As a global city, an engine of the UK economy where transformative developments are taking shape, a place of 1.15 million people with one of the youngest and most diverse populations, and overseen by Europe’s largest single-tier authority, Birmingham has a sense of scale.
This is also true for levelling up. When we published our levelling up strategy in November, we looked hard at the challenges. Over 40% of Birmingham’s children live in relative poverty. We’re in the top three most deprived core cities. Our citizens fare less well across many key indicators. Unemployment is the country’s highest. Around 90% of wards are more deprived than the national average and there’s a decade’s gap in the life expectancy between the poorest and most affluent areas. Bluntly, too many people are excluded from the benefits of our economy, inequalities have grown due to the pandemic and our communities now face the cost of living crisis.
These are challenges that we’re committed to address. It means harnessing our opportunities and ensuring that these are felt across the city. Our scale means that a great many people benefit if we level up and a significant contribution is made to the government’s national goals.
In Birmingham we say we’ve a golden decade of opportunity. Soon we host one of the world’s largest multi-sports events, the Commonwealth Games. We bid for the Games, we won it, are delivering it, and are now looking forward to a fantastic event and legacy – great for the city, region and UK.
HS2’s arrival towards the end of the decade, provides long-term momentum and is spurring investment now.
With our partners we’re bringing forward significant developments with new homes, commercial space and jobs. Increasing growth, jobs and business opportunities helps drive levelling up and we want to do much more.
This growth must be inclusive, so all people and places benefit. Levelling up means challenging the deeply ingrained structural inequalities, improving infrastructure including social infrastructure as well as public services, empowering citizens and ultimately delivering improved outcomes.
We’re overlaying labour market interventions such as driving the payment of the real living wage and providing training and signposting to help people get the jobs. We’re driving social value procurement to embed wealth locally and support local jobs and business, including through the Commonwealth Games programme. We’re harnessing our assets to support local businesses and neighbourhoods and working with anchor institutions to do similarly.
We’ve developed ‘levelling up accelerators’ to do more than we can within our existing powers and budgets. An early intervention approach seeks to help prevent the most disadvantaged spiral into a crisis through community support networks. East Birmingham, the size of Derby, has the lowest indices in our city. We’re developing a place model to spur at scale change.
Programmes seek to accelerate transport and digital infrastructure and new homes, particularly affordable. We’re developing an at scale housing retrofit with the cities of Wolverhampton and Coventry to cut carbon, improve homes and create jobs.
We seek partners to join us and we want to partner with government. This calls for a dynamic partnership with authorities like ours that want to make the biggest difference, and in turn devolving powers and funding to scale comprehensive, strategic investment to create and connect opportunities in all our communities.
Author: Deborah Cadman, Chief Executive, Birmingham City Council
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