Regional perceptions indicator for the West Midlands

England’s glory or England’s shame – what’s your opinion of the West Midlands?
We all have perceptions about places and they shape what we do, where we go and how we invest.
Because of this we are now running a research project to find out what perceptions people have about the West Midlands, and how it compares with [...]

Evaluation of business support services

Business support services such as Business Link, Manufacturing Advisory Service and Train to Gain are an important part of the assistance offered to business to help them start, grow and prosper.
The last three years have seen significant changes in the way this support has been organised and delivered and the time is now right to evaluate [...]

Economic migrants

The subject of economic migrants and what benefits or problems they bring has not been quite as topical in recent months as it has been in the past.
The downturn in the economy and the weakening of the pound are assumed to discourage migration and to encourage economic migrants in the UK to think of returning home.

Have your say!

We at the Observatory aim to provide you with a first class information service on the region, and a website that makes this easy for you to do. Recently we have been thinking about what we could do to improve finding information on our website and how we could lay it out better for you.
To [...]

Guidance on using the Indices of Deprivation 2007 to identify deprived areas

The regional Office of National Statistics (ONS) team in our neighbouring East Midlands region have recently published a guide on how to use the Indices of Deprivation 2007, How to identify deprived areas using the Indices of Deprivation 2007.
This guide sets out in a step by step fashion how to:

Find the most deprived small areas [...]

Support for e-business adoption

The last month has seen the launch of a new business service from the Observatory. We now have an online directory of organisations and websites who will support SMEs in all aspects of e-business adoption. If your business hasn’t yet got any e-business capability or is looking to broaden or expand existing capability then you will find [...]

West Midlands worst for fear of homophobic hate crime

The West Midlands heads some league tables that it can be proud of, but this is not one of them.  According to new research published by Stonewall, gays and lesbians are more likely to fear homophobic hate crime in the West Midlands than anywhere else in the UK. Of course fear of crime isn’t the same [...]

Has Liam Byrne got it right?

Today in his “One year on” speech, the regional minister Liam Byrne returned to his theme of increasing the number of graduates produced by the West Midlands.
What evidence there is that the planned increase in graduate supply is matched by demand for them from employers is one of the issues that will be explored in the graduate research work [...]