The birmingham Race Disparities Overview
The Birmingham Race Disparities Overview provides detailed statistical analysis of the extent of racial disparity in our city.
The development of the Birmingham Race Disparities Overview is a significant milestone that demonstrates the collaborative effort of the Birmingham Race Impact Group (BRIG) and the Insight, Policy and Strategy team at Birmingham City Council, who have worked together to develop a tool which provides a shared understanding of race disparities in Birmingham.
As a council, we want to tackle racial inequality, as this has been, is, and will continue to be a key priority in our City Vision and Corporate Plan, for our Cabinet members, and for our Corporate Leadership team.
BRIG have worked with many partners across the city in developing the 10 Year Birmingham Race Equality Delivery Plan. It was therefore essential we worked together and aligned our resources and efforts to develop a tool that will not only support BRIG and the council but support many other partners across the city. The analysis is easily accessible on the Birmingham City Observatory, it can be used to inform and influence delivery of services for our citizens as well as to support with continued efforts in lobbying for structural and systemic change.
We are grateful for the groundwork Jagwant Johal from BRIGand Mac Alonge from The Equal Group have done to engage with communities and partners across Birmingham to determine which policy areas are most important to drive progress within, and which indicators are important to report on. The learning from this engagement has led to the 5 high level themes and 41 indicators which have been reported on:
1) Housing
2) Education
3) Employment
4) Criminal Justice
5) Health & Well-being
The approach towards development includes:
• Comparative analysis: of Birmingham to the West Midlands, English Core Cities, and England overall
• Trends: being provided from the last 5 years – where available
• Data on broad and detailed ethnicity: where possible, to show how communities are affected
• Inclusion of public and service-level data: includes publicly available data, as well as service-level data from BCC Housing service, BCC Education service and West Midlands Police
• Always up to date: The product automatically links to a range of source data (using API) to provide the latest data, with some service-level data updating weekly in the product
Key headlines the insight product is revealing includes:
• Housing: In 2024, over 20% of people in temporary accommodation are Black African, the highest amongst any other ethnic group.
• Education: In the 2022-2023 the England average ‘Attainment 8' (which measures pupils' performance in 8 GCSE-level qualifications) was 46.4. In Birmingham, Gypsy/Roma pupils had the lowest average attainment 8 score (21.0), followed by White and Black Caribbean and Black Caribbean pupils who had a score of 38.
• Employment: In 2024 37% of 16-17 year old NEETs (Not in education, employment and/or training) are White British, followed by under 20% who are Pakistani.
• Criminal justice: In 2021/22, there were 15.83 stop and searches for every 1,000 Mixed ethnic people, and 14.98 stop and searches for every 1,000 Black ethnic people in the West Midlands, compared to 5.22 for White ethnic people.
• Health and Well-being: In 2019 in the West Midlands, the infant mortality rate (under 1 years of age) per 1,000 live births is 7.4 for Black infants, and 7.0 for Asian infants, compared to 4.1 for White infants.
Jagwant Johal, Birmingham Race Impact Group:
"From BRIG’s inception our quest has been to secure accessible quality data. The importance of this being that ‘speaking truth to power (“the system’’) of the racism endured by our communities was simply being ignored. The launch of the ‘Birmingham Race Disparities Overview’ marks a significant step in being able to set and measure the pace of the change required for Birmingham to be truly anti-racist. Thanks to The City Observatory team for making this collaboration work".
Sal Naseem, Assistant Director of Insight, Policy and Strategy, Birmingham City Council:
‘The Race Disparities Overview is a critical tool in our aspiration to become an Anti-Racist City. It highlights the systemic racial inequalities baked into too many systems, but importantly provides transparency to organisations and citizens on what must improve. Working with partners such as BRIG where we have clear common purpose is an example of how we can break out of our silos and come together to try and tackle these systemic issues together.’
The Birmingham Race Disparities Overview can be found here.