Inclusive Growth & Investment
This document outlines the WMCA Inclusive Growth Decision-making Tool, giving guidance for how it can be used to evaluate the contribution of projects to inclusive growth in the West Midlands.
The Decision-making Tool is designed to assess if a project is likely to make a positive contribution to inclusive growth. It does this by focusing on identifying how the economic growth will be generated and on the people likely to benefit from a project, amongst the target groups.
Although the Decision-making Tool should ideally be considered in all investment decisions, not every project will have an inclusive growth outcome, and this does not necessarily mean it should not be funded.
If a project cannot be identified as directly supporting the inclusive growth, that does not mean that it cannot produce a wider inclusive growth benefit, with a clear focus on the potential to procure and manage the project in a way that will create wider benefits.
This is a simple tool that is intended to be tested, used and improved over time. It asks a set of simple questions that, done repeatedly and systematically, can help make the consideration of inclusive growth goals the norm across our policy and practice.
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Designed to encourage practitioners to include Inclusive Growth considerations when designing their project.
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Designed to qualitatively assess how projects could be modified at application stage to increase Inclusive Growth outcomes.
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Intended to instil a set of behaviours and embed Inclusive Growth principles across the WMCA partnership.
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Intended to be used for technical project monitoring or project evaluation/appraisal – though it can form the basis of more a more technical approach.
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The sole mechanism to decide whether to fund a project. Instead it’s a complementary tool which asks a consistent set of questions to evaluate the extent to which projects contribute to the inclusive growth.
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Designed to provide detailed, exact figures on the inclusive growth impact of a project – though it can help to frame this approach.