Renewing the black country. An assessment of the employment impact of the black country UDC

Summary

The combination of the tendency for reclaimed sites to be occupied by firms moving around the Black Country and for corporate relocations to involve a significant importation of staff, in conjunction with modest levels of additionality for grant‐aided activity, helps to explain the persistently high relative levels of unemployment both in the UDA and the wider Black Country area. The focus on securing investment which was likely to be attracted to the area anyway has been an integral part of the BCDC's development strategy. The 1995 Corporate Plan notes that the aim was to attract:

• local and Midlands‐based companies;

• external enquiries having a clear need for a Midlands location;

• large inward investment enquiries which could go anywhere, but have a low level of plant and machinery and to whom grant is of a lesser significance.

The success in attracting corporate relocations was noted in the research conducted by Prisim (1995) which examined the performance of the Black Country economy compared to Mid‐Glamorgan County and South Yorkshire Metropolitan County. However, the study also noted that the Black Country had, pro rata, the lowest level of inward investment in the West Midlands and a lower level of physical development compared to the other areas.

While the BCDC's development strategy was always dependent upon attracting corporate relocations, the employment impact upon disadvantaged communities has been aggravated by a lack of attention to distributional issues within schemes of regeneration. Neither central government nor the BCDC required local companies to conform to a given standard in respect of equal opportunities, wage rates or employment conditions. Additionally, the BCDC did not develop a strategy to ensure that the different geographical communities in the Black Country could access employment opportunities. Sandwell MBC's Economic Development Unit has been conducting research into the barriers that local people face when attempting to access employment opportunities and has commissioned several residents’ surveys in areas that have been targeted for regeneration. Table 7 shows how these studies build a cumulative picture of extremely localised job search areas for some of Sandwell's most disadvantaged communities, with as many as four‐fifths of residents in some areas being unwilling to travel across Sandwell to take up employment, while in some areas, such as North Smethwick, more than one third will not travel outside their immediate neighbourhood to find employment.

This evidence of the reliance of disadvantaged communities on highly localised employment opportunities has significant public policy implications for regeneration activity in an area such as Sandwell. For example, it is clear that residents in disadvantaged outlying communities will not access the employment created without explicit linkage policies being developed. Additionally, further research is needed to understand fully the reasons why there is a reluctance to travel between employment centres within Sandwell.

The permeable nature of the Sandwell labour market has been confirmed in a study by Green (1995) which uses the special workplace statistics contained in the 1991 census of population to construct a matrix which measures the level of self‐containment of each of the TEC areas in the West Midlands. The model contains two types of measurement, which are:

• demand‐side self‐containment — the extent to which local jobs are filled by local people;

• supply‐side self‐containment — the proportion of employed residents working locally.

The results of this study show that Sandwell has the lowest rate of demand‐side self‐containment in the West Midlands (55 per cent), clearly illustrating the difficulty which local people have in accessing local employment opportunities. Conversely, the Black Country boroughs all have relatively low supply‐side self‐containment rates, reflecting in part the interconnection between the labour markets in the four boroughs.