About Business Link

The West Midlands is an exciting region - demographically and geographically diverse. The region boasts superb quality of life, unique heritage locations, areas of outstanding national beauty and major cultural attractions. This diverse combination of places provides a compelling offer to international investors and current and potential residents, backed up by the West

Midlands’ unique central location at the heart of the UK’s transport infrastructure. Like other economies in the UK, the West Midlands’ workforce is changing – ageing and rapidly diversifying. The West Midlands faces significant economic and social challenges including:

• A continuing dependence on traditional sectors;
• A ‘3 speed’ economy where parts of Coventry, Warwickshire, Solihull and Birmingham are growing rapidly in terms of new development and productivity; North Staffordshire and the Black Country are lagging significantly behind the rest of the region on all issues and the remaining sub-regions demonstrate modest growth, new development and productivity gains;
• A low skills base where 14% of adults have no qualifications and where residents are more likely to have problems with basic skills than any other region;
• A lack of entrepreneurial culture.

This presents challenges to the region’s communities and also to the region’s business base in terms of skills supply and demand, and pressure on business practices.

In April 2007, Business Link in the West Midlands was transformed from five individual services to a single, streamlined and more effective service, providing information, advice and support to help businesses grow and start-up.

The service will help 70,000 businesses each year with basic information and provide intensive support for a further 16,000 companies. It serves all businesses and recognizes the specific requirements of women, young people, ethnic minorities, social enterprises and rural companies.

It is forecast that the benefit of this support will be to generate a £400 million improvement in the economic performance of the region by 2010.