Resultados generales de la variable

The existence of spatial concentrations of unemployment has been a key reason for the need to develop area-based regeneration strategies (Campbell 2000) such as the SARP programme to tackle heightened levels of unemployment in certain disadvantaged areas. Unemployment is spatially differentiated and, for most of the industrial era, urban unemployment has tended to concentrate in specific neighbourhoods. Indeed, even when unemployment at a national level has fallen steadily, the least employable individuals and those with least access to employment have been found to be concentrated in particular places (MacLennan 2000). Previous research (e.g. Green and Owen 1998; Turok and Edge 1999; Turok 2004) has demonstrated that those places with high concentrations of workless residents are likely to be found within the UK’s major conurbations, certain neighbourhoods in cities, and in mining and industrial areas where the number of jobs and employment opportunities have often been in decline since the 1970s as a consequence of de- industrialisation processes and manufacturing decline (Campbell 2000). These places can contain above average rates of economic inactivity and long-term unemployment in people of working age, and average incomes lower than in the rest of the UK (Barnes et al. 2011). Indeed, people in inner city areas, for example, can be disadvantaged in the labour market due to jobs moving to other areas, an issue that is described as ‘spatial mismatch’ (Kain 1992; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1998).

Thus, the economic changes associated with area decline can leave many people stranded in one location without work, and whilst some may be able to move from that location, many more cannot or are unwilling to, an issue which can justify the investment in regeneration strategies (Couch et al.

2003).

In Scotland, a clear spatial pattern of social deprivation linked to manufacturing decline was uncovered in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1990s. For example, Glasgow was found to have the largest concentration of deprivation in Scotland by some considerable margin, which was directly attributable to the city experiencing significant manufacturing and industrial job losses between 1981 and 1991. The overall loss of jobs in Glasgow was more than for the whole of the rest of Scotland put together (Webster 2000). In addition, other Scottish manufacturing centres such as Dundee and the inner Clyde Valley conurbation (covering towns such as Motherwell, Coatbridge, Airdrie, and Greenock) also suffered heavy job losses through deindustrialisation processes, as did former mining areas such as Cumnock and Doon Valley (Webster 2000). Thus, these areas became the focal points for area-based regeneration strategies in Scotland from the 1970s onwards.

89 An insight into the factors that contributed to spatial concentrations of unemployment in the UK was provided by Turok and Edge (1999) who demonstrated that in the period 1981-1996, for example, half a million manufacturing jobs were lost to de-industrialisation in twenty of the UK’s major cities and conurbations whilst the rest of the country gained 1.7 million jobs. Over the longer term (1929 to 2009) Livingston et al. (2010) have shown that manufacturing jobs in general decreased from 7,053,000 to 2,730,000. This considerable job loss was found to have most particularly disadvantaged full-time male manual workers in cities and conurbations and was not offset by growth in (mostly part-time) female employment and the service sector. The impact of manufacturing decline and loss of employment resulted in a large rise in worklessness where tens of thousands of people (mainly men) moved on to sickness benefits, which has helped to disguise the real rate of unemployment in disadvantaged areas suffering from urban job loss (Turok 2004).

This ‘hidden’ unemployment in disadvantaged neighbourhoods was addressed by Green and Owens’s (1998) concept of ‘non-employment’, which comprises both unemployment and economic inactivity. Green and Owen found that, between 1981 and 1991, the rate of non-employment in inner city and mining/industrial areas was greater than that suggested by unemployment figures alone relative to the rest of the country, whilst also finding that the unemployed in large urban areas were relatively more likely to become economically inactive and on sickness or incapacity benefit than to actually return to work compared with people living elsewhere. Furthermore, the disappearance of low-skilled routes into the labour market in the 1990s had particular consequences for young people trying to gain a foothold in employment (Fevre 2011). Thus, in addition to male workers, younger workers struggled to find a way in to the labour market.

