Andrew Mitchell

While the Department has made no assessment of the potential merits of investing in industrial sites in the West Midlands, we continue to consider industry’s feedback on the key enablers for strategic investment which includes the need for industrial sites.

We have been working at pace to develop an Industrial Strategy based on businesses responses to the Invest 2035 Green Paper and ongoing engagement with businesses, with the advice and oversight of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council.

The Office for Investment is also expanding its capacity to better support and enable large scale investments, such as the recent investment secured in Bedford for a multi-billion pound Universal theme park.

Last year the Business Secretary announced a new Business Growth Service which will make it easier for businesses in Sutton Coldfield, the West Midlands and across the UK, to get help, support and advice to grow and thrive.

The West Midlands Growth Hub is where small and medium sized businesses in Sutton Coldfield and the West Midlands can benefit from specialist advice on how to scale up, access new markets and receive financial support through the British Business Bank.

Businesses can also access other Government programmes such as the Business Support Service, Help to Grow: Management, the UK Export Academy, International Trade Advisors and the Export Support Service.

We are delivering across government to create better conditions for retail and hospitality businesses to thrive.

This government has introduced the Crime and Policing Bill, which will scrap the effective immunity for low-value shoplifting and do more to protect retail workers from assault. We have introduced High Street Rental Auction powers for local authorities, which will make town centre tenancies more accessible and affordable for SMEs, local businesses and community groups. And we are delivering permanently lower tax rates for retail, hospitality, and leisure properties from 2026-27.

Last year the Business Secretary announced a new Business Growth Service which will make it easier and quicker for businesses across the United Kingdom to get the help, support and advice they need to grow and thrive. The West Midlands Growth Hub is where small and medium businesses in the West Midlands can benefit from specialist business advice on how to grow, access new markets and receive government support.

DBT offers extensive support for food and drink businesses in the West Midlands and across the UK. This includes educational programmes via the Export Academy, one-to-one advice from International Trade Advisors, and participation in global trade shows and missions. UK Export Finance provides financial assistance, with dedicated managers in the Midlands. Businesses can access support through the Business Support Service, Gov.UK, local Growth Hubs, Help to Grow Schemes, and the Small Business Council. This package reaffirms government’s commitment to making the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business, particularly in the food and beverage sector.

Details of Ministers' and Permanent Secretaries' meetings with external individuals and organisations are published quarterly in arrears on GOV.UK.

The government recognises the critical role of AI infrastructure in supporting advanced AI technologies. The AI Opportunities Action Plan outlines how the UK can build the cutting-edge compute infrastructure needed to lead in AI development and deployment, securing long-term economic growth and staying at the forefront of AI innovation.

We are interested in partnering with local and regional authorities and devolved administrations to establish AI Growth Zones, ensuring substantial regional and national benefits, such as upskilling and employment opportunities, are felt across the country.

On Monday 10 February, local and regional authorities, along with industry, were invited to come forward with potential sites suitable for hosting AI infrastructure as an early expression of interest. This was followed by a discussion about towns in the Birmingham area.

Arts Council England has provided over £357 million of funding in the West Midlands between 2021-2025. Sutton Coldfield has received over £1.5 million between 2021-2025.

For example, Selina Thompson Ltd is in receipt of £350,000 per annum as a new Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO). This NPO makes theatre installations, workshops and radio work for performance spaces, pubs, clubs and shopping centres across England and internationally.

The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery has received £5m as part of the Cultural Development Fund to create a striking extended building and repurpose spaces to showcase Stoke-on-Trent’s world class museum collections and enhance the visitor experience. In February, the Secretary of State announced that museums in the West Midlands, including Tamworth and Wolverhampton, would receive Museum Estate and Development Fund awards of over £3.4 million.

The Department has also announced a new £270 million Arts Everywhere Fund on 20 February. This will include support to museums, arts and music venues across the country and is a critical step that this Government is taking to help create jobs, boost local economies, and expand access to arts and culture for communities.

The Government is delivering the largest reform of destination management in a generation. We now have a network of 41 Local Visitor Economy Partnerships (LVEPs) across England and two Regional Destination pilots in the North East and West Midlands. The programmes have been looking at how we make it easier for people to visit those regions and enjoy a range of things to do when they are there, including great places to eat, shop and stay.

In March 2025, during English Tourism Week, we announced that the government is now providing an extra £1.35 million of support so the pilots can operate for another year. The extension will provide an opportunity to keep testing how a regional approach to managing the visitor economy can help drive visitor numbers, increase spending and create jobs, and secure the West Midlands’ reputation as a world-class destination to visitors.

The Government highly values the cultural sector and its positive contribution across the country, including in the West Midlands.

Due to the difficult economic inheritance from the previous government, we had to take a number of difficult decisions on tax, welfare and spending to fix the public finances, fund public services, and restore economic stability. The Government has considered the implication of this policy change, and the impacts were published in the usual way by HMRC as part of the Autumn Budget process. The cultural sector also benefits from the expenditure on public services that the Budget has enabled.

