Creating an Active Birmingham Strategy Consultation

Your views on the Creating an Active Birmingham Strategy 2024-2034

1. The Strategy should be clearer with accessible and simple English.
2. Inclusivity and accessibility were important to you. You said that strategy should consider the diverse needs of residents of Birmingham, ensuring accessibility for all ages and abilities with a key focus on disadvantaged groups who are the least active in Birmingham. Some of those groups are those living in disadvantaged areas, older adults, individuals with disabilities (learning, sensory and physical) and South Asians, especially women.
3. You expressed concerns about practical access to physical activity, including timing and location. Working-age individuals feel disadvantaged due to conflicting activity hours, and poor public transport limits accessibility.
4. Being physical active should be affordable. You suggested making physical activities more financially accessible.
5. It is important to have adequate infrastructure, including safer roads, cycle paths, green spaces, and overall city safety. You emphasised the need for safe and well-maintained leisure centres and indoor spaces.
6. It is key to have a holistic, whole-system approach to ensure Birmingham becomes an active city. Collaboration with partners is crucial, but you emphasised involving and empowering grassroot and community-led organisations, leveraging existing relationships to bridge the inactivity gap.
7. You have concerns about the Council's ability to deliver the ambitious strategy due to financial challenges. You worry whether the Council will have the necessary resources to support and implement the Creating an Active Birmingham Strategy.
8. You mentioned you want to be involved in designing services for you.

1. We have reviewed the strategy and ensured the language used is accessible. We have gone beyond and reviewed our use of language across our physical activity work. We have recently changed the name of our physical activity forum from ‘Creating an Active City Forum’ to just ‘Active City Forum.’ This way it is streamlined and clear. We intend to use clear and accessible English in all aspects of our work. We have clarified our targets to make it easier to measure the impact of the strategy.
2. This is an important point which also came through when we spoke to organisations who work with the most deprived communities. We, therefore, from the beginning of the strategy, changed the way we talked about opportunities and reinforced that we intend on ensuring opportunities are equitable and accessible and takes cultural needs into consideration. We changed our language to explicitly mention that we will use data and evidence to identify areas of needs where we will focus.
3. As part of our Wellbeing Service in making physical activity accessible and affordable, we will continue to improve our BeActive offer based on evidence available.
4. Recognising affordability as a barrier to being physically active, we ensured our Vision and Priorities considered this. Our focus is to make being physically active an easy choice. Hence why, we will continue to review and evaluate our programme and services to ensure they are relevant, equitable, accessible and affordable.
5. This has come out really clear in the consultation. Therefore, for ‘Active  Environments’ priority, we have highlighted our existing action of working to ensure there are local, safe, affordable and attractive spaces to be physically active in.
6. We have revised how we will deliver our ‘Active Systems’ priority by making it clear that the partners we intend to engage are not just traditional partners we have worked with. We will work with grassroot and community-led organisations. We have already started this through the Seldom Heard Voices project, and we are ensuring that the Active City Forum has those representations.
7. The Creating an Active Birmingham strategy is a co-produced strategy and is owned by the city rather than just the Council. We will harness existing relationships to ensure the strategy is delivered.
8. We created a Citizens Panel with 127 members from the community who we will consult regularly to obtain views and suggestions when designing programmes of work.