London Metropolitan Area Research Articles

Modelling area-wide count outcomes with spatial correlation and heterogeneity: An analysis of London crash data

Count models such as negative binomial (NB) regression models are normally employed to establish a relationship between area-wide traffic crashes and the contributing factors. Since crash data are collected with reference to location measured as points in space, spatial dependence exists among the area-level crash observations. Although NB models can take account of the effect of unobserved heterogeneity (due to omitted variables in the model) among neighbourhoods, such models may not account for spatial correlation areas. It is then essential to adopt an econometric model that takes account of both spatial dependence and uncorrelated heterogeneity simultaneously among neighbouring units. In studying the spatial pattern of traffic crashes, two types of spatial models may be employed: (i) classical spatial models for higher levels of spatial aggregation such as states, counties, etc. and (ii) Bayesian hierarchical models for all spatial units, especially for smaller scale area-aggregations. Therefore, the primary objectives of this paper is to develop a series of relationships between area-wide different traffic casualties and the contributing factors associated with ward characteristics using both non-spatial models (such as NB models) and spatial models and to identify the similarities and differences among these relationships. The spatial units of the analysis are the 633 census wards from the Greater London metropolitan area. Ward-level casualty data are disaggregated by severity of the casualty (such as fatalities, serious injuries, and slight injuries) and by severity of the casualty related to various road users. The analysis implies that different ward-level factors affect traffic casualties differently. The results also suggest that Bayesian hierarchical models are more appropriate in developing a relationship between area-wide traffic crashes and the contributing factors associated with the road infrastructure, socioeconomic and traffic conditions of the area. This is because Bayesian models accurately take account of both spatial dependence and uncorrelated heterogeneity.

The impact of patient choice and waiting time on the demand for health care: results from the London Patient Choice project

In a number of countries where health care is publicly funded, policies to introduce greater patient choice are being implemented. In most cases patient choice is seen as an instrument to reduce waiting times for elective (non-emergency) hospital services. An important issue is whether facilitating greater patient choice will increase the demand for health care and thereby undermine the achievement of reduced waiting times. A large scale pilot of choice in the London metropolitan area permits a test of the hypothesis that choice will affect demand. This paper estimates a model of the demand for elective surgery using a panel of 150 English acute hospitals over the period 1995 to 2004 for three surgical specialties. It examines whether demand shifted following the introduction of the London Patient Choice Project in 2002. The results suggest that the choice project only shifted NHS inpatient demand in orthopaedics and that this shift was inwards.

Understanding the risk of going missing: estimating the risk of fatal outcomes in cancelled cases

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to improve the police, policy makers' and researchers' understanding of the likelihood of fatal outcomes befalling missing persons.Design/methodology/approachData on the age, sex, duration missing and outcome (fatal or non‐fatal) of over 32,000 cancelled reports of missing persons were extracted from a police database of missing persons in the London metropolitan area. The analysis highlights the risk of a cancelled missing person report resulting in a fatal outcome by the same variables.FindingsShows that the risk of a cancelled missing person report resulting in a fatal outcome is overall very low, though it does increase with the age of the person reported missing and the duration they remain missing for. Males face a higher risk of being found dead than females.Research limitations/implicationsThe risk estimations use a base rate of all cancelled missing person reports, therefore excluding persons who have never being found. The estimations are based on missing person reports rather than individuals. Insufficient detail was available to analyse the fatal cases by type of death (e.g. suicide, homicide, accident, etc.).Originality/valueThis paper provides new empirical evidence on what happens to people reported missing. The findings provide an actuarial context in which clinical risk assessment by police officers can take place.

