The Equity and Inclusion Scheme 2025-2028

Our equity and inclusion scheme sets out how we aim to reduce inequality and improve the quality of people’s lives.

The Equality Act 2010 requires us to work on eliminating discrimination, advancing equality, and fostering good relations between people with protected characteristics and those without. We cannot deliver lasting change for the everyone if equity, diversity and inclusion are not at the heart of everything we do.

Equity and inclusion affect us all and shape every aspect of our lives. A person’s background or income can influence their health outcomes and access to care, while unemployment, low skills, and limited educational achievement create barriers that must be addressed by everyone. People also face obstacles due to protected characteristics or wider socio-economic factors such as where they live or their social class.

Equity and Inclusion in the West Midlands

There are lots of strategies that describe the work going on in the West Midlands and equity and inclusion is part of all this work. Some of the strategies and policies where equity and inclusion feature as a central theme include:

These pages set out how we are addressing these inequalities and working to create fairer, more inclusive opportunities for everyone in the West Midlands.

Our Objectives

To tackle these challenges, we have set out our key objectives and aims, guiding the actions we will take to make the West Midlands a fairer and more inclusive region.

Objective 1: To provide accessible, affordable, safe and inclusive transport services to our wide range of customers.

Our aims:

Improve passenger perceptions of personal safety on the transport network.
To ensure services offer good value for money and people can access employment, education and leisure opportunities.
To narrow the sustainable travel inclusion gap and ensure sustainable travel modes and infrastructure are more easily accessible to more people that meets their individual needs.
To improve customer experience for our diverse range of customers and engage effectively to understand and act on customer needs.

Actions to support deliver of these objectives include:

Improve safety on the transport network and reduce total recorded crime.
Engage with the public to help them make informed choices over how the transport system is governed.
Investment to support rapid transition of the public transport and shared transport fleet to zero emission vehicles.

Objective 2: Deliver schemes, strategies and programmes across the WMCA that help deliver positive equality and inclusion outcomes, reducing socio-economic disadvantage and poverty for our region’s diverse communities.

Our aims:

To implement the affordable housing policy and delivery programme supporting regeneration and generating employment opportunities for local people.
To drive up skills levels amongst the region’s communities to help secure sustainable employment at higher levels in a range of sectors so that everyone can benefit from the region’s economic growth.
To deliver on the promise of more innovative, inclusive growth, with the confidence to more deliberately shape investment, infrastructure and services around social and economic goals.
To create a region in which positive, proactive and preventative approaches to citizen wellbeing and engagement are normalised, giving our diverse population a better chance to thrive in life and work.

Actions to support deliver of these objectives include,

The establishment of the next Affordable Homes Programme or equivalent successor from April 2026 onwards in collaboration with Homes England and MHCLG.
Developing the WMCA Affordable and Social Housing Plan.
Implementation of the Employment and Skills Strategy 2024-2027.

Objective 3: Ensure equality is embedded within all key WMCA work areas, and that WMCA uses its strong regional influence decision making is informed by the needs of diverse communities.

Our aims:

To ensure equality considerations are an integral element of the decision-making process and supported by Health and Equity Impact Assessments or similar.
To inform and co-produce the development and delivery of our strategies and programmes.
To deliver equality through procurement by making sure that practices are fair, contractors abide by key equality principles and social value is delivered through WMCA contracts.

Actions to support deliver of these objectives include,

Engage with more of the region’s diverse communities via the Combined Authorities, community engagement process.
Embed Social Value across WMCA processes.
Ongoing training and support to produce evidence-informed health and Equity impact assessments.

The West Midlands Population

The West Midlands faces its own unique challenges with equity and inclusion.

The region is one of the UK’s youngest, and one third (33.6%) of the WMCA area population is under the age of 25, higher than the England average of 29%.
Almost half of the population are communities racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’.
28% of the population are living in amongst England’s top 10% most deprived areas. Increasing living costs have led to the West Midland’s having some of the highest rates of child poverty in England.
Our region has some of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country.
Disabled people in the WMCA area are less likely to be in employment and more likely to be economically inactive, when compared to non-disabled people.
The West Midlands region is amongst the UK’s more expensive places to rent a home. Those on lower incomes face the least affordable rent prices outside of London.

More information can be found in the State of the Region report here.

Summary

Our three Equity Scheme Objectives as mentioned and Equity Scheme Action Plan are intended to help make the West Midlands the best place to work, live and visit.

The scale of the regional EDI challenge means we will have to work closely with the rich diversity of business, organisations and communities to bring about change together.

Get in touch

For further information, queries or to see the full report please contact the Equalities and Diversity Team on equalitiesteam@wmca.org.uk