A Challenge For Mick Laverty

BETWEEN ALUM ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

10-12-2007

New AWM Chief Exec Mick Laverty will be launching a new Innovation Centre on the old MG Rover site at Longbridge today, with West Midlands Minister and Hodge Hill MP Liam Byrne. I wonder if they’ll be discussing this open letter to Laverty from Stirrer reader David Parker.

Dear Mr Laverty,

Firstly, many congratulations on your promotion to Chief Executive of Advantage West Midlands.

Secondly, I am writing to you as a resident of East Birmingham to set you and your organisation a challenge.

If you read this letter in your office you will be sitting at the heart of the second largest city in the world's fifth richest economy. Two miles to the East of where you sit is an area in which according to a 2007 report produced for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, "Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968-2005", half the population is living in "breadline poverty".

I would draw your attention to page 22 of the report in which Hodge Hill West is mentioned as one of the three areas in Britain with the largest increase in poverty in the last few years. (The background papers to the report state that in 1990 the figure was 33.3%, in 1980 25.6%).

I walk along the Washwood Heath and Alum Rock Roads regularly. I have yet to see evidence of AWM's presence in that core area of Hodge Hill West. Where are the large-scale and small-scale regeneration projects with the AWM insignia proudly displayed? Have your organisation's resources been deployed with the focus and urgency required to meet the locality's social and economic needs?

The scale of the challenges in this part of Birmingham is matched only by the opportunities. Imagine the boost it would give to the career of an ambitious regeneration professional if this area could be transformed over the next two decades into one of the fastest-growing and most vibrant urban centres in the country.

Accordingly, I urge you to make the future of Alum Rock, Washwood Heath and Hodge Hill the top priority in your new post. I suggest you work with the Minister for the West Midlands, local councillors, local residents, and local traders' organisations to devise a comprehensive economic development and social regeneration framework for the Washwood Heath and Alum Rock areas.

The formulation of a long-term vision should be accompanied by a short-term commitment to greater resources being directed to this area of Birmingham which has one of the greatest levels of social disadvantage in the country.

I hope you will agree with me that an agency with an annual budget of over £300 million should be doing more to counteract these deep-seated structural trends and I look forward to a reply outlining your response to this challenge.

Yours sincerely,

David Parker