State of the City Region

Cardiff University’s City Region Exchange is delighted to present this ‘State of the City Region’ report for the Cardiff Capital Region.

This is the first report of its kind and has been produced in an effort to bring together in one place the latest economic, social and environmental data on the city region. We have tried to use accessible and interesting graphics, and to provide some accompanying commentary on key trends and patterns.

Our key motivation in producing this report is to demonstrate the sort of data and information that is currently available on the economic health and wellbeing of the Cardiff Capital Region. This data will be important as key decision-makers seek to benchmark and monitor the impact of the City Deal, its associated strategy and range of new initiatives.

It is our hope that this report will therefore prompt a wider discussion and debate about the sort of data and information that might need to be regularly collected and analysed to inform ongoing developments in the Cardiff Capital Region, as well as about the appropriate means and mechanisms for doing this. In short, this could provide a template for a regular, perhaps annual, independent health check for key decision-makers and stakeholders in the Cardiff Capital Region.

There is considerable scope for further discussion and debate about the sorts of information that will be useful as the City Deal is implemented and the city region develops. The work we’ve undertaken for this report suggests that at present, many of the key data sets for the region are somewhat piecemeal. Certainly, there is scope for greater development in terms of indicators which will help us better understand how effectively the city region works as a functional, interdependent economic area, including, for example, how the labour market functions, how businesses are connected across the city region, and the economic role played by the region’s different towns and communities. Similarly, there is much greater scope for thinking whether, and how effectively, existing data for the city region maps onto the requirements of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act.

What this report does reinforce is the very varied economic and social geography of the Cardiff Capital Region, and the scale of both the opportunities and the challenge facing those charged with finding ways to grow and spread economic opportunities in a truly transformative way. We hope that this report will also contribute to the important task of thinking and acting city-regionally that is going to be so crucial to the success and sustainability of the city-region agenda in south east Wales.

As such, we welcome your thoughts and suggestions on this report and how it might be developed and taken forward into the future.

Please contact us: cityregionexchange@cardiff.ac.uk and join in the debate

Gill Bristow, Adrian Healy and Stevie Upton

February 2017