Capital funding is provided through a combination of locally managed operational capital and national capital programmes. Within their capital allocations, Integrated care boards are responsible for prioritising investment locally, working with partnered National Health Service trusts to determine which schemes should be taken forward first.

There is no single national timetable for decisions on individual local schemes. Funding decisions for critical care infrastructure projects in Birmingham and North Solihull will be driven by the national capital settlement and the Department’s business planning, and then by the annual NHS planning cycle, which is when systems submit plans setting out proposed use of funding and demonstrate affordability.

In practice, decisions on the release of funding for specific schemes depend on the maturity of proposals, including business case readiness, and whether they can be shown to be affordable within agreed plans.

Decisions on future capital funding beyond existing allocations will be considered through the usual planning and spending review processes.

We have set a clear target for systems to work to reduce long waits in NHS England’s Medium Term Planning Framework. By 2028/29 at least 80% of community health service activity, including podiatry, should take place within 18 weeks. In addition, in 2025 we published Standardising Community Health Services, which provides an overview of the core community health services, with further detail published in February 2026.

The NHS Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB) is responsible for commissioning podiatry services across Birmingham and Solihull. Services are provided by the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and the Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

The Birmingham and Solihull ICB is working closely with both providers to address these challenges and reduce waiting times through a coordinated programme of improvements. Key actions across the system include:

- improving access and pathways, by reviewing and refining referral pathways to ensure patients are directed to the most appropriate service first time, reducing unnecessary demand and delays;

- service redesign, by developing more sustainable models of care that better reflect current demand and levels of clinical complexity, including opportunities to deliver care in alternative settings;

- workforce development and productivity, by expanding workforce capacity through apprenticeships and upskilling, optimising skill mix, and improving productivity through better use of support roles and streamlined clinic processes; and

- operational improvements, by reducing non-attendance rates, improving clinic utilisation, and strengthening performance monitoring to support timely intervention where pressures emerge.

The government is investing over £1.5 billion in tackling youth unemployment and inactivity, including £820 million for the expanded Youth Guarantee and £725 million for the Growth and Skills Levy. This will provide young people aged 16–24 with greater support into work and learning, including a Jobs Guarantee offering fully subsidised paid work for every 18–21-year-old on Universal Credit for 18 months.

In line with the Government’s December 2025 announcement, the Jobs Guarantee will begin its rollout from Spring 2026 in 6 areas which have some of the highest need, including Birmingham and Solihull.

The first 6 months of the Jobs Guarantee scheme will provide over 1000 job starts across the 6 areas.

National roll-out of the Jobs Guarantee across Great Britain will take place later in 2026. The programme is expected to support around 55,000 young people over the next three years, contributing to this government’s long-term ambition to increase employment and reduce long-term youth unemployment.

This Government is taking action to ensure young people have clear pathways into work, with opportunities that build skills, confidence and long-term employability.

In addition, through the expanded Youth Guarantee, we are creating around 300,000 additional opportunities for young people to gain workplace experience and training.

This includes up to 150,000 extra work experience placements and up to 145,000 bespoke training opportunities designed with employers through our Sector based Work Academy Programmes, or SWAPs. These programmes provide young people with real, practical experience linked to vacancies in priority sectors, improving their prospects of moving quickly into work.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of local wheelchair services, based on the needs of their local population.

NHS England supports ICBs to reduce variation in the quality and provision of National Health Service wheelchairs, and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment. Since July 2015, NHS England has collected quarterly data from ICBs on wheelchair provision, including waiting times, to enable targeted action if improvement is required. The latest figures from the Quarter 2 2025/26 National Wheelchair Data Collection showed that 84% of adults and 78% of children received their equipment within 18 weeks. Further information is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhse-national-wheelchair-data-collection/q2-2025-26

The Community Health Services Situation Report, which will be used to monitor ICB performance against waiting time targets in 2026/27, currently monitors waiting times for both children and young people and adult waiting times under the ‘Wheelchair, Orthotics, Prosthetics and Equipment’ line. The Community Health Services Situation Report is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/community-health-services-waiting-lists/

The NHS Medium-Term Planning Framework, published October 2025, requires that, from 2026/27, all ICBs and Community Health Services must actively manage and reduce the proportion of waits across all community health services over 18 weeks and develop a plan to eliminate all 52-week waits.

