̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Maria Abreu

Former coal mining communities have less faith in politics than other 'left behind' areas

fpjl2 — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 08:30:26 +0000

Communities once reliant on the coal industry are now more politically disenchanted, with residents less likely to vote, than places with similar levels of deprivation but without the “narrative of decline” that holds sway in former mining areas.

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Cardiff Business School used survey data on social and political attitudes gathered across Britain between 2009-2019, a decade dominated by austerity and Brexit.

̽��ֱ��team identified neighbourhoods that had seen large numbers employed by the coal industry in the early 1980s. Survey respondents from these areas were 'matched' to respondents with similar personal characteristics, income levels and education from locations with comparable levels of poverty – but no history of mining.

̽��ֱ��overall trend revealed that people now living in communities once dependent on coalmining are less engaged in – and feel far less knowledgeable about – politics than those in equivalent 'left behind' neighbourhoods.

Residents of coalfield areas are less likely than their socio-economic counterparts to have voted in the last election, are much less likely to say they intend to vote in future, and believe the same to be true of their neighbours.

They are also more cynical about the overall effectiveness of democracy, and more likely to believe that “public officials don’t care”.

Self-reported mental health was found to be significantly lower in former mining communities than in similarly deprived areas, while scepticism towards climate change was slightly higher, as was a positive attitude towards working mothers.

̽��ֱ��study, published in the journal Applied Geography, used responses from over 14,000 individuals who were surveyed every year.

“Narratives of decline loom large in the current identity of old mining areas, even though the working lives of most residents started long after the pits closed,” said study co-author Dr Maria Abreu from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“For people in communities that saw sudden and rapid economic decay, there appears to be an increased insularity and distrust of political systems compared to those who are also deprived, but do not have a shared local history of decline.”

̽��ֱ��study shows an uptick of political engagement over the Brexit campaign period, with ex-mining areas leaning towards Leave. But even Brexit doesn’t raise political interest to the level seen in comparable locations beyond the referendum campaign period.

In fact, political engagement continues to climb in other ‘left behind’ areas, while in the former mining communities it drops off again after 2017.

This discontent with contemporary politics also extends to newer populist and nationalist parties. While they favoured Leave in the referendum, those in coalfield communities are still less likely to vote for UKIP, the SNP or Plaid Cymru than those in other areas with similar social and economic struggles.

“It seems that the modern Left may not have lost the people in former mining communities to populism or emerging nationalist parties, but rather apathy and cynicism,” said Abreu, from Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy.

In addition, and contrary to cinematic depictions and public perceptions, the research didn’t detect any greater sense of community cohesion in former mining neighbourhoods compared to other economically depressed areas.

“It’s been over thirty years since large numbers of people went underground for work, plenty of time for strong social relationships to dwindle,” said co-author Dr Calvin Jones from Cardiff Business School. “Loss of solidarity among these communities may have been compounded by austerity in recent years.”

“However, it is also possible that the other deprived communities to which we compared former mining areas – from housing estates to rundown seaside towns – actually have higher levels of social cohesion than might be expected.”

̽��ֱ��study used individual-level data from the last decade, collected by the Understanding Society survey (UK Longitudinal Household Survey). ̽��ֱ��researchers broke this down into small census areas – neighbourhoods of around 1,500 people – and combined it with other socio-economic data to match individuals living in coalmining areas to those in other areas with comparable levels of deprivation, welfare spending, and ruralness.

To define former coalmining communities, Abreu and Jones used 1981 census data to identify areas where at least 10% of adult males had been employed in the “Energy and Water” sector, and overlaid this with geological maps to whittle down to those neighbourhoods within 10 miles of bedrock coal deposits.

Communities that met these criteria are dotted across much of the north and midlands, with particular concentrations found in South Wales, northeast England and Tyneside, the Lanarkshire coalfields south of Glasgow, and the midlands between Nottingham and Leeds.

Those in ex-mining areas are also less likely to vote for new populist and nationalist parties compared to socio-economic counterparts elsewhere. Researchers argue that the modern Left may have lost these communities to “apathy and cynicism”.

Narratives of decline loom large in the current identity of old mining areas, even though the working lives of most residents started long after the pits closed

Maria Abreu

It's No Game via Flickr

̽��ֱ��remains of the former pit at Pleasley, near Mansfield.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Mend the gap: solving the UK’s productivity puzzle

sjr81 — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 13:02:25 +0000

̽��ֱ��UK is the world’s sixth largest economy. But would it surprise you to learn that outside of London, the South East and a handful of major cities, many areas of the UK are just as poor as swathes of Eastern Europe?

̽��ֱ��disparity between different regions of the UK is stark, and not only in terms of living standards and educational attainment – but, crucially, also in the productivity of its workforce.

̽��ֱ��productivity gap is one of the most serious and vexing economic problems facing the government of the day, and Brexit is adding uncertainty to the mix.

Close the productivity gap between the most and least successful regions of the UK, and the GDP of UK PLC will invariably rise. Allow it to remain at current, stagnant levels – or, even worse, let the gap widen – and it’s not only our place in the world rankings that suffers, but also the UK’s economy, infrastructure, educational standards and health, as well as other indicators of social cohesion, such as child poverty and rising crime rates.

