Birmingham City Council: Year 3 Q2 update

Birmingham plan to test their powers to influence the upstream, social and economic determinants of health to shift towards a healthier food and physical activity economy and environment through planning powers and apprenticeships and employment training.

Progress

• Developers toolkit is complete and actively being used by planning colleagues
• Online learning platform built and content made live on the Healthy Brum website in Oct 21
• Conducted initial trial with a number of apprentices in Oct 21 to ensure the system worked and to gain initial feedback
• Evaluation participation methodology developed by Birmingham University
• Reached out to stakeholders and increased membership of the Creating a Healthy Food City Forum
• Continued work on Birmingham Basket - aiming to collect local data to support COTP work
• A cultural eating guide has been commissioned to explore what the community needs. Researchers involved in developing African/Caribbean guide around cultural eating and the plan is to link it with different campaigns
• Eight workshops will be delivered in January as part of the Best Start workstream and partners across the city will attend - on course for having ten food businesses on board
• Planning to link COTP work with the upcoming Commonwealth Games including healthy eating campaigns, healthy recipes from different countries and so on

Learnings

• Toolkit consultations too long, hence low response rate - this learning to be taken on board for future consultations
• Developing a scoping checklist and process for developing new tenders to ensure robustness and product quality has been beneficial

Challenges

• Low response rate to toolkit consultation because it was a long document. Mitigated this by shortening the consultation and providing a brief explanatory document to accompany the consultation
• Toolkit not adopted by Planning authority of BCC and not seen as integral component of developing a healthy city approach - working closely with colleagues to ensure it is embedded the Birmingham Development Plan
• Data not available to develop a functional Birmingham Basket

Next steps

• Develop policies and processes to embed and enact the Healthy City Planning Toolkit with a partnership approach between planning teams and Public Health Built Environment teams.
• Explore possibility of developing a Healthy Urban Development Group for Birmingham
• Deploy pre- and post-surveys alongside the programme on the online learning portal and collate feedback
• Follow up participant interviews to take place between Jan-Mar 22
• Complete data collection by March 22, analysis in April 22, write report capturing recommendations on building health literacy into apprenticeship programmes by June 22