A Tax Information and Impact Note (TIIN), which gives a clear explanation of the policy objective and an assessment of the impacts was published alongside the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill on 13 November 2024.

High and rising school standards are central to the government’s mission to break down barriers and provide every child with the best start in life. As part of this, the department supports various initiatives to encourage more girls into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

The ‘I Belong’ programme, part of the National Centre for Computing Education, helps schools understand barriers to girls’ engagement with computing and aims to increase computer science qualification uptake in primary and secondary schools.

To build a strong mathematics foundation for all children, the Maths Hubs programme improves teaching in publicly funded schools. Supported by the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, the programme addresses attainment gaps linked to disadvantage, gender or other factors.

The STEM Ambassadors programme features over 28,000 volunteers from more than 7,500 employers, inspiring over 3 million young people annually by sharing personal experiences in STEM careers. 48% of the volunteers are women.

To provide careers information and guidance, the Careers and Enterprise Company, supported by £30 million of government funding, coordinates a careers hub network covering 95% of secondary schools and colleges, involving 400 employers and 4,000 business volunteers, many in STEM roles.

Every child and young person should be able to achieve and thrive in education, regardless of background. As in previous years, girls continue to do better than boys across all headline measures, and although the gap has narrowed compared to 2018/19, there is more to do. The department is committed to addressing this challenge.

High standards across education are the key to unlocking stronger outcomes and a better future for all children and young people, including boys. We aim to deliver these improvements and reduce gaps in outcomes through excellent teaching and leadership, a high quality curriculum and a system which removes the barriers to learning.

Teaching quality is the single most important in-school factor in improving outcomes, which is why the department is committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 expert teachers. We have established an independent, expert-led Curriculum and Assessment Review, which is looking closely at the key challenges and barriers to attainment for young people. Alongside this, we are strengthening our tools for faster and more effective school improvement by launching the new regional improvement for standards and excellence teams.

As part of a £2 million investment to drive standards in reading and writing, teachers in secondary schools are being offered new training and resources this year to help them support readers at all levels. Next year, the department will commission further training focusing specifically on struggling readers in secondary school who are at risk of falling behind.

This government is committed to improving mental health support for all children and young people. This is critical to high and rising standards in schools and breaking down barriers to opportunity, helping pupils to achieve and thrive in education.

That is why the government has committed to expand Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), so every young person has access to early support to address problems before they escalate. ​ NHS-funded MHSTs are expected to cover at least 50% of pupils in schools and learners in further education in England by the end of March 2025.

The department will also recruit an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults and open new Young Futures hubs with access to mental health support workers.

In addition, to support education staff, the department provides a range of guidance and practical resources on promoting and supporting pupils’ mental health and wellbeing. For example, a resources hub for mental health leads, and a toolkit to help choose evidence-based early support for pupils.

The department continues to work closely with the further education sector to promote and support providers to develop and implement a whole college approach to mental health and wellbeing. This includes supporting the Association of Colleges (AoC) in their goal for all colleges to sign up to the AoC Mental Health Charter and to align it with the University Mental Health Charter in higher education (HE). AoC’s framework aims to integrate mental health and well-being into every aspect of college life.

Departmental officials also continue to work closely with students, parents, mental health experts and the HE sector to drive meaningful change in mental health practice through the HE Mental Health Implementation Taskforce, which recently published its second stage report.

To raise standards in the sector, the Office for Students has also provided £400,000 of funding to the student mental health charity, Student Minds. This has enabled significant expansion of the University Mental Health Charter Programme, with 113 universities now signed up. The programme helps universities to adopt a whole-institution approach to mental health, bringing universities together to drive forward continuous improvement in mental health support for students.

The statutory duty to provide sufficient school places sits with local authorities. The department provides capital funding through the Basic Need grant to support local authorities to provide school places, based on their own pupil forecasts and school capacity data. They can use this funding to provide places in new schools or through expansions of existing schools. The funding is not ringfenced, subject to the conditions set out in the published Grant Determination Letter, nor is it time bound, meaning local authorities are free to use this funding to best meet their local priorities.

Birmingham City Council has been allocated just below £26.2 million to support new school places needed over the current and next two academic years, up to and including the academic year starting in September 2026.

The department’s Pupil Place Planning Advisers engage with local authorities regularly, to review their plans for creating additional places and to consider alternatives where necessary. When local authorities are experiencing difficulties, they offer support and advice.

Recent engagement with Birmingham City Council has confirmed both existing and anticipated secondary sufficiency pressure in Sutton Coldfield. The local authority is investing in expansions within existing schools to address short term localised sufficiency pressure and exploring further expansions to meet medium term demand. The department is aware of planned housing development in the local area in the longer term which may ultimately require additional school places to meet community needs.