Put simply, productivity fires the engine of our economy – and we all need to mind the gap.

̽��ֱ��UK’s ‘productivity puzzle’ is what concerns Dr Maria Abreu from the Department of Land Economy. She’s working with colleagues from universities around the UK as part of the Productivity Insights Network funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Sheffield. ̽��ֱ��group of economists, geographers, management experts and other scientists are taking a place-based approach to a problem HM government is desperate to solve.

Last year, the government published a 256-page Industrial Strategy that placed the productivity gap at its centre and is looking to the Network to provide policy recommendations, explains Abreu.

“There’s a narrative that the UK is a very rich country, but many regions of the UK outside the capital are poor,” she says. “We have a few of the richest regions in Europe and some of the poorest. It’s a delusion to say we’re rich.

“All the growth in the economy is centred on London, the South East and a few other cities. But growth is low or negative in the rest of the UK, and overall that means there is nearly no growth whatsoever. We are standing still.”

Compared with other OECD countries, the UK has had low productivity performance since the 1970s.

̽��ֱ��gap with other countries closed significantly during the Labour governments of the late 1990s and 2000s: GDP per hour worked grew at an average rate of 2.1% until 2007 when the global financial crisis began.

Since then, however, productivity growth has been negative (-1.1% per year for 2007–9) or very low (0.4% per year from 2009–13), and the gap with other OECD countries has increased again despite employment rates remaining relatively strong, leading to the so-called productivity puzzle.

̽��ֱ��three-year ESRC project is divided into distinct themes, and Abreu is leading on researching how the skills of the UK labour force, developed from preschool to life-long adult learning, go hand in hand with the rise (or fall) of productivity – and how place is a crucial, determining factor in all of this.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that labour productivity in 2016 was significantly above the UK average in London (+33%) and the South East (+6%), but below average in all other regions and nations, and particularly low in the North East (-11%), the West Midlands (-13%), Yorkshire (-15%), and Wales and Northern Ireland (-17%).

“My group is looking at education and teaching standards, and what might be causing the regional disparities,” says Abreu. “We are also looking at graduate migration because we have some excellent northern universities, but those regions lose a lot of people after graduation.

“London and its surrounding areas are very successful in attracting graduates and highly skilled workers from around the UK, as well as migrant workers from abroad.

“ ̽��ֱ��capital’s productivity is enormous, but this means it is decoupling from the rest of the economy. We can link this directly to globalisation in the 1980s and the offshoring of certain industries. Most of the new jobs have been in hi-tech industries concentrated in only a few places.”

Abreu suggests the dismantling of the Regional Development Agencies and the move to LEPs (Learning Enterprise Zones) from 2010 has come at a huge cost to large areas of the UK that are no longer covered by a consistent development strategy.

She passionately believes that increasing education standards across the country is vital if the UK is ever to close its productivity gap. She also argues for proper development strategies for all regions of the UK – as well as investment in education.

̽��ֱ��extent to which parents are engaged with their children’s schooling also displays strong regional variations. Areas that are better off attract better teachers. ̽��ֱ��benefits and drawbacks of this regionalism become self-perpetuating and that affects everyone.

“These disparities in productivity, education and living standards affect us all,” says Abreu. “It matters if you have one region that far outpaces everywhere else. Regions get left behind, become very socially and politically unstable, and low productivity translates into low wages and deprivation. Families do badly at school and this entrenches poverty and poor social mobility, which impacts the rest of the country.”

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

When it comes to the output, education and wellbeing of the Great British workforce, our towns, cities and regions exist on a dramatically unequal footing. A new, wide-ranging research network hopes to find answers to a decades-old problem – the UK’s productivity gap.

There’s a narrative that the UK is a very rich country, but many regions of the UK outside the capital are poor.

Maria Abreu

Brandon Wong

Migrant workers and domestic labour

A study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2015 found that migrant workers brought benefits to UK employers that led to productivity boosts. What happens after Brexit?

Professor Catherine Barnard from the Faculty of Law believes that too much of the Brexit debate has been taken up with the discussion of trade – manufacturing amounts to only 15% of the economy – rather than the impact of the migrant workforce.

“We know there are sectors that are highly dependent on EU labour such as agriculture, which is often low-paid, seasonal work where the incentive to UK workers is not that great,” says Barnard. “We also know that 10% of the NHS, especially in London, is made up of migrant workers. At Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, it’s 27% at postdoctoral level.”

Barnard, working with Dr Amy Ludlow and Sarah Fraser-Butlin, has been looking at the issue of immigration and the labour force, funded by the ESRC. They have focused on the East of England, visiting schools in Spalding as well as attending town hall meetings in Holt and Sheringham. Barnard says: “You get a very different view of the world. When I have given evidence to parliament, I can talk about these towns and their experiences of Eastern European migration – which are very different to the experiences of a town like Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��reason people can’t get a hospital appointment or a school place is partly to do with migration, but it’s also because of the underfunding of public services. Local councils have lost 40% of their funding from central government since 2010.”

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