Birmingham and Solihull ICB providers are working towards reducing waiting times in line with the NHS 10-Year Health Plan. In Birmingham in December 2025, equipment handovers were completed within the 18-week target for 42.9% of children and 71.9% of adults.

The government is committed to introducing free breakfast clubs in every state-funded school with primary-aged pupils. The Autumn Budget 2024 confirmed over £30 million of funding for breakfast clubs for the 2025/26 financial year. This funding will enable us to fund up to 750 early adopters of the new breakfast clubs. Decisions about future funding for breakfast clubs will be taken as part of the next phase of the spending review.

All schools will receive £500 to cover initial set up costs and a lump sum of at least £1,000 per term, regardless of how many pupils are in attendance.

Schools will then receive a payment in arrears each term based on the number of pupils who accessed the club and the characteristics of pupils.

For the summer term this means there will be two payments. An initial fixed payment will be made to schools at the end of April 2025 for local authority maintained schools and at the beginning of May 2025 for academies. This will include the initial set up and lump sum payment. An arrears payment will be made to schools between October and December 2025, to cover the costs of running the breakfast club in the summer term 2025 (58 days).

The recently published Impact Assessment estimates the number of workers who will be affected by the increases in the National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage, broken down by region and country. More granular estimates by local authority and parliamentary constituency are subject to greater data reliability issues due to survey response rates.

A full-time worker earning the National Living Wage will see their gross annual earnings rise by £1,400 per year. A full-time worker earning the 18-20 National Minimum Wage will see their gross annual earnings rise by £2,500 per year.

The number of pensioners in receipt of the State Pension in each (a) local authority and (b) parliamentary constituency in (i) Birmingham and (ii) Solihull are provided in the following tables. These figures are for the quarter ending August 2024 and are available at DWP Stat-Xplore.

(a) (i) - Birmingham

(a) (ii) - Solihull

(b) (i) - Birmingham

(b) (ii) - Solihull

In 2025/26, it is estimated the total State Pension expenditure will increase by around £9bn (in nominal terms). This estimation is available in the latest Benefit Expenditure and Caseload tables published at Autumn Budget 2024. Source: Benefit expenditure and caseload tables 2024 - GOV.UK

The government is committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation.

We will set out details of new investment to succeed the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme at the Spending Review.

This new investment will deliver a mix of homes for sub-market rent and homeownership, with a particular focus on delivering homes for Social Rent.

Core funding allocations for nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools are distributed through the dedicated schools grant (DSG).

Annual DSG allocations are published at local authority level. Allocations are not available by constituency, since local authorities are responsible for distributing the funding they receive locally through their own local formulae.

For mainstream schools, the DSG allocations show the total amount of funding each local authority receives. This is also split down into its constituent parts: per pupil funding for primary and secondary pupils respectively, premises funding, and growth funding.

For early years, the DSG allocations show the total amount of funding each local authority receives through the early years block. The early years block comprises of funding for each of the early years entitlements, as well as additional funding for early years pupil premium, disability access fund and maintained nursery school supplementary funding. The early years block comprises of funding for each of the early years entitlements, as well as additional funding for early years pupil premium, disability access fund and maintained nursery school supplementary funding. Early years allocations for the government funded entitlements are based on an hourly rate and the number of children taking up the entitlements. The hourly rates each local authority receives are calculated using the early years national funding formulae and are published annually. Further details on early years funding rates for 2025/26 financial year can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-funding-2025-to-2026.

The early years budget is demand led, and the early years block allocations in the DSG are adjusted based on census and headcount data according to the take-up of the entitlement hours.

The DSG publications for each year going back to 2020 can be found at the following addresses:

2025/26:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2025-to-2026.

2024/25:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2024-to-2025.

2023/24:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2023-to-2024.

2022/23:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2022-to-2023.

2021/22:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2021-to-2022.

2020/21:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2020-to-2021.

As part of the provisional Local Government Finance Settlement on 18 December 2024 the government published the latest Core Spending Power figures which are available here.

Included within the tables are figures for allocations dating back to 2015. Due to changes in the function and financing of local government, comparable data is not available prior to 2015-16.

Funding allocations from future settlements are subject to the outcome of future Spending Reviews. The government is committed to providing a multi-year funding settlement starting in 2026-27.