Birmingham Issues
Since John's election in 2005 all of the MPs in Birmingham have agreed to work together in the interests of the city (from time to time). There are monthly meetings of all 11 Birmingham MPs. There are a number of issues which have involved all party Birmingham Campaigning.
  • New Street Station - the station is close to its limit as to passenger numbers
    * New Street Station is to be redeveloped *

  • HP Sauce - sadly Heinz have taken Houses of Parliament Sauce manufacturing to Holland

  • Loan Shark action - MPs are lobbying the government to keep funding action against loan sharks.
Birmingham - clearly the best city to live in

Notwithstanding the efforts of Pro Birmingham Campaign Sites, Birmingham has not really got the press it deserves.

Recent surveys have shown that:

Birmingham is one of the Safest Cities in the Country
"A recent crime survey ranks Birmingham sixth lowest for crime out of 55 cities. This makes Birmingham safer than Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle, Liverpool and London among others. The results of the survey show that Birmingham is well below the national average in six out of seven key areas."

"Despite popular belief that gun crime is an issue in Birmingham, the survey shows that the ratio of gun crime offences to population is three times higher in the more traditional cities of Oxford and Cambridge."

Quotations from West Midlands Police website.
Birmingham is top out of 42 cities for services
The link is to a Glasgow Evening Times story about how Glasgow came second to Birmingham. Somerfield's original press release is Here

Quote: The 10 most serviced cities and towns in the UK (from a sample of the 42 largest)

  1. Birmingham
  2. Glasgow
  3. Manchester
  4. Swansea
  5. Liverpool
  6. Sheffield
  7. Leeds
  8. Northampton
  9. Southampton
  10. Edinburgh
Size is not everything
The point about the above two stories is that they are calculated "per capita". Normally, for example, Birmingham issues more parking tickets than any other local authority simply because it is the largest city other than London (which is divided into a number of warring balkan republics known as London Boroughs). To compare cities, therefore, the calculations need to be done on a per capita basis.

Cities and Local Authorities
When comparing sizes of Cities there are confusions that result from the fact that Cities such as Leeds (the third English local authority, but 4th English city) have local authorities (Leeds MDC) which include quite a bit of the surrounding area. Leeds MDC, for example, has a population of about 750,000 whereas the City itself is more like 440,000.

The relative populations of cities are:

  1. London
  2. Birmingham
  3. Glasgow
  4. Liverpool
  5. Leeds
  6. Sheffield
  7. Edinburgh
  8. Bristol
  9. Manchester
  10. Leicester
  11. Coventry
  12. Kingston upon Hull
  13. Bradford
  14. Cardiff
  15. Belfast
  16. Stoke-on-Trent
  17. Wolverhampton
7,172,091
970,892
629,501
469,017
443,247
439,866
430,082
420,556
394,269
330,574
303,475
301,416
293,717
292,150
277,391
259,353
251,462

Information Sourced from: www.citypopulation.de/UK.html
Best City For a New Headquarters

According to the UK Cities Monitor 2006 Birmingham is the best city for a new HQ. With a score of 1.01 it is well in front of Manchester (0.89), London (0.86), Leeds (0.74) etc etc. (source Cushman and Wakefield)

Also from the same report "London and Birmingham remain the best known cities."

Second Best City to locate a business in today

London (0.91), Birmingham (0.65), Manchester (0.59).

Generally the city does well in this report apart from as the best city for a new call centre where Birmingham is 7th.

Page last updated: 19 October 2011