Policy Responses to Urban and Regional Economic Change in Britain

Abstract

Regional policy responses were reviewed in the broad context of metropolitan decentralization of population and the continuing disparities in regional unemployment. In spite of the many difficulties surrounding the evaluation of these policies, such as the definition of their nature, the lack of clear and quantifiable objectives and the problem of defining the situation without intervention, evaluations have been attempted. In reviewing these it was argued that the results may not have been as favourable as they seemed, both in terms of the quantity and quality of the jobs generated. Such studies, by examining only changes in manufacturing, the main focus of government policies, have concentrated on a relatively minor aspect of employment change. Of more significance has been the growth in service activities and in female employment. The increasing concentration of professional employment in the south and the expansion of part time working in the Assisted Areas raised questions concerning the effectiveness of policy for the development of sustained economic growth. After considering recent policy initiatives, it was argued that measures concentrating regional subsidies into areas most likely to benefit from them, although unpalatable in social terms, were the only hope for sensible spatial planning of the economy for the future. THE PURPOSE of this paper is to comment on the evaluative studies of urban and regional policy produced in the 1970s and to relate these comments to current and future policy. The first section is essentially contextual and describes some of the principal contemporary trends and current policy responses. Sections two and three focus on policy evaluation itself. First, the inherent difficulties of evaluating policy are reviewed; and second, a description of conventional methods of regional policy evaluation is provided. The penultimate section considers the results of conventional evaluations showing that they are not as favourable to the Assisted Areas as they might appear. The paper concludes with resultant implications for the design of urban and regional economic policy for the 1980s. I. The changing context of urban and regional policies Over the last fifteen years, urban and regional policies have been set in a context of considerable change generated by relative movement of both population and employment. This context has been further complicated by general changes in the economy, particularly associated with the increasing growth of female employment and the growth of certain service-based industries in marked contrast to the general decline of manufacturing employment. In Britain, population grew by around 5 per cent in both the 1950s and 1960s, but in the early 1970s, as a result of a significant fall in the birthrate, a decennial rate of population increase of only 2.2 per cent was recorded. However, these increases were distributed unevenly over the country. The 1950s saw a phase of population concentration into the major metropolitan areas of the nation while, by contrast, the 1960s were a period of almost universal decentralization of population from these metropolitan areas. Details of these trend reversals are by now well known and fully documented (Hall etal, 1973; Department ofthe Environment, 1976) for British 'daily urban systems'. Such systems have a central core area surrounded by a metropolitan ring of local authorities selected by their level of commuting to the centre. Together these zones form a Standard Metropolitan Labour Area (SMLA) which is, in turn,