Partnership Working

The City Region aims to build upon existing levels of cooperation in recognition of the unique power and influence that their connected, coordinated and cross border interventions can provide to:

• Work in a voluntary, visible and accountable partnership to achieve a more integrated approach to the delivery of large scale urban development, business growth and environmental sustainability by ensuring that our spatial planning, economic development, skills and employment, transport, regeneration, housing, the reduction of carbon emissions and environmental sustainability, and quality of life policies and interventions are connected, mutually supportive and reinforcing.
  
  
• Accelerate the delivery of existing and forthcoming regional and sub regional strategies, most notably the Regional Economic Strategy, the Regional Spatial Strategy, the Black Country Study, and the Regional Sustainable Development Framework, and to positively influence the revisions of those strategies that are currently in progress.
  
  
• Work collaboratively across borders to tackle the common challenges which our communities face so as to increase national and international competitiveness and productivity, individual prosperity, and public and private sector service provision and delivery in the City Region, and through this to help to address the problems associated with economic development overheating in London and the South East, and to significantly improve the overall economic performance of the West Midlands Region, and of the nation as a whole.
  
  
• Maximise the efficient and strategic deployment of public sector finance and through this to lever in higher levels of private sector investment than would result in the absence of City Region interventions.
  
  
• Support growth that serves both City Region, other urban, and rural communities, and reduces development pressure on the West Midlands’ rural areas to allow the Region to benefit from managed population growth.
  
  
• To utilise the collective powers and influence of the City Region to progressively deliver policies for carbon neutrality and environmental sustainability.
  
  
• Commit to collective representation to and negotiation with central Government, and other key agencies and interests as deemed appropriate.

The City Region will also develop other important strategic, spatial relationships – with the North and South Midlands, Milton Keynes, and with the South East. Work will be undertaken to ensure that strategic decisions are sensitive to, and complement, the priorities identified by other major city regions and urban areas. This City Region is uniquely well positioned to be able to relieve some of the difficult growth trajectories currently challenging London and the South East by absorbing a proportion of the (migratory) population growth that would otherwise gravitate to these areas.