Our vision

Ambition

We are very ambitious in our City. In summary, we are working with our partners to bring about the economic renaissance of our City, based on a combination of physical regeneration and the upskilling of local people. We are also committed to ‘closing the gap’, reflecting the fact that some sections of our community currently lag some way behind others on all the major quality of life indicators. These ambitions have underpinned the development of our Sustainable Community Strategy and our negotiations with Government about our new Local Area Agreement. The Council, along with other key stakeholders, has embraced the new long term ambition for the City and we are now translating these aspirations into our own policy arena.

Our emerging Corporate Plan will define what the Council will do to achieve our ambitions for the City. It will reflect the residents’ outcomes captured in the Community Strategy and be underpinned by our aspiration to be an “excellent” Council.

Ambitions for the Sub-region and beyond

Wolverhampton’s fortunes, in part, are inextricably linked with those of the Black Country and the wider West Midlands. The City Council takes an active strategic role in the sub-region together with our Black Country partners in Walsall, Dudley and Sandwell. In 2005, this resulted in the publication of the Black Country Study, which, in its turn, has formed the context for the development of the City’s ‘Vision 2020’ report.

This will provide the means by which the City establishes itself as a thriving, inclusive post-industrial City, in which people want to work, live and invest. This will build on Wolverhampton’s status as both a Black Country partner and a place which attracts people from large parts of south Staffordshire and Shropshire. This latter link is exemplified in developments like the M54 Technology corridor and i54.

Wolverhampton also looks beyond these areas and plays a major role on the Regional stage.

The Council is nationally recognised for our community involvement, and is one of the eighteen National Empowering Authorities.

Addressing Disadvantage

Wolverhampton is ranked within the 10% of the most deprived areas in England, based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

All of our priorities are driven by the need to address the underlining inequalities between different communities and neighbourhoods in the City. This will be done by targeting resources to both raise the basic levels for the most disadvantaged but also to narrow the gap between different communities and neighbourhoods.

Delivering our Ambitions

Our ambitions have been developed in conjunction with our partners. A number of strategic groups have been brought together under the auspices of our Local Strategic Partnership to ensure the contribution of a range of agencies are co-ordinated across the public, private and voluntary and community sectors to deliver our shared objectives. Wolverhampton’s partnership culture was forged in response to the difficulties which faced the City in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the widespread recognition that no one organisation or single community could resolve the situation acting alone. Further information on the LSP and its thematic partnerships can be found at http://www.wton-partnership.org.uk/.