Key issues in the West Midlands

Over recent decades, development in the West Midlands has been dispersed in a way that has encouraged movement of people and jobs away from major urban areas. This has had impacts for both urban and rural areas. Central urban neighbourhoods have suffered from increasing social exclusion and deprivation, damaged and degraded environments, a lack of adequate housing and in some areas collapse of the local housing market, consequently making urban areas less attractive for residents and investors. In rural communities, increasing housing costs and inward migration has led to a changing demographic profile, areas of reduced economic activity, with pockets of deprivation particularly in more remote rural areas. Many rural areas also have increasing problems of accessibility to jobs and services. There are opportunities to improve links between urban and rural communities through the provision of local produce, sustainable fuel sources and opportunities for recreation.

There is a shortage of affordable housing in the West Midlands, and the Region also faces significant problems with regard to the condition of much of its housing, particularly in the private rented sector. As well as issues with the current supply of housing, the Region is faced with demanding projections for new housing development, which will prove a challenge to regional policies aiming to focus development in the major urban areas, and will also place a strain on regional infrastructure, including essential services such as water supply.

People are living increasingly further away from their work and the services and amenities they use, meaning that they need to travel further and more often, with a greater proportion of journeys made by car. This combined with the region’s position as a national transport hub for both road and rail leads to problems of congestion, poor air quality and streets that are unsafe for walking and cycling. Growing demand for transport is placing increasing strain on the ability of the existing transport infrastructure to cope, and the prevalence of less sustainable means of transport is an important element of the Region’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

The West Midlands lags behind other regions in the UK and Europe in terms of economic growth, affected by factors such as levels of productivity and investment, and there are pockets of deprivation across the region. The structure of the Region’s economy still relies heavily on manufacturing industry. The need for local economic diversification is a particular issue for some of the more rural areas of the Region, where faster-growing industrial sectors are under-represented and there is a reliance on more traditional patterns of industry, particularly agriculture and related land-based activity. The shifting economic profile of the region means that the skills required of the regional workforce are changing; but the West Midlands has a high proportion of the workforce with low-level or no formal qualifications.

The effects of climate change are already being felt in the UK, and such effects will become more apparent in the West Midlands over the next few decades. We are likely to see warmer summers and milder, wetter winters, with more unpredictable weather and more frequent extreme weather events such as storms and flooding. All of this has implications for the economy, regional infrastructure, health, agriculture, wildlife, and property, as outlined in Sustainability West Midlands’ report ‘The Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the West Midlands’. The scientific consensus is that the relatively rapid climate change that is currently taking place is due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions, the primary source of which (although there are other sources) is the use of energy, either in the home, by industry, or in transport. The West Midlands emits slightly less carbon dioxide (the most significant greenhouse gas) per person than the UK average, although the impacts of transport in the region are higher because of higher than average car use.

Email: admin@swm.org.uk | Tel: 0121 449 4406