We have just published a new kind of product on the Birmingham City Observatory website. The Birmingham Pakistani Community Profile provides new insight into one of our largest communities of identity – our residents of Pakistani heritage.

 

 

Birmingham has the largest Pakistani community of any local authority in England, numbering 195,000 people and accounting for 17% of our residents in 2021. It is a growing population, concentrated in East Birmingham – our largest area of deprivation in the city. The dashboard allows us to see this population in granular detail, with insight to age, education, employment, and many other factors. It highlights issues such as the large number of young Pakistani people needing skills provision, high numbers with low qualifications, and low employment rates.

 

For the first time, this insight and the underlying data is now available at individual ward and multi-ward level, not just at the scale of the whole city or the constituencies. So you can see the numbers and characteristics of the Pakistani population for the catchment area of a college, or the area served by a healthcare or leisure facility, or affected by an economic or transport development. Or you can look at particular age ranges or genders.

 

This is relevant to council services, valuable for our partners, and important for our communities. It allows us and our partners to target our communications and plan services more effectively. It helps shape culturally appropriate provision and promotes community engagement. The information is detailed, public and equally accessible to everyone.

 

In terms of the technology behind this, we are now drawing on a Census data model developed in partnership with Birmingham City University, which allows us to develop dashboards like this far more quickly than ever before. We can go on to create similar insight for many other communities, which can sit alongside and inform products like the existing community health profiles and a wide range of strategic needs assessments.

 

 

We hope this work will help inform our decisions, improve our performance, and drive change across the city. Please don’t hesitate to share it, and please contact us at cityobservatory@birmingham.gov.uk if you can see improvements or changes that would help increase its impact. The City Observatory Team now has many other initiatives underway with city partners and colleagues across the council, and is always keen to engage, demonstrate and develop further tools to drive positive change.

 

Author: Richard Brooks