Anne E. Green

University of Birmingham · City-REDI, Birmingham Business School

Against the background of the rise in higher‐education participation rates, this paper examines the spatial redistribution of undergraduates across the United Kingdom resulting from moves to and from university. Drawing on the Graduate Outcomes Surveys of 2017/2018 and 2018/2019, address data coded to 53 subregions (SRs) are used to track those enr...

In a significant change to the UK social security system, the introduction of Universal Credit has seen the broadening of labour market activation to cover a larger number of population sub-groups. This change has also prompted a greater concern with employment sustainability and progression in work in active labour market policy (ALMP), as the ben...

Crises spur reflection and re-evaluation of what matters and what is valued. The impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis, COVID-19 pandemic and climate emergency are reigniting debates about the nature of economic development approaches and what they aim to achieve in urban settings. Addressing a substantive gap in contemporary debates by helpi...

‘Active labour market programmes’ (ALMPs) aim to assist unemployed people into employment. While policies, programmes and scholarship have focused on the supply side of the labour market (jobseekers), a critical omission has been the demand side (employers). This book broadens the debate on ALMPs by fusing social and public policy with human resour...

Introduction For many years the labour market model in the UK was bound up with a predominant concern with job quantity, but with considerably less attention to job quality (Lauder, 1999). Recently however, there has been a shift in policymaking towards a greater concern with the idea of ‘good work’. In active labour market policy (ALMP) the shift...

Connecting Communities was a voluntary employment support programme funded by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and procured and overseen by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA). It was tested across nine geographically defined neighbourhoods (also called ‘lots’) and ran for three and a half years. This period included the Covid-19...

The Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit have focused attention on the resilience of key sectors and firms. This paper explores the financial resilience of the 50 largest automotive firms in the West Midlands region of the UK in their response to disruption and economic shocks. The findings demonstrate that 22 firms are at high risk due to poor current liq...

The manufacturing output of the West Midlands is notably higher than the average across UK regions, making a significant contribution to UK GVA. However, manufacturing sectors are some of the hardest hit by changing macro-environmental factors, including soaring energy prices, the impacts of the pandemic and the UK's withdrawal from the EU. Our ana...

Introduction The United Kingdom is characterised by an uneven economic geography, with large and persistent regional disparities in economic activity (Gardiner et al, 2013; Martin et al, 2016). Labour market outcomes and conditions vary quite widely over space. Even set within the context of rising employment rates generally in recent years, concen...

Purpose This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities of shifting from physical to virtual employment support delivery prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. It investigates associated changes in the nature and balance of support and implications for beneficiary engagement with programmes and job search. Design/methodology/approach The study...

The economic and social importance of ethnic minority microbusinesses (‘EMMBs’ with 1–9 employees) is neglected in human resource (HR) academic and policy discourse on productive ways of working. This article presents an action research approach to show how academics and intermediaries (local trusted industry representatives) can collaborate to pro...

Recent employer and employee surveys in the UK highlight a decline in training participation, a reduction in training expenditure per employee and an increase in online training/e-learning. The Covid-19 pandemic adds impetus to considering training trends given the importance of skills for economic recovery. Many workers are adapting to work and le...

This paper contributes to anchor institution, migrant and refugee integration, skills utilisation and inclusive growth debates. Via a pioneering innovative approach to inclusive urban development linking together physical infrastructure development and neighbourhood management approaches to urban regeneration, it explores the potential for micro as...

This report summarises findings from a research project examining the role of universities in skills and regional economic development. It identifies key short and medium-term priorities for the up-skilling and re-skilling of school leavers, graduates and existing employees in the West Midlands. It analyses the current and potential future role of...

This brief makes a case for policy makers to understand the relevance of promoting community engagement in strategy and policy development. • The findings suggest the need for engagement with new audiences and groups and for continued development of participative models of interpretation and governance. There is also a need to strengthen liaison wi...