Urban scale integrated assessment of options to reduce PM10 in London towards attainment of air quality objectives

Epidemiological studies have indicated that the fine fraction of airborne particulate matter (PM10) is harmful to human health. In order to explore what can be done to attain air quality objectives (AQO) in the London metropolitan area it is necessary to analyse and compare a range of options for reducing emissions from different environmental and economic perspectives. The dominant sources of PM10 in the urban environment today are from traffic; hence abatement strategies must include reduction of traffic emissions. The USIAM model has been developed and used to examine and rank a large number of different kinds of road source emission reduction strategies, and explore their resulting projected concentrations for 2005. Such analysis can aid in deciding which strategy is most cost efficient from both the perspective of attaining present and future AQOs, and of reducing population exposure to harmful PM10 concentrations. The model base case scenario for 1996 has been compared with measured PM10 concentrations in locations throughout the area of study, resulting in error estimates well within the typical ±10% to 50% error often quoted for this kind of air dispersion modelling. This work indicates that the most cost effective strategies from both perspectives analysed are those involving the use of alternative fuels, particularly switching diesel vehicles to LPG and/or CNG. The model also implies that measures involving road user charging appear to be less effective.

A state of permanent exception: The Birth of Modern Policing in Colonial Capitalism

The London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829. Dominant historical accounts presume that the formation of this modern police force was a response to changing conditions in forms and levels of criminal activity and the inadequacy of existing means of suppression in and around the London metropolitan area. Counter-explanations focus on the economic and social upheavals wrought by accelerated industrial production. This essay proposes a different explanation by examining the broader context out of which various ideas for a new concept of police emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries among Atlantic political economists, commercial theorists, colonial administrators and parliamentarians. Decisive in the shaping of this novel force of repression in London were the confrontations encountered, the experiments undertaken, and the discourse of crime that emerged out of colonial territories, particularly in that most proximate of ‘alien’ terrains, Ireland. Conditions in Ireland served as the basis upon which new conceptions of policing and repression began to circulate throughout the British Empire. Contrary to alternative policing histories which have assumed that two primary police forms emerged in the early nineteenth century, the metropolitan and the colonial, this essay argues that these forms were of like origin. The institution of modern policing was colonial in form, whether instantiated in colonial outposts or inside the metropole. There was but one model of policing that emerged in the early nineteenth century, despite significant variation owing to local and national conditions, because each particular form was bound up in a project of reshaping forms of capitalist circulation (of goods and bodies) rendered obsolete by colonial expansion. New forms of repression were the product of resistances to a colonial capitalism that was remaking the world inside and outside England.

Cost Efficiency Benchmarking for Operational Units with Multiple Cost Drivers

We consider the activity-based costing situation, in which for each of several comparable operational units, multiple cost drivers generate a single cost pool. Our study focuses on published data from a set of property tax collection offices, called rates departments, for the London metropolitan area. We define what may be called benchmark or most efficient costs per unit of driver. A principle of maximum performance efficiency is proposed, and an approach to estimating the benchmark unit costs is derived from this principle. A validation approach for this estimation method is developed in terms of what we call normal-like-or-better performance effectiveness. Application to longitudinal data on a single unit is briefly discussed. We also consider some implications for the more routine case when costs are disaggregated to subpools associated with individual cost drivers.

Use and cost of hospital and community service provision for children with HIV infection at an English HIV referral centre.

