Research for the BBC has identified the places most vulnerable to spending cuts. I am not sure it throws up that many surprises. As the Guardian puts it: "Assessing more than 30 separate measures of a local authority's ability to withstand tougher economic times, the report found that poor areas still feeling the effects of the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s were likely to be hardest hit."
The initial shocks in the 1980s were big, but this does highlight the issue that 30 years of intervention has done very little to address the problem. There seem to be two takes on this. One is to say we haven't spent enough and that the UK is sufficiently small that anywhere can be turned around. The other is to suggest that the shocks represented a fundamental shift that reasonable policy expenditure will struggle to ever address. My feeling is that the impact of this recession gives further strength to the latter argument.
CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog (formerly SERC)
