I’ve just spent a couple of hours gathering demographic data about Birmingham to get an idea of how different parts of the city will be affected by today’s Spending Review.

The first thing I’ve visualised is what sectors are people working in in the city’s 8 constituencies. From this you can, for example, see that a large proportion of people in Hodge Hill work in public administration, education or health – likely to be particularly badly hit – while Yardley has the smallest proportion of workers in the public sector, and so is likely to escape job cuts. 

You can see the map visualisation in action here. Because of the scale of the colouring, differences in some job sectors are harder to see clearly (where the differences are smaller).

The next step is to go through the spending review to see what industries might be affected and how that maps out in the region.

It will also be worth trying to find other data, such as numbers claiming welfare. 

And also worth exploring is whether the hardest-hit areas are likely to have any influence politically. If they change their vote in the next election, will it actually matter? The Voter Power Index could come in useful here.

Data sources: Data is from 2007 and is taken from BirminghamEconomy. I had to copy them from individual PDFs, sadly, and collate them in a series of spreadsheets, which are published here.