Employment Deprivation (Worklessness) in Lancashire
2003

Introduction

An attempt to measure and identify local areas where relatively large proportions of people were without work was first used in the compilation of the Indices of Deprivation 2004 developed on behalf of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now the Department for Communities and Local Government). Two separate combined employment deprivation indicators were compiled in order to provide a measure of "worklessness". Originally constructed on the basis of 2001 data, these indicators have now been combined and up-dated using 2003 information, though this process does not itself constitute part of any update of the overall Index of Deprivation. Information is available for Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs). Full downloads of the 2003 data for these LSOAs for the whole of England are available from the Office for National Statistics Neighbourhood Statistics website. Data relating specifically to Lancashire can be obtained from the Lancashire Profile Data Download Centre.

Background to the Data

The information used for the Employment Deprivation indicator has been drawn from administrative data relating to a range of social security benefits handled by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP). The exercise provided a single indicator which (after allowing for the possibility of any double counting that can occur when New Deal participants also receive JSA) is the sum of the following:

• The number of people claiming benefits related to sickness or disability which prevent them from working (Incapacity Benefit and Severe Disability Allowance);
• The number of people engaged in New Deal Programmes, which seek to help people back to work and improve long term employability; and
• The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) benefit, which is paid to those actively seeking, and able to start employment (this measure is used as a proxy for the "Claimant Count" produced by ONS, as no Claimant Count data are available at LSOA level for August 2003).

The indicator thus provided is not comparable with the two combined employment deprivation indicators published previously but is still held to produce a useful measure of employment deprivation at the small area level. Some 410 England LSOAs, or 1.3% of the total do not have any value associated with them due to data disclosure controls. However, this does not affect any of the Lancashire areas and it is believed that a true count in cells where no value is available would generally not exceed 30, thereby placing them amongst the least employment deprived areas.

It should be noted that the Employment Deprivation indicator is a simple numerical value representing a summation of the numbers of people claiming the above benefits. As such, a high number of claimants in any particular area do not necessarily mean that the area has a high rate of unemployment, as the data do not take into account the size of the population in each LSOA.

Lancashire Results

The geographical distribution of areas across the sub-region as defined through the Combined Employment Indicator is illustrated in Figure 1. Table 1 details the top and bottom placed LSOAs according to both their ranking within Lancashire and their overall ranking across England. As a further aid to visualisation, Figure 2 has recast the Combined Employment Indicator in terms of the higher geographical order Middle Layer Output Areas (MSOAs).

Figure 1 Combined Employment Indicator, 2003, for LSOAs: Number of People Who Are Workless

Source ONS - Combined Employment Indicator, 2003

Lancashire may be seen to encompass virtually the full range of scores produced under the Combined Employment Indicator – from an LSOA (017E) within the Guild Hall, Broadgate & Avenham area of Preston which with 508 workless people ranks as no less than 7th in the whole of England, to a low of just 19 people in an LSOA (004A) in the Fulwood Row & Sherwood area, also in Preston, which ranks amongst the 2% least employment deprived areas in England. Overall, Lancashire has 17 LSOAs within the 1% most employment deprived in England and 70 LSOAs within the 5% most employment deprived. The sub-region also has a fair number of LSOAs within the least employment deprived category but this distribution is less pronounced that with the poorer ranking areas.

LSOAs with the highest Combined Employment Indicator rankings are to be found overwhelmingly within the larger urban areas, particularly in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley and Preston but with a noted presence also in areas like Fleetwood, Morecambe and Skelmersdale and in many of the smaller urban settlements in East Lancashire – all areas with known pockets of above-average rates of unemployment and of multiple deprivation. The more favoured rankings with low levels of worklessness are to be found, not unexpectedly, in more prosperous suburban and rural/dormitory areas.

Figure 2 Combined Employment Indicator, 2003, for MSOAs: Number of People Who Are Workless

Source ONS - Combined Employment Indicator, 2003