Discussion
regions tended to have a greater drop in claiming rates than those in the North East and Merseyside, even where unemployment rates were similar in 1995.”128 All 20 of the highest ranked districts for income support, job seeker’s allowance and invalidity benefit claimant rates in 1995 were urban: twelve in London, eight in the rest of the country (London is over-represented because individual London boroughs are counted separately). Two things stand out from the experience of these areas. First, between 1995 and 1998, the period covered by the report, 19 of these councils remained in the top 20 (only Waltham Forest dropped out). Urban problems are persistent, even when the economy as a whole is doing well. Secondly, even within this group, geography is a reasonable predictor of which areas will do well and which badly. For England as a whole, the number of people claiming these benefits fell by 16.3 per cent. The picture in London was mixed, with seven of the twelve boroughs doing better than this, and five doing worse. Overall, therefore, the deprived boroughs of London were doing as well as the country as a whole. Not so the non-London deprived boroughs. All eight – Birmingham, Hull, Knowsley, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham and South Tyneside – performed below the UK average.129 The location of cities matters: poor cities, or parts of cities, outside of London are struggling. In November 2006 the Department for Communities and Local Government published a report that it had commissioned from academics at Oxford Brookes University and elsewhere. State of the English Cities: The competitive economic performance of English cities showed once again that location matters. Of the 56
cities in Britain, only one town (York) outside the South East region had a gross disposable household income above the national average in either 1995 or 2003. On that measure twenty-one places in the greater South East region were in the top half and seven outside it. Five cities were in the bottom half and twenty-three outside it.130 The authors also studied changes in gross value added per capita 1995-2002, and found that eight of the nine cities whose GVA rise was 10 per cent or more above the national average were in the South of England. Conversely, all but three of the fifteen places whose GVA per capita rise was 10 per cent or more below the national average were outside the South East.
The location of cities matters: poor cities, or parts of “ cities, outside of London, are struggling ”
In four of those cities – Telford, Stoke, Middlesbrough and Blackburn – rises in GVA were less than half the English average.131 The authors commented: “Gross disposable household income, gross value added per capita, visible exports, productivity and average earnings all diverged over the periods for which we have time series data.”132 Those areas that were in decline tended to decline further over time. The report was also sceptical that regeneration spending was effective; it was “open to question whether such policies as physical urban renaissance and physical regeneration will pay large dividends in terms of improved competitiveness”.133
128. Ibid, p. 4 129 Ibid, pp 11-13, Table 2 130 Department for Communities and Local Government, State of the English Cities: The competitive economic performance of English cities, p 68, 2006 131 Ibid, p 74 132 Ibid, p 224 133 Ibid, p 228
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