Improving biodiversity is a key objective for the Government, and we are taking action to deliver on our legally binding biodiversity targets on species abundance, species extinction, and habitat creation and restoration.

These targets, alongside other statutory targets on tree canopy and woodland cover, water and air quality, marine protected areas, and resource efficiency, will drive action for nature recovery.

The West Midlands Combined Authority is the responsible authority for preparing the West Midlands Local Nature Recovery Strategy, which will agree priorities for nature recovery in the area and identify and map the best locations for action to be taken to benefit nature and the wider environment. Defra has provided funding to responsible authorities to prepare their strategies, as well as dedicated advice and support from Natural England, the Environment Agency, and the Forestry Commission.

Local councils are usually best placed to respond to littering problems, as their response can be tailored to the local community. They have a range of enforcement tools at their disposal including fixed penalty notices and prosecution. We are reviewing how we can further support local authorities to tackle these issues.

We have also taken steps to tackle commonly littered plastic items such as disposable vapes. The sale of single-use vapes will be banned from 1 June 2025. This will help to tackle a huge and growing stream of hard-to-recycle waste and litter, with nearly 5 million thrown away every week.

Plastic drinks containers are also covered as part of the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) that will go live in England, Northern Ireland, and Scotland in October 2027. The DRS will introduce a redeemable deposit on single-use in-scope drinks containers which can be claimed back by customers when the empty container is returned. This will reduce litter, increase recycling rates, create high quality recyclate for producers, and promote a circular economy.

The percentage of household waste sent for reuse, recycling or composting for Birmingham City Council in 2022-23 was 22.9 per cent.

Waste and recycling statistics including household recycling rates are published annually for all local authorities in England here.

Birmingham City Council (BCC) is the local highway authority for Sutton Coldfield and is a constituent authority of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA).

BCC has a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) agreement for its highway maintenance operations, under which the Department for Transport provides approximately £50.3 million per year to BCC. The Department will make an announcement in due course on the future of this agreement.

In addition, WMCA receives a City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS) from the Department, that runs for 5 years between 2022/23 – 2026/27. This settlement consolidates all transport capital funding allocations, including highways maintenance. The WMCA has a total CRSTS settlement of £1.05 billion; decisions on how this funding is allocated is a matter for WMCA. On Friday 20 December, the Government announced that, as part of the £500 million autumn Budget uplift, WMCA will receive an additional £8.61 million funding for local highway maintenance for the 2025/26 financial year.

The Government is committed to accelerating the roll-out of charging infrastructure so that everyone, no matter where they live or work, can make the transition to an electric vehicle (EV). As of 1 January 2025, there were 6,484 public charging devices in the West Midlands region, or 108 per 100,000 of the population.

Going forward, the West Midlands region has been allocated over £37m capital and resource funding as part of the £381m Local EV Infrastructure Fund (LEVI), to transform the availability of EV charging for drivers without off-street parking in the area. The LEVI Fund is expected to leverage significant further private investment and support the installation of at least 100,000 local chargepoints across England and will give EV drivers, especially those without off-street parking, confidence they are never too far from a chargepoint.

The department is working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to implement an “Integrated Settlement” for the West Midlands Combined Authority from April 2025. This will give the Mayor and Combined Authority a consolidated budget across local transport, housing, regeneration, local growth, skills, buildings retrofit, and employment support, with much greater freedom and funding flexibility to drive forward the local economy and deliver growth.

The department is also looking to simplify the current funding arrangements for all other Local Transport Authorities so that they can spend funding according to their local priorities and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy. Multi-year funding will be confirmed at the upcoming spending review.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency’s (DVSA) main priority is upholding road safety standards while it works hard to reduce car practical driving test waiting times.

On the 18 December, DVSA set out further plans to reduce driving test waiting times across the country. These steps include recruiting 450 driving examiners (DEs). Full details of these steps can be found on GOV.UK.

DVSA continues recruitment for DEs at driving test centres (DTCs) that serve customers in the West Midlands region and is currently working through the recruitment process from recent campaigns. As part of this, DVSA is currently aiming to recruit up to twelve potential new DEs in the Birmingham area, five in the Worcester area, two in Ludlow and two in Hereford. There is also the potential for five new DEs for DTCs in Gloucestershire, which might also serve customers in the West Midlands region.

Some of these candidates have started training, whilst others are currently undergoing checks as part of the recruitment process.

The Budget announcement on 30 October confirmed departmental budgets for the rest of this financial year and the financial year 25/26. This included a commitment of over £650m in local transport funding beyond city regions in 25/26 to ensure that transport connections improve in our towns, villages and rural areas as well as in our major cities. Allocations for individual local authorities will be confirmed by the Secretary of State for 25/26 in due course.

Funding for the Department post 25/26 is subject to a comprehensive bottom-up Spending review process that is planned to conclude in June. Local funding options are being considered as part of this review.