To describe the use of hospital and community services for children infected with HIV and estimate the cost per patient-year by stage of HIV infection during the era of antiretroviral monotherapy. Data on the use of hospital services were collected from case notes; the use of statutory and nonstatutory community services was recorded through diaries and interviews. Total cost estimates were calculated from unit costs from relevant hospital departments and community organisations. Children managed at St. Mary's Hospital (London, England) between 1 January 1986 and 31 December 1994, some of whom used statutory and nonstatutory community services in South East England between 1 November 1994 and 31 May 1996. 118 children with positive HIV antibody status. Mean inpatient days, outpatient visits, tests and procedures performed, drugs prescribed, community services used, associated unit costs and average cost estimates per patient-year by stage of HIV infection (1995/1996 values), and lifetime costs. Service provision during the study period was predominantly hospital-based. The use of services increased for different stages of HIV infection and increased with increasing severity of HIV infection. A shift from an inpatient-based to an outpatient-based service was seen between the periods 1986 to 1991 and 1992 to 1994. As symptoms evolved, children used more hospital inpatient services, with an accompanying shift in the use of community services from general services, such as schooling, to increased use of nurses, social care and home help. The estimated total cost of hospital and community care was 18,600 Pounds per symptomatic non-AIDS patient per year and 46,600 Pounds per AIDS patient per year. Similar estimates for children with indeterminate HIV infection and asymptomatic infection amounted to 8300 Pounds and 4800 Pounds per patient-year, respectively. Nondiscounted lifetime costs for hospital care amounted to 152,400 Pounds (44,300 Pounds to 266,800 Pounds) compared with discounted lifetime costs of 122,700 Pounds (42,000 Pounds to 182,200 Pounds); nondiscounted lifetime costs for community care amounted to 24,300 Pounds (7900 Pounds to 41,600 Pounds) compared with discounted lifetime costs of 21,000 Pounds (6800 Pounds to 32,000 Pounds). The continued emphasis on the use of hospital services may be due to the small number of children infected with HIV, most of whom lived in the London metropolitan area where specialist care was concentrated in a few centres. A shift from an inpatient- to an outpatient-based service was observed over time; the advent of the use of combination antiretroviral therapy in this population may further facilitate a shift in service provision and promote shared care between specialist centres, local hospital and community-based services.

Re-reading Robson on the Government of London

It is sixty years since William Robson's The Government and Misgovernment of London was published. This paper re-examines Robson's argument, noting how the structure of the book needs to be interpreted as setting out a programme for reforming the government of the Greater London metropolitan area. For Robson, failure to establish a unified Greater London administration was a fundamental weakness in the government of the city. His distinctive contribution was to address the problem of metropolitan growth as an administrative expert with an acute sense of the problems of inter-governmental relations. Whilst acknowledging administrative fragmentation, Robson nevertheless failed to appreciate the significance of political forces that underlay this state of affairs. His recommendations were purely administrative and lacked any sense of the way politics might impede or motivate such machinery. Reactions to the book were as polarised as the text itself was polarising. The outbreak of the Second World War halted any movement for reform. After the War, new ways of understanding the problems of metropolitan growth emerged, notably those of American scholars. However, none of this new political analysis engaged Robson's attention, despite its direct relevance to the governance of the metropolis.

Alternatives for urban bus services: an international perspective on the British reforms

Around the world, a variety of methods have been employed for providing urban bus services ranging from public monopolies at one extreme to unregulated private firms at the other extreme; the intermediate alternatives usually involve private firms with some degree of public regulation over fares and entry. Public monopoly is common in the developed world while private provision with some form of regulation is the norm among developing countries. The British reforms of 1986 pioneered two schemes for bus provision. First, outside of the London metropolitan area the government created one of the few largely unregulated private regimes in the world (the most notable other recent examples being in Sri Lanka and Chile); second, within London it allowed local public authorities to retain control of the design of the route network and fares but forced them to tender all services to private firms (a scale of tendering heretofore unknown). The most obvious conclusion from the experience of Britain and elsewhere is that it is important to introduce at least enough competition to keep costs under control. Both inside and outside of London the costs of providing a bus mile of service were dramatically reduced from those under the old public monopoly regime. The outstanding issue is whether competition in the design of fares and services should also be introduced or whether these should be left to public authorities (as in London). The experiences of Chile and Sri Lanka as well as Britain are inconclusive as to whether market driven or publicly designed and coordinated services are superior, and the choice probably should depend on the particular context.

