Draft Coventry and Warwickshire local economic assessment for consultation

Warwickshire County Council and Coventry City Council have carried out a sub-regional economic assessment. The draft economic assessment is now available and comments are invited.

The economic assessment and feedback form are available on the Warwickshire County Council website. There are also supporting papers on innovation, future sectoral growth, functional economic geography and business starts and growth.

Local Enterprise Partnerships need to act to reinvigorate the private sector

Weaknesses in the structure of the West Midlands economy mean that it was hit particularly hard by the recent recession and is likely to see further job losses over the next five years.

Our latest briefing paper (pdf, 408kb), produced as part of our West Midlands Skills Assessment 2010, reveals that the West Midlands has a weaker private sector than other parts of the country. The West Midlands has poorer representation of higher value added activities and high growth firms with the potential to create new, skilled jobs.

As a result the West Midlands has seen its share of jobs in the public sector rise more rapidly than anywhere else in the country. It is particularly vulnerable to job losses from the spending cuts announced by the government.

We forecast that West Midlands Gross Value Added (GVA) will grow by only 8% (£8.8 billion) between 2010 and 2015 and there will be a net fall in employment of more than 38,000 people.

Local enterprise partnership proposals announced

56 proposals for local enterprise partnerships across the country have been submitted, the government has confirmed, following the closing day for submissions.

There are seven proposals from the West Midlands:

• Birmingham and Solihull with East Staffordshire, Lichfield and Tamworth: two page summary (pdf, 17kb) and  the full proposal (doc, 243kb)
• Coventry and Warwickshire (doc, 3.5mb)
• Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire (pdf, 1.3mb)
• The Black Country (pdf, 2.74mb)
• The Marches Enterprise Partnership (pdf, 1mb) – Herefordshire, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin
• West Midlands (an overarching proposal from Business Voice West Midlands)
• Worcestershire (pdf, 603kb)

Three distinct responses in respect to cross boundary working arrangements have also been received from Peak District, South East England and West Leicestershire and Northern Warwickshire.

Here’s the full list of proposals.

Inward investment into the West Midlands 2009/10 – a local analysis

In 2009/10 there were 84 inward investment successes in the West Midlands and another four knowledge-based investments. These investments created over 1,500 new jobs and safeguarded another 4,300.

Although these 88 investments represented the lowest number of jobs created or safeguarded since 1992/93, they also represented the 7th highest total number of projects since 1991.

Inward investment is usually spread reasonably evenly between the West Midlands metropolitan areas and the shire counties. In 2009/10 the shire counties attracted the majority of inward investment projects (55%). See left.

However, the metropolitan areas of Birmingham, Coventry, Solihull, Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton have attracted perhaps just over half of the projects over the years – see below. The number of jobs created and safeguarded also generally follows a similar pattern.

New Deal for Communities has brought significant improvements to deprived neighbourhoods in West Midlands

A new report  published by Communities and Local Government, A New Deal for Communities Experience: A final assessment (pdf, 779kb), highlights how government investment has had a positive impact on the six New Deal for Communities (NDC) areas in the West Midlands.

The £2 billion flagship regeneration programme between 2001 and 2008 helped:

• Reduce the proportion of working age residents in Walsall NDC area with no qualifications by 17 percentage points
• Raised the satisfaction with housing to 91% in 2008
• Reduced the proportion of residents in the Aston NDC area feeling unsafe in the dark from 20% to 17% in 2008
• 81% of residents in Kings Norton NDC area feel they had good access to a doctor in 2008
• 69% of residents in the Sandwell NDC area felt the NDC had improved their area

Sustainable Cities Index: analysis for the West Midlands

Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton are the three cities from the West Midlands included in the Sustainable Cities Index (pdf, 4.3mb) published recently by Forum for the Future.

This is the third year that the index has been published, which tracks sustainability progress achieved in Britain’s 20 largest cities. The index is designed to give a snapshot of sustainability in each city, aiming to encourage healthy competition, stimulating discussion and suggesting new ways of thinking about cities.

