A new perspective on the success of public sector worklessness interventions in the UK’s most deprived areas

No urban economic assessment is complete without an analysis of worklessness in the most deprived neighbourhoods. In Manchester, as in most other cities, there are many neighbourhoods where worklessness rates are persistently high. However, because the analysis usually done is an anonymous snapshot, it is never possible to know whether this is the result of individuals getting work and moving out to a ‘better’ area, only to be replaced by a new tranche of the jobless, or whether it is in fact the dynamics of the neighbourhood that militate against a higher rate of employment. This analysis breaks new ground in using real individuals’ data on employment transitions and geographical movements, taken from the Department for Work and Pensions’ and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ administrative records. By working through that population’s movement into employment and movement out of an area, it sheds new light on neighbourhood level population dynamics. With some caution, the work suggests that the movement out of an area of people who get a job does not seem to be a key factor in the persistence of high worklessness rates in the most deprived areas.