West Midlands Futures Green Paper

The West Midlands Futures Green Papper proposes that, over the coming ten years, the West Midlands will prioritise our collective efforts to achieve the following outcomes.

The West Midlands’ Theory of Growth

High Growth Clusters and Innovation

• Increase the rate and level of R&D adoption by businesses, focused on the West Midlands’ high growth cluster strengths and translational research.

Business Leadership and Investment 

• Transform the standards of business leadership and management across the region, including to support the adoption of technology.
• Maintain the West Midlands’ standing as the top region for FDI investment outside of London.

Our Everyday Economy

• Improve job quality and pay across the region’s everyday economy.
• Double the size of the social economy with effective social economy clusters in every local authority area.

Our People and Skills

• Tackle youth unemployment and the drivers of economic inactivity, with a particular focus on better supporting residents with caring responsibilities and addressing racial inequalities in the labour market.
• Equip our residents with the skills they need for a higher-skilled economy.

Our Economic Networks and Narrative

• Strengthen the region’s institutions by forming more effective partnerships and enhance the region’s approach to economic development delivery.
• Tell a new, confident narrative about the West Midlands, which shows up in stronger perceptions of the region by our key partners.

Our Places

• Unlock economic growth through public and private investment in a series of major growth sites and corridors of opportunity.
• Better connect the region’s boroughs to its cities and its cities to each other by public transport.
• Make the core centres of the region’s cities and boroughs well-designed places to live, with denser housing connected to transport hubs as we advance the development of 15-minute neighbourhoods.
• Meet the rising demand for (social) housing from our burgeoning population.
• Transform the urban centres and high streets of the region’s cities and boroughs, creating the conditions for culture, leisure, retail and community activity to thrive.

Public Service Innovation

• Ensure all of our children are better prepared as they start in school including by improving the quality of available childcare.
• Lower the barriers to youth employment and tackle the root causes of the poor health that prevents people from accessing good work.
• Tackle the root causes of homelessness and provide pathways out of temporary accommodation.

Net Zero

• Reduce our regional energy demand through investment in smarter energy systems and place-based approaches to achieving net zero.
• Enhance our resilience to future changes cause by climate change that is now unavoidable.