Selling ‘golden decade’ to poor will be struggle

BIRMINGHAM City Council’s political leadership, supported by Cadman, decided to head to Westminster to unveil its masterplan to level up the city last month.

The top line of the strategy is that Birmingham is at the start of a “golden decade”.

The Commonwealth Games and the arrival of HS2 are seen as the catalysts for this new era.

But for many ordinary citizens struggling to make ends meet they mean very little.

Many ordinary residents in Alum Rock, for example – the fifth most deprived and most overcrowded ward in the city – see only chaos, noise and disruption ahead when the Saltley Viaduct and Aston Church Road overbridge are demolished and rebuilt to make way for the HS2 line out of Curzon Street.

Cadman agrees more needs to be done to sell to residents the benefits of HS2 around the jobs it will create, the inward investment it will bring.

But for residents of Alum Rock, there will be other benefits coming down the line.

First will be a planned Metro line out of Curzon Street station through to the international HS2 hub at the NEC and Birmingham Airport, with local stops en route.

But she also reveals the council is exploring other ideas that could make a real difference.

“Lots of people say they don’t understand what it (HS2) means for me. The route runs through the most deprived part of our city, through east Birmingham.

“HS2 has bought land along that route so it has ownership of land. So I want to have a conversation with Homes England about what land it owns, and as we are the 20th biggest landowner in the country, what do we have along that route?

“So you can already see a different conversation about how do we use that route to create value and the opportunity to build linear communities along that track. And then if we are going to attract global investment, at least 50% of that has to be affordable housing to support those communities, and 80% of those skills we need go to local people – and so on.”