Metropolitan Polarization, the North-South Divide and Socio-Spatial Inequality in Britain

Spatial inequalities have been a constant feature of capitalist development in Britain. Today there are two major macro-geographical divides. The first is between the Greater London metropolitan area and the rest of Britain. The second is a related division between North and South which assumed particular prominence after the inter-war depression when the industries of the old industrial heartland went into decline. Attention is paid first to a variety of social, economic and political indicators of these persistent divisions and of the more complex mosaic of in equality that underlies them. An attempt will be made to explain the evolution of these divisions via refer ence to some of the underlying structures specific to British capitalism, the deep-seated process of relative economic decline that dates from the late nineteenth century, the dynamics of the post-war boom and the impact of the neo-liberal, two-nations accumulation strategy of the Thatcher era which saw a regionally differentiated process of de-industrialization in 1979- 83 followed by a speculative, service industry-led boom and a service-led recession after 1989. To con clude I shall try to identify the relationships between inequality and economic dynamism, focusing in par ticular on the contradictory character of inequality.

Privatizing and Deregulating Local Public Services Lessons from Britain's Buses

Abstract The British Transport Act of 1985 ordered one of the most radical efforts to privatize and deregulate local public services in a developed country. With the exception only of companies serving the Greater London metropolitan area, all public bus companies in Great Britain were ordered reorganized as for-profit corporations; any bus company could offer any unsubsidized (commercial) bus services simply by giving local authorities notice; and local authorities could supplement the commercial services with subsidized ones, but only through competitive bidding among the newly privatized carriers. This article examines the experience of the first two years of the new British policy and argues that it offers important, and generally hopeful, lessons about the potential for privatizing and deregulating local buses and other services in the United States and elsewhere.

Increased demand for psychiatric beds in the London metropolitan area

Increased demand for psychiatric beds in the London metropolitan area

Increased demand for psychiatric beds in the London metropolitan area

Increased demand for psychiatric beds in the London metropolitan area

SELECTING DELINQUENTS FOR CAUTIONING IN THE LONDON METROPOLITAN AREA

SELECTING DELINQUENTS FOR CAUTIONING IN THE LONDON METROPOLITAN AREA

Fiscal Migration and the London Boroughs

An amended version of the Aronson-Schwartz model and a more detailed econometric model are used to test the proposition that population movements within the London metropolitan area are related to the 'value-for-money' provided by local authorities. Both approaches reveal evidence of a significant relationship, which has a variety of implications for policy towards local government finance.

12.5 kHz channel spacing for mobile communications in the u.h.f. band between 420 and 512 MHz

The historical and technical background which lead to the development of 12 kHz channel spacing at u.h.f. is described. The advantages and disadvantages of the narrower channel spacing, including problems of achieving satisfactory adjacent channel protection and frequency stability, are discussed. A series of field tests within the London metropolitan area is reported which demonstrated that coverage and quality of reception is as good as with 25 kHz channel spacing.

The Greater London Council and the Education Service

Metropolitan areas are often plagued in their educational efforts by the plethora of governmental bodies that have some say in matters educational. Dean Reller describes the problems faced by the London metropolitan area, the work of the Royal Commission, the Parliamentary Act of 1963, and the structure and functioning of the Greater London Council, all in the context of the education service.

SUBURBIA AND VOTING BEHAVIOR IN THE LONDON METROPOLITAN AREA

ABSTRACT Widely noted spatial regularities in political activity include suburbancentral city differences in party preference and political participation. The spatial regularities can be found both in the United States and in Britain. In the London metropolitan area both party preference and participation are related to suburbanism in particular, and to other socio-economic dimensions in general, derived from a factor analysis. A causal model which attempts to evaluate the relative significance of suburbanism and other socio-economic dimensions in explaining the geography of party! preference and participation suggests that while both aspects of political activity are directly related to suburbanism, suburban-central city differences also operate indirectly through other dimensions to effect geographical differences. Suburbanism probably affects party preference in two ways: conversion of erstwhile central city Labor party supporters and immigration of Conservatives from the central city.