Economic (and social) exclusion was identified as a key concern of the SARP programme, particularly in the SIP phase, where a clear commitment was made to prevent younger people and others such as the non-employed from becoming excluded from the economic and social mainstream (SIP Monitoring and Evaluation Unit 1998; Taylor 2002). In particular, these issues were tackled in the form of education and vocational training programmes, and employment advice (Tyler et al. 2001), whilst in an attempt to address the issue of economic inactivity the SARP programme placed a greater focus on in-work benefits to encourage and enable people to move from non-employment into work (Carley 2001). However, others have argued that job creation should be the primary focus of area-based regeneration as supply-side measures such as education and training alone were not sufficient to deal with spatial concentrations of unemployment when an inadequate demand for

90 labour and a lack of jobs existed in the cities, conurbations and mining areas (Green and Owen 1998; Turok and Edge 1999).

Nevertheless, a shortfall in skills and educational attainment may indeed play a part in geographical concentrations of unemployment in addition to lack of jobs alone. For example, Campbell (2000) states that gaps in skills and experience among the long-term unemployed may mean that any available jobs will tend to go to the short-term unemployed in areas where jobs growth is slow or declining, advantaging new labour market entrants such as graduates or commuters. The long-term unemployed will therefore face difficulties obtaining work even if the demand for labour overall were to be sufficient to employ them (Campbell 2000), which therefore supports the approach that the SARP programme took to focus on supply-side measures to tackle spatial concentrations of unemployment.

Resident migration out of, and into, disadvantaged areas is a further issue thought to have a bearing on spatial concentrations of unemployment. For example, the persistently high rate of worklessness in disadvantaged areas is linked to the two interrelated processes of (1) transitions into, and out of, worklessness and employment, and (2) geographical migration (Barnes et al. 2011). These two processes are interlinked in that the transition from worklessness into employment for a resident can then often facilitate geographical mobility from the disadvantaged area to another more affluent area. This can become problematic for a deprived area when out-movers are replaced by workless in-movers who may also eventually make the same transition to employment and move out; and so the cycle continues. This process has been termed the ‘moving escalator’ (Cole et al.

2007) where persistent population churn ensures that the neighbourhood’s unemployment profile (and the overall level of deprivation) does not change. As we shall observe in the next section, this issue is also particularly problematic in regards to area-regeneration programmes such as the SARP initiative that seek to improve the employability of non-employed individuals, as these regeneration efforts can merely serve to facilitate and expedite the moving escalator processes.

Research by Bailey and Livingstone (2007), however, has found that disadvantaged neighbourhoods do not suffer from increased rates of residential churn compared to less deprived neighbourhoods

per se. Instead, compositional factors such as the age-structure of movers and the stage of a

household’s lifecycle determine household mobility as opposed to neighbourhood type. Indeed, previous research (e.g. Beatty et al. 2009; Kearns and Parkes 2003; Meen et al. 2005; Barnes et al.

2011) found that, in general, out-movers from disadvantaged neighbourhoods have a younger age profile than non-movers. Given that a key aim of the SARP programme was to improve the

91 employability of younger people excluded from the jobs market, it would appear that by improving life chances for people who are likely to move out after receiving education and training programmes, attempts to improve the deprivation profile of an area may be undermined. However, the overall success of any regeneration effort is dependent on retaining the population in the area (Tarling et al. 1999) by also improving aspects of the physical environment such as housing and green space in order to make the area a more attractive place to live. Thus if a comprehensive regeneration effort has been successful, one may expect the flow of younger, well-qualified individuals from these areas to be arrested; yet, to date it is unknown how the SARP programme fared in attempts to retain the population in the areas where it was delivered. This will be investigated in the empirical analysis in sections 4.5-4.7.

So far, I have highlighted issues surrounding the spatial patterning of unemployment in the UK. The least employable individuals and those with least access to employment have been found to be concentrated in particular urban areas that have experienced economic decline in industrial and manufacturing employment opportunities, leaving men in particular vulnerable to unemployment and economic inactivity generally. In addition, migratory patterns into and out of disadvantaged neighbourhoods suggest a process through which area measures of unemployment may remain stagnant, as the more qualified, younger and dynamic households tend to leave and are replaced by individuals less likely to be employed. In addition, it has been seen that area-based regeneration may simply reinforce this stagnation by aiding outward migration through the provision of supply- side measures like employment advice and vocational training. The issues presented here therefore pose key challenges for area regeneration policy. The following section will reflect on these issues, and consider the ways in which area regeneration in Scotland has attempted to address spatial concentrations of unemployment in order to turn round the fortunes of disadvantaged areas.