Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface

List of Tables

List of Figures

Chapter One Locating the New Deal

Reforming Welfare and Redrawing Responsibility

Activating Labour Market Policy

Introducing the New Deals

Inadmissible Evidence? Geography and the New Deal

Aims and Approach

Chapter Two The Geographies of Worklessness

Introduction

The Unemployment Problem

The Geographies of Worklessness

The Policy Challenge

Chapter Three Local Disparities in the Performance of Welfare-to-Work

Introduction: Residual Pockets and the Geography of New Deal

Mapping New Deal Outcomes

Local Labour Market Flows

Local Disparities in Other New Deals

Conclusions

Appendix

Chapter Four Welfare-to-Work in Local Context

Introduction: Employability and Local Context

Low Employability in Buoyant Labour Markets

New Deals in Big Cities: Job Search and High Volumes

Expectation Gaps and Job Quality

Workfare Recycling in Depressed Local Labour Markets

Moves to Inactivity

Conclusions

Chapter Five A Geography of Mismatch? Employers, Jobs and Training

Introducing Gatekeepers’ Tales

Variations in Job Opportunities and Recruitment

A Pool of ‘Cheap Labour’?

The Role of the Job Subsidy

Training Provision under the NDYP

A Typology of Employer Participation

Conclusions

Chapter Six Localising Welfare-to-Work?

Local Flexibility and the New Deal for Young People

Partnership-Building and Co-ordination

Policy Learning and Adaptation

Innovation and Experimentation

Resource Targeting

Work-First Flexibility?

Conclusions

Chapter Seven Conclusions

The New Deal Policy Paradigm

Geographical ‘Anomalies’ in the Performance of the New Deal

Increasing Local Opportunities

A Final Note on Geography and Workfare

Notes

Bibliography

Index

RGS-IBG Book Series

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Book Series provides a forum for scholarly monographs and edited collections of academic papers at the leading edge of research in human and physical geography. The volumes are intended to make significant contributions to the field in which they lie, and to be written in a manner accessible to the wider community of academic geographers. Some volumes will disseminate current geographical research reported at conferences or sessions convened by Research Groups of the Society. Some will be edited or authored by scholars from beyond the UK. All are designed to have an international readership and to both reflect and stimulate the best current research within geography.

The books will stand out in terms of:

• the quality of research
• their contribution to their research field
• their likelihood to stimulate other research
• being scholarly but accessible.

For series guides go to www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/rgsibg.pdf

Published

Putting Workfare in Place

Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and

Corinne Nativel

After the Three Italies

Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Domicile and Diaspora

Alison Blunt

Geographies and Moralities

Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military Geographies

Rachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?

Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British Modernity

Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of Power

John Allen

Globalizing South China

Carolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years

Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Forthcoming

Living Through Decline: Surviving in the Places of the Post-

Industrial Economy

Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson

The Geomorphology of Upland Peat

Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Peoples/States/Territories

Rhys Jones

Publics and the City

Kurt Iveson

Driving Spaces

Peter Merriman

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes

David Nash and Susan McLaren

Fieldwork

Simon Naylor

Mental Health and Social Space

Hester Parr

Natural Resources in Eastern Europe

Chad Staddon

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work and the Canon 1850—1970

Avril Maddrell

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico

Georgina H. Endfield

Consuming Ethics: Markets and the Globalisation of Care

Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass

©2006 by Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunley, Peter.

Putting workfare in place: local labour markets and the new deal/Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel.

p. cm. — (RGS-IBG book series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0785-3 (hard cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-0785-5 (hard cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0784-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-0784-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Youth-Employment—Government policy—Great Britain. 2. Welfare recipients-Employ- ment—Government policy—Great Britain. 3. Labor market—Great Britain. I. Martin, Ron. II. Nativel, Corinne. III. Title. IV. Series.

HD6276.G72S868 2005

331.3’412042’094109049—dc22

2005013100

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards.

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS/IBG Book series publishes the highest quality of research and scholarship across the broad disciplinary spectrum of geography. Addressing the vibrant agenda of theoretical debates and issues that characterise the contemporary discipline, contributions will provide a synthesis of research, teaching, theory and practice that both reflects and stimulates cutting-edge research. The Series seeks to engage an international readership through the provision of scholarly, vivid and accessible texts.

Nick Henry and Jon Sadler

RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Preface

The move towards workfare policies represents a fundamental change in the welfare states and labour markets of many industrialised countries. Such a shift represents a process of activation in which the receipt of benefits and assistance are made conditional on the active fulfilment of job search and other work-focused obligations. Across the industrial world, politicians are identifying such policies as the solution to the entrenched problems of worklessness that have plagued their economies during the last few decades. Within Western Europe the UK has led the way in the adoption of workfare and the New Deal for Young People has been at the forefront. Buoyed by favourable national economic conditions since 1998, this flagship New Deal programme has been held up as a model to be emulated. While it has received much abstract and aggregate attention, there has been relatively little research into the uneven geography of the New Deal. The aim of this book is to look beneath the model and understand how this set of active policies has had quite different challenges and impacts in different local and regional labour markets. It attempts to contribute to the understanding of the role of geography in the constitution of labour markets, and to highlight the need to incorporate such understanding in order to construct effective and efficient policy interventions.

The geographical concentration of unemployment and worklessness has become one of the most problematic and stubborn features of the UK labour market. The book aims to consider how far the New Deal has been able to respond to and resolve this problem. How far have local flexibility and policy decentralisation allowed the programme to address dramatic differences in local labour market contexts? Despite the complexity of local outcomes, the book argues that the spatial variation in the New Deal tells a clear and systematic story in which the policy typically works more effectively in more dynamic and tighter local labour markets.

The geography of non-work is not a problem that has been virtually eliminated. Instead, the limitations and imbalance of supply-side active labour market policies, focused on raising individual employability, are most apparent in distressed local labour where there is less opportunity to find rewarding and stable job opportunities. The book discusses some of the implications of this finding for the idea of a new contract between unemployed individuals and the state. It outlines some of ways in which the local responsiveness of the policy could be improved, and some of the possible means of raising the demand for labour in depressed local areas. The need to do so remains pressing.

The research for this book was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Grant R000237866 (The Geography of Workfare: Local Labour Markets and the New Deal) and we would like to thank the ESRC for their financial support. We would also like to thank the many Jobcentre Plus (formerly Employment Service) officials, other local labour market agents, programme participants and employers who helped by providing information. We are especially grateful to those individuals who agreed to be interviewed in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Tyneside, Birmingham and North London. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2001, NS Volume 26, pages 484–512, and an earlier version of Chapter 6 was published in Environment and Planning: Government and Policy, 2002, Volume 20, pages 911–932. We are grateful to the editors and referees of these journals. We would like to thank Tim Aspden and Bob Smith in the Southampton Cartography Office and Philip Stickler and Owen Tucker in Cambridge for their help in producing the figures. Finally we would like to acknowledge the late Pam Spoerry who drew many of the original maps for this project and provided much good-natured, professional help.

Peter Sunley

Ron Martin

Corinne Nativel

Southampton, Cambridge and Paris, August 2004.

Tables

Figures