Sandwell residents are urged to look out for a form in the post to check they’re registered to vote in elections and referendums. The council’s elections team has sent forms to every household in Sandwell. The council has to do this by law – and all people need to do is confirm the details for their household are correct or update them. This can easily be done online, by phone, by text or by post – just follow the instructions on the form.

Health regulators have praised Birmingham’s John Taylor Hospice, stating its staff treat people with ‘kindness, compassion and respect’. Care Quality Commissioners, who visited the hospice unannounced, found the hospice to be ‘good’ in all categories and highlighted the caring attitude of staff and volunteers. The commissioners, who visited on May 25, said staff were ‘kind, empathetic, responsive, creative and proactive in providing care and ensuring dignity for patients’.

Digbeth, which is increasingly referred to as 'Birmingham's Shoreditch', is an area on the up. Hip bars and arty coffee shops rub shoulders with independent stores and some of the funkiest clubs in the UK's second city. Young, creative professionals work in huge, converted warehouses where businesses ranging from performing arts companies to new media hubs feel right at home. Art meets culture meets creativity, all with a good-sized helping of retail therapy and top restaurants thrown in for good measure.

To mark the official opening ceremony of this summer’s major sporting event, Victorian Arcade in Walsall hosted its very own carnival celebrations. The event brought true Brazilian style to the town as the centre played host to a variety of colourful salsa stilt walkers who entertained shoppers with their impressive circus skills. The shopping centre also supplied an all-round entertainer as well as a full steel band and face painter to help bring some South American sunshine to Walsall.

Exactly half of Brits will return a child’s lost teddy bear, according to a social experiment recently conducted in towns and cities throughout the UK. 500 teddy bears were intentionally lost in 25 major towns and cities, each in a different location, such as a café, gym or park bench, between May to June this year. All had nametags with a child’s name and contact number, to see which places and type of person were most likely to return a lost bear.

Over a third of working families in the West Midlands could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage for more than a month if they lost their job, new figures from Shelter reveal today. With little or no personal savings to fall back on, the Shelter and YouGov study found that this means a staggering 313,000 working families in the region could be just one paycheque away from losing their home.