The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) is the strategic authority for the UK’s largest city-region outside the capital, comprising Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, and Wolverhampton. Its purpose is to make the West Midlands the best place to live, work, and visit. High-quality research, intelligence, and evaluation are essential to ensure that the WMCA’s strategies, programmes, and interventions deliver the most impactful outcomes for its communities.
The Strategy Unit works to achieve meaningful outcomes through collaboration – outcomes that no single individual, organisation, or team could deliver alone. Examples include raising residents’ living standards, reducing poverty, and achieving net zero.
The Research, Intelligence, and Evaluation function within the Strategy Unit focuses on:
- strategic research, analysis, and forecasting required by the WMCA, thematic teams, and the region, aligned with its Annual Research Programme, and enhancing the rigour of thematic research by coordinating with partners across its research ecosystem
- bringing together regional data and insights into one trusted service, supporting evidence-informed decisions and more impactful strategy and delivery at both local and regional levels. This includes creating an economic intelligence network across the West Midlands system and coordinating a community of practice
- understanding the impact of its programmes, including through action learning; and helping thematic teams develop strong evaluation plans and logic models, resulting in refined and improved thematic strategies, policies, and programmes.
The collaboration with Diverse CDT will enable the WMCA to:
- strengthen its data, visualization, and policy modelling capabilities so that strategies, policies, programmes, projects, and interventions are more coherent and evidence-informed
- advance its approach to engaging and communicating impact, progress, and activities with policymakers and the public
- nurture a thriving regional research, intelligence, analysis, data, and evaluation ecosystem.