The British White Paper on Local Government

national government in Britain there has been vigorous debate about issues of postwar reconstruction, and, though compromises have been adopted as wartime expedients, these issues will doubtless influence forthcoming elections. The solutions proposed in the White Paper caused some dismay in Liberal and Labour ranks and emphasized a division among conservative forces in England. Although the chief problem dealt with in the White Paper is the adjustment of the boundaries and areas of local government, questions of administrative structure, financial resources, and the distribution of functions between national and local government are so intermingled with problems of area that they form a major part of the argument. The paper does not attempt to consider the special problems of the London metropolitan area. The basic framework of British local government as presently constituted was established by the Local Government Act of 1888, which established a system of counties, county boroughs, noncounty boroughs, and urban and rural districts which, with some

Some Locational Problems in British Industry

Some Locational Problems ?? British Industry By ELIOT G. MEARS Lehiiid Stanford Jr. University The following observations on British industry were based upon my year abroad in 1937-38 and may prove of interest not only in considering the problems there but also their meaning to other countries. The measures taken by the government and private interests are indeed striking, but they do not represent what we might construe as radical changes in the geographical principles of factory location . The practices, however, in view of the fear of possible military attack , may not appear as primarily geographic in their concept; yet, in my opinion, none of them can be divorced from the broad question of land use. Where are manufacturing plants located ? The normal list of factors includes those of sources of supply, power, labor, markets, capital, and other pertinent features wisely stressed by engineers and private firms. These components are active and dynamic. But we cannot keep abreast of the times if our thinking stops with the foregoing economic and efficiency gauges. There are other considerations of vital consequence which are often heavily discounted or altogether omitted from discussions. Onerous taxation burdens levied by national, state, and local authorities are tending to overweight the financial administration of industry within the management sphere, as exemplified by the incidence of taxes based on tthe factory buildings or on earnings , the legislation regarding wages, and interregional competition. Most of these forces, likewise, operate directly or indirectly within the scope of social and public activity. In addition to the more strictly economic and engineering aspects, we are becoming clearly aware of the implications which derive their influence from a new viewpoint toward financial and social questions, particularly housing, health, transport, and labor. In the United Kigdom, for example , the regional contrasts are clearly recognized. That the situation is regarded as a distinct menace, from several points of view, is evident in the following Resolution of the House of Commons (November 18, 1936), appended to the official questionnaire for foreign persons desirous of setting up manufacturing establishments: That, owing to the serious decline in the recognized industrial areas of many major exporting industries upon which the preeminent commercial position of this country was built, this House is of the opinion that steps should at once be taken to prevent further industrial concentration around London and in the South by diverting new undertakings to those areas where unemployment and under-employment have for long caused hardship and distress among industrial populations. In the past, the prime locational factors have been raw materials, power, labor, capital, and markets, with an increasing tendency toward markets as the main motivation. In any study, however, the part played by transport is usually of first rank, despite its submergence and the apparent disappearance under some of the factors which I have enumerated, If the future location of workshops were to be governed 'entirely by considerations of private economy, untrammeled by any other, the problem of determining a satisfactory location would be relatively easy. The realistic aspect of our problem, however, makes political bodies consider other than purely economic motives. Thus, conscious effort has been made in Great Britain to encourage firms with foreign capital to locate in the Special Areas and in the other depressed industrial districts , Furthermore, there is a clash of national interests, for the London Metropolitan Area offers probably the best business opportunity for numerous kinds of new enterprises ; yet (30) that region is exceedingly vulnerable from a military standpoint. Then there is the question of state socialism. Should Government permit industry to locate when and where it will? More than ever before this question is being raised. In Germany, for sometime, the strategic as well as the economic phases have been receiving the most careful consideration. The student of history might conclude that England and the English would be the last stronghold against an ordered plan and program, such as the adoption of a system of licenses; yet the present conservative Prime Minister , formerly the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has stated that he saw nothing revolutionary in prohibiting enterprises from functioning in certain areas, since this was merely an extension of the established practice of zoning in...