Posted by Prof Tony Champion, SERC and CURDS, Newcastle University
Most
people agree that our big cities have had a pretty good 90s and 00s. In the
past two decades, big cities like Manchester and Liverpool have had a physical
makeover and have seen employment and jobs growth.
But how
well have the big cities actually done, in relation to each other and to London
and the country as a whole? And with the UK economy entering a second phase of recession,
what’s been the impact of the first recessionary dip? A new SERC paper, of
which I am co-author with Alan Townsend, sets out some key facts and figures
(see below).
It’s easy
to over-claim the urban renaissance, at least in terms of raw numbers. Even
before the 2007 banking crisis, the State of the English Cities report showed
that, while cities had been making a comeback in the decade to 2003, the scale
of population and employment growth for urban England had been relatively
modest and patchy.
Subsequent analysis by Alan Townsend and me showed that in the 10 years to 2007, employment growth in England’s eight
Core Cities’ city-regions was consistently below the national level – except in
2000-2, around the dot-com downturn. And while their jobs growth accelerated in
the late 1990s, it then slowed in the 2000s.
Alan and I
have now updated the analysis to 2010, allowing us to see the
recession’s initial impact on employment. As the credit crunch took hold, most
people expected London to be the most severely impacted part of the country –
much as it had been in the early 1990s downturn. But as SERC colleagues have
explained, London seems to have ‘got away with it’. In
fact, our data (which now includes Glasgow as well as the eight Core Cities) suggest
that, for these city-regions, this recession feels more like the early
1980s.
Between
2007 and 2010, these nine city regions saw their combined employment drop by
over 320,000 Full Time Equivalent jobs. This is a drop of 4.9%, compared to a
fall of just 2.2% for London’s city region and 3.5% for Great Britain as a
whole.
The worst-hit
city regions in our study were Birmingham and Glasgow (both -8.0%), followed by
Liverpool (-5.5%), Newcastle (-5.3%), Manchester (-4.5%) and Sheffield (-4.3%).
Bristol was in a class of its own, seeing its FTEs rise by 1.8% against the
national trend, while Leeds and Nottingham were around the national average
(-3.2% and -3.8% respectively).
The bad
news for local leaders across these city-regions is that these impacts eroded
much of the employment growth of the previous decade. Allowing for
discontinuities in the data, we find that Birmingham’s city region was set back
the most; its 2010 FTEs were the lowest since 1996. The equivalent dates are
1999 for Glasgow, 2000 for Liverpool, 2001 for Newcastle, 2002 for Leeds and
Manchester, 2003 for Sheffield and 2004 for Nottingham. By contrast, for London
city region, the 2007-2010 downturn has only shifted FTEs back to 2005. Many of
these cities now clearly face a big uphill struggle in their efforts for
economic growth – made all the harder by the post-2010 public-sector cuts and by
the lack of growth nationally.
