Why we need regions, not just cities, to rebalance the UK. Why is UK productivity so low?
It’s the economic question all politicians are asking. It’s clear to me that a big part of the problem is a lack of strategy and co-ordination. For example, are we planning our transport systems based on where our economic or energy assets are? We’re not because we don’t plan properly where these things are, or have a way to make sure they work together.
My quite cold take on some of the North of England/towns stuff - with a reference to Chris Harvie's famous statement of English regionalism as 'the dog that never barked' (1991) Interesting seeing constituent nations and regions contribution to U.K. economy = whole other country's GDP e.g. London equivalent to UAE. Source: New Statesman… *****Quaternary: Welsh Government is working with technology company Thales to establish a £20 million cyber centre as part of its Tech Valleys programme. 'Left behind' coastal communities receive £1m funding boost. More than two dozen coastal communities in England are to receive regeneration funding to preserve historical landmarks and help boost local economies.
They include six heritage sites that have been classified as “at risk” by Historic England, ranging from a former ice factory in Grimsby to a miners’ chapel in Cornwall and an historic artillery fort in Essex. "Open your eyes - there is very real poverty out there." UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston says there are people in the UK "living in destitution" and that. Some useful data from recent healthiest/unhealthiest high street report. Could use the ‘Richter scale of health’ table to assess how your local town would fare. Full report. Good Morning Britain sur Twitter : "Welcome to Britain's most unhealthy high street. Analysis of 70 towns and cities found people from Grimsby in Lincolnshire are likely to die younger as their high street has high a proportion of betting shops, payday le.
Alasdair Rae sur Twitter : "160 local authorities in England have an area within the 'least deprived' or 'most deprived' 1% of the country. Bradford, Bury, Chesterfield, East Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds, Newcastle, North Somerset, Sheffield, Stockport and. The Brexit vote, declining health and immigration. Early death rate in deprived Blackpool 'twice that of the most affluent areas' #Health.
Off to London today for meeting about urban and regional inequalities so refreshing my memory on the maps and numbers - and coincidentally I have lived in three of the UK's 'Objective 1' regions… "The contemporary labour market in Britain’s Older Industrial Towns" new report from @CBeatty_CRESR @jrf_uk and @CRESR_SHU (see p. 42 for the 'five fundamentals')… *****UK regions poorest North Europe. *****UK core and periphery: This map illustrates what happened to the U.K. housing market after the 2008 crash, and points to London as the center. #maps #economics #housing.
The UK has 9 out of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe - unequal places. Alasdair Rae sur Twitter : "@FullFact have done a note on the 'UK has the poorest regions in northern Europe' quote, which is worth reading. GDP PPS and NUTS2, in case you are curious. As of 2016 it does have the top 5 poorest areas though. In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything. This morning we released the latest subnational population projections find out more here #SNPP. Britain’s great Brexit divide as seen through the final Premiership football table. Barnsley C result at GE17 where a by-election is likely… Dan Jarvis’ nomination spells the end for the Sheffield City Region.
It's been ten years since the recession. How has the UK economy recovered since 2008? Government statistics authority releases council heroin death map that no one asked for. Government statistics authority releases interactive council heroin death map no one asked for. Amazing old map Geographical Distribution of Drunkenness in England and Wales in 1899(!) Shows recorded incidents of dr… And Science & Innovation Audit Themes - and locations on p. 86 and 87. Quick search for 'inequality' (or ies, y) and 'disparity' (or ies) in Industrial Strategy white paper 0 vs 26 #IndustrialStrategy.
Industrial Strategy: building a Britain fit for the future. These maps + table are from a 1972 document on "Regional Economic Policies and Structures of the United Kingdom" by the Commission of the EC… *****Infrastructure: “Today we invest over £500m in a range of initiatives from artificial intelligence, to 5G and full fibre broadband” #Budget2017. Unemployment rates in the UK, September 2017.by bezzleford:Not... Danny Dorling - Speech to Imagine 2027. 19 Oct 2017. Added EUref results to our analysis of the areas of England most exposed to future economic pressures, for @pestononsunday: - Every one of t… Something is going badly wrong on the fringes of rich economies like the UK. In Blackpool, life expectancy is actually starting to fall.… This is a map of GDP per head in EU regions (2015), but it doesn't really do the data justice (e.g. highest value is 580, Inner London West)
On the establishment of the European Regional Development Fund, from 1974. Makes very interesting reading today. Beatty TheRealLevelOfUnemployment2017(VoR) What do Bradford, Bury, Chesterfield, Leeds, Newcastle, North Somerset, Sheffield, Stockport and Wirral have in common? *****EU regional GDP per head, 2015. They had to alter the y axis for W London - see Fig 6.3 here. And regional R&D expenditure, 2014. Where industry is strong and where it’s weak – key facts of UK business geography. Financial services aren’t as London-centric as the creative industries, and the coast-inland divide is growing, write Sandra Bernick, Richard Davies, and Anna Valero.
Here’s why you can’t bridge the north/south divide just by moving public sector jobs. By conservative estimates, the United States owes black people somewhere between a few and several trillion dollars.
The origins of this enormous debt will forever mystify those committed to not knowing about the monstrous chain of events that lead to it. For the rest of us – those who find a bedtime story version of history too costly or too boring to endure – the reasons are as obvious and unavoidable as a mallet to the face in broad daylight: a half millennium of gothic cruelty inflicted on black Americans by the country their toil made possible.
Still, a single question hovers over any mention of the debt owed to these unacknowledged architects of America. Yes, that sounds good in theory, but how the hell would it actually work? No doubt the challenge is often made by folks genuinely curious as to how such a massive and complex scheme would unfold in the real world. *****'Why the educational divide in voting is really dangerous' Sam Freedman. Voting used to be about rich and poor.
