This year’s State of the Region Report is the first of a new series of annual reports.
In future years, these reports will present a synthesis of the findings from the new State of the Region process which have emerged during the year.
They will draw out some of the key themes emerging from the process, and from other research undertaken in the West Midlands, and link them to wider developments influencing policy and strategies. These reports will provide an important role in the process of ensuring that the links between evidence and policy remain strong.
Because the new process is still in its infancy, this year’s annual report is slightly different. It looks back over the four years since the first State of the Region Report (2004) and forward to the future of evidence based policy in the region.
The report begins by reviewing what the evidence tells us about changes in the West Midlands since 2004 and about the key challenges that remain. The review is arranged around a dozen key issues which were first identified in the 2004 report.
The report then looks at the progress over the last four years in the development of evidence-based policy. The improved evidence base, to which the Observatory has contributed, has had an impact on many of these changes and the importance of evidence-based policy continues to rise. National policies now emphasise the need for robust evidence to underpin policies, and the increasing resources put into research shows that this is recognised at regional level too.
The report concludes by looking to the future, in terms of planned evidence base developments, the process by which evidence informs policy making and key challenges facing the West Midlands, informed by the evidence presented earlier in the report, including:
- Increasing participation in cultural and sporting activities
- The impact of an ageing population and a growing age gap between urban and rural areas
- Enhancing the economic contribution of growing minority ethnic groups
- Closing the output gap by improving productivity and economic inclusion
- Raising qualification levels and reducing the number of people without qualifications
- Taking advantage of opportunities from climate change, whilst protecting against its impacts
- Improving lifestyles to prevent future health problems developing
- Building more housing to improve affordability whilst protecting the environment
- Maintaining relatively low crime levels and addressing anti-social behaviour and fear of crime
- Improving the image of the West Midlands to encourage more people and businesses to locate here
- Reducing worklessness so more people can contribute to economic prosperity
- Improving transport reliability, so the region can take advantage of its central location
Full report
State of the Region Report 2008 (PDF, 1.37MB)
Datasets
As part of our continuing commitment to support the development of the regional and sub-regional evidence base we've assembled key indicators to accompany the report and presented these in a series of datasets, available to download below.
These indicators are also available through InstantAtlas maps, an interactive tool that displays data visually in a colour-coded atlas. The atlas geography can be set by government office region or local authority district to capture a wide range of data.