has resulted in WMPF being substantially over-funded.”

Councillor Kaye tells us that, like us, he tried to convince the fund from a position of his expertise that this means the surpluses must be returned to the council much more quickly through substantially lowering their contributions straight away. He has not been successful in persuading them of this.

In other words, they ignored him.

He revealed to us that Solihull’s figures were sorted by October and their Employer  contributions will fall by 35% from April. Councillor Kaye’s advice,  if followed, would obviously have led to a bigger fall.

What Councillor Kaye’s email does not mention is that the valuation has artificially and for the first time created a 20% buffer for the purpose of calculating contributions. This presumably also explains why Councillor Kaye is not happy with the pace of the return of the surplus through reduced Contributions.

If this never-used-before buffer had not been used, and contributions were based on 100% funding (not this ridiculous 120% funding) then Solihull contributions could well have have fallen by 50%.

Councillor Kaye says that Birmingham is likely to have been offered the same kinds of reductions.

As we have pointed out in our blogs, we believe Birmingham’s mega contributions were so egregious that they must fall to 0% for the next three years at least; not as a holiday, but credit for already having paid them. It paid £130Million last year.

But even using the pension funds own questionable figures, if Birmingham had as significant a fall in contributions as Solihull's, its contributions would fall by 35% or £46Million/year.

Without the completely unnecessary 20% buffer, its contributions could fall by 50%, or £65 million/year.

And if Solihull knows what their figures are and is prepared to share it with the rest of us, why can’t Birmingham?

Councillor Kaye is not aware of any challenge by Birmingham City Council to the Fund's calculations.

Councillor Kaye rightly states that he "would have expected their S151 Officer/Government appointed Commissioner to be all over it.”

We'd suggest they probably don’t have a clue what’s going on.

Furthermore, Councillor Kaye believes the fund to have been too cautious in their calculations, resulting in a much slower return of the the Fund's surplus than he had anticipated.

We had been cautious in our own calculations here and had worked out our estimation based on what we still believed to be inappropriate calculations at the fund.

So an acceptance that this fund has an £11 billion pound surplus means that Birmingham City Council’s share of that surplus is an astonishing £2.5B.

Let’s be clear about this scandal: Birmingham City Council’s so-called bankruptcy was caused by catastrophic miscalculations and errors at its pension fund and the huge contributions it demanded from the Council.

This dwarfs the Oracle and Equal Pay disasters.