This post provides a short analysis of findings for the West Midlands cities and also highlights the similarities that this work has with our State of the Region dialogue on sustainable communities.

West Midlands population increased to over 5.4 million in 2008

The population of the West Midlands grew to over 5.4 million in 2008, according to the latest population estimates released by the Office for National Statistics.

With a population of 5.411 million, the region’s population grew by 0.5% (29,000) on the preceding year.

Natural change (births minus deaths) was the most significant contributor to the growth at 20,000, whereas net migration accounted for the remainder (9,000).

Locally within the West Midlands region, the most significant increases in population (in absolute terms) were recorded in Birmingham (up 7,000 to 1.017 million), and Coventry (up 3,000 to 310,000). With an increase in population on the preceding year of 1%, Coventry also recorded the largest rate of increase.

Government awards grant to boost town centres

The government is making £3 million available to help areas hardest hit by the recession find creative ways to reduce the negative impact empty shops are having on the high street.

Coventry, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Walsall councils are each being given a grant of £52, 632.

The councils will use the grants as they see fit to boost town centres and transform empty shops into a variety of places including learning centres, meeting places or a showroom for artists.

Inward investment: record high for West Midlands

In the period 2008 to 2009 the West Midlands region received 117 foreign direct investment (FDI) projects, a record high since records began in 1991 (shown by the blue line in the graph below).

Observatory collaborates with CSWP to develop new sub-regional strategy

The Observatory is pleased to continue our long standing links with the Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Partnership (CSWP) through a forthcoming project aimed at exploring future economic prospects for the sub-region.

We were commissioned in 2007 to deliver an initial economic assessment for CSWP. This report provided CSWP with a review of the strengths and weaknesses in the wider socio-economic environment for the sub-region as well as outlining future opportunities and threats.

Latest gross disposable household income estimates indicate metropolitan West Midlands is UK’s poorest sub-region

The 2007 Regional Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) (Word, 411KB) estimates are released today by the Office for National Statistics.

Indexed GDHI per head (where UK=100) for the West Midlands in 2007 was 90, stable in comparison to the revised 2006 index value of 90.

GDHI per head in the West Midlands rose from £12,700 in 2006 to £12,900 in 2007, an increase of 1.9%, in line with the increase seen in England and the UK.

Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) per head is preferred to Gross Value Added (GVA) per head as a measure of economic welfare.

Making information more accessible

InstantAtlas maps

How to make complex information available to a wider audience and how to make it more easily understand? Those were questions being considered in Coventry this week.

On Tuesday 20th January, Coventry City Council hosted a meeting designed to share ideas on how regional partners were using software to make their information more readily available.

The main focus of the event was Geowise’s InstantAtlas tool, which is used by many public sector organisations to provide a nice clear visual interpretation of the data they hold.

West Midlands local development annual monitoring reports

The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 requires local planning authorities to regularly monitor planning policies that affect the planning and development of their areas.

Each council is required to produce an Annual Monitoring Report which is published in December to assess the effectiveness of policy in the Local Development Framework.

These show whether the progress towards targets and milestones in the Local Development Framework are being met and whether council planning policies are being successfully implemented. If policies are not working as intended – or are not achieving sustainable objectives – the Annual Monitoring Report includes suggested actions.

Sharing intelligence from Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire

Yesterday, I attended the Coventry, Solihull and Wawickshire Researchers’ Forum to demonstrate the Observatory’s Resource Catalogue and show how the data and intelligence in the catalogue might support the work that they’re engaged in, and also to encourage further contributions to the catalogue from members of the forum to help share their data and intelligence across the region and sub-region.

The Resource Catalogue is available through the Observatory’s website and collects research, data and policy documents from across the West Midlands to create a fully searchable database for policy makers, decision makers, researchers and anyone else to access. There are contributions from organisations across the public, private and third sectors and what is particularly useful is that almost all are free and available immediately via a web-link.

Questionnaire on benefits of local information systems

This questionnaire is part of a research project, commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government, to investigate the way users of local information systems benefit from the data and statistics the systems provide. The aim of the questionnaire is to obtain information about how you use the system and the way it helps you.