The workers voted Labour and the owners voted Tory. Of course, it was never quite as simple as that, but income was the frame through which politics was seen throughout the 20th century. At the election earlier this year, though, rich people were just as likely to vote Labour as poor. Education level was a much better predictor of voting behaviour – with graduates 50 per cent more likely to vote Labour than Tory. **********The poorest regions in the U.K. are also the poorest in Northern Europe. But I must disagree that there are no easy answers. Why working-class children have little chance of success. For those having a quiet day patronising working-class Salford children after the latest episode of Channel 4’s TV series Educating Manchester, I recommend you look at Joan C Williams’s new book, White Working Class.
Williams is writing about the US, but her observations rang so many bells, some of them probably in Bow as well as Salford, that I felt duty bound to report back. In a chapter entitled Why Don’t They Push Their Kids Harder to Succeed? , she explains some of the obvious reasons Kylie and Wayne don’t always get a leg up from their parents in the way Rupert and Saffron might. Key is this observation, from the sociologist Annette Lareau, quoted by Williams: “Working-class families follow … the accomplishment of natural growth … they view children’s development as unfolding spontaneously as long as they are provided comfort, food and shelter. Providing these represents a challenge and is held to be a considerable achievement.” Astal communities among worst off in UK, report finds. Image copyright Getty Images The UK's coastal communities are among the country's worst off for earnings, employment, health and education, a report for the BBC has found.
Could "Greater Oxbridge" rival London as a fully connected economic region, led by the two ancient universities? Cable sides with Osborne in an attack on GE2017 failure TMay. Nine out of ten poorest areas in Northern Europe are in the UK. The growing gulf in life expectancy shows how austerity has deepened inequalities. Public health experts sometimes rework the map of a city’s train or underground system to illustrate the wide differences in life expectancy between wealthy areas and poor ones.
For example, every one of the eight stops travelled on the London tube’s Jubilee line east from Westminster, the heart of government, to post-industrial Canning Town in the East End counts for up to a year in diminished life expectancy. In Glasgow, in the course of the seven-stop trip south-east from Jordanhill to Bridgeton, the average male life expectancy drops from 75.8 years to 61.9 years. In Newcastle upon Tyne, adults living near the airport can hope to remain free of disease and disability – to enjoy healthy life – until just before they turn 75. But a few miles east in Byker that enviable period typically ends before the official retirement age, at just 63.8 years. *****Pension gender disparity: Improved title - I hope this clarifies the message. #GIS #gistribe #pensions #Pensionreform. Ballot boxes from Barra arrive by boat #GE2017 #bbcelection. Here's a look at how the news covers the excitement of election day #BBCElection.
*****From rust belt to mill towns: a tale of two voter revolts. The Red Shed is a simple, one-storey wooden building in Wakefield that houses a meeting place and a bar.
A sign on the front wall informs the world that it has been the meeting place of the Wakefield Labour Club since 1966: “50 Years a Socialist Shed”. I happened across this unlikely outbuilding in the course of an effort to understand the politics of modern Britain as it hurtles toward the momentous decision it will make on 8 June. Theresa May presents herself as a strong leader who can go toe-to-toe with the big boys in Brussels; if her mandate is big enough, she will be free to seek the most extreme form of Brexit. If her victory is less convincing, she will have to moderate her stance. Londoner fascinated to hear about life in ‘the regions’ Europe's Purchasing Power Density, 2016. Further proof that in the past month we seem to have regressed back to the 1970s. Animated #map morphs #UK by regional #GDP and highlights the importance of #London for national #economy. @galka_max.
Inheritances and inequality across and within generations - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS. Today’s elderly have much more wealth to bequeath than their predecessors, primarily as the result of rising homeownership rates and rising house prices.
Excellent map from Ian Warren @election_data highlighting that rail fares very much a SE issue. Most don't live/work in Lonodn. Half UK budget deficit 'is down to job destruction in older industrial areas' Stats, Maps n Pix: City Footprints. Earlier in the week I posted a map of London's 'economic hinterland' on Twitter because I've been working with commuting data and wanted to see what the economic footprint of London looks like. But, some people have been telling me that other cities exist - which is a fair point.
Stats, Maps n Pix: London+ (or, another way of looking at London) Just over six years ago, there was a bit of a fuss when a marketing campaign attempted to re-brand parts of Northamptonshire as 'North Londonshire' owing to the relative accessibility of places like Corby and Kettering for Central London commuting. This stands in contrast to the accessibility of some other places in the South East, such as Hastings. A few years after that I was working up something on the topic in the Guardian news room but it never went anywhere and I completely forgot about it until last week and the London Mayoral Elections, when I began to think again about the relative importance of London to everywhere around it. Social mobility report: Problems in coastal and rural communities challenge north-south divide. Social mobility problems are blighting England’s coastal and rural areas and wealthier regions too, a new report has found.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission yesterday published the first ever ranking of English council areas by social mobility, with the results showing that some of the worst areas for improving the prospects of poor children are in more wealthy parts of the country. It follows warnings by Ofsted about a concentration of under-performing schools in the north and midlands, and calls into question general rhetoric over a divide between the north and south. Looking back at Nissan’s 25 years of success.
AS the Nissan plant approaches its landmark quarter of a century of car production, boss Kevin Fitzpatrick said recent announcements meant that history appeared to be repeating itself at the Sunderland plant. After winning the contract to produce the 100% electric Nissan Leaf – as well as the next generation Qashqai – it is not only looking to recruit more staff but is sending people to the Oppama plant near Yokohama in Japan to learn the required skills in developing the revolutionary model Leaf model. Oppama is the sister plant to Sunderland and was where, in 1985, the so-called ‘original 22’ were sent.