The University of Birmingham was commissioned by Shropshire Council on behalf of the Marches Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to undertake analysis and research on the innovative health and social care sector within the Marches LEP geography (Herefordshire, Shropshire and Telford and the Wrekin). The research is intended to provide an independent...

The idea that some local areas are characterized by a low-skills equilibrium trap is prominent in academic and policy debates in the Global North. Factors shaping this position and associated implications for local economic development are only partially understood. This paper provides new evidence examining employers’ decision-making around invest...

The article examines the innovation-job quality-employment nexus in social and health care in the United Kingdom and Sweden, respectively. Through seven case studies carried out with a common methodological and analytical framework in the two countries, it shows how the constraining factors of fiscal strictures derived from budgetary regimes and ch...

The article examines the innovation-job quality-employment nexus in social and health care in the United Kingdom and Sweden, respectively. Through seven case studies carried out with a common methodological and analytical framework in the two countries, it shows how the constraining factors of fiscal strictures derived from budgetary regimes and ch...

Matching skills supply and demand is critical for economic growth, competitiveness and inclusiveness. Yet, measuring skills is difficult. This paper develops an approach for measuring the gap between demand and supply of skills at the local level in the UK West Midlands region. It uses qualifications as a proxy for skills. By comparing the projecte...

The UK’s poor productivity performance continues to be of much debate in policy and research and is central to the development of the Industrial Strategy. This research focusses on how the Professional and Business Services (PBS) sector can contribute to Local Industrial Strategies and create growth both within the sector and be a driver of growth...

Building a co-produced research legacy: Lessons from community research in ‎Birmingham Sara Hassan, Anne Green, Lisa Goodson and Peter Lee University of Birmingham Abstract Co-production is a term that is applied to a range of different forms of engagement with ‎society in urban planning and development issues. It builds on debates in the planning...

This paper addresses the question: What functions or activities does it make sense to discharge at a pan-regional level? It addresses this question from the specific perspective of the Midlands Engine. Evolving perspectives on regional geographies are introduced before the distinctive nature of spatial and economic development in the Midlands is...

In an era of free movement UK employers have had ready access to a supply of labour from the European Union to fill low-skilled jobs. This has enabled them to adopt business models, operating within broader supply chains, that take advantage of this source of labour and the flexibility that many migrant workers – especially those who are new arriva...

Between 2014 and 2016, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills ran a ‘test and trial’ programme – the UK Futures Programme - aimed at tackling workplace productivity through improvements to skills and workplace practices. £9 million was co-invested (£4.4 million public funding) in 32 projects across five ‘productivity challenges’. The objecti...

Active labour market policy has developed into a widely used and seemingly embedded approach to addressing worklessness, both in the UK and internationally. But the future of UK active labour market policy looks far from certain. Some recent developments suggest demise and diminution. But at the same time there is also evidence of more positive poi...

The concept of inclusive growth is increasingly presented as offering prospects for more equitable social outcomes. However, inclusive growth is subject to a variety of interpretations and lacks definitional clarity. In England, via devolution, cities are taking on new powers for policy domains that can influence inclusive growth outcomes. This ope...

Active labour market policy (ALMP) is a well-established strategy but one aspect is greatly neglected – employer participation – about which there is a lack of systematic evidence. The question of why and how employers participate in ALMP, and whether there may be some shift from employers solely being passive recipients of job-ready candidates to...

This report looks at the role productivity plays in employers’ wage-setting decision-making in low-wage sectors. It asks how employers think about, understand and measure productivity and what role productivity plays in employers’ wage-setting decisions among other factors. With the National Living Wage emerging as being of prime importance in wage...

This article considers employer engagement within a changing landscape of active labour market policy (ALMP). Employer engagement in ALMP has focused on supporting job entry for disadvantaged groups, through working with employers to attain changes on the demand side or using dialogue with employers to implement changes on the supply side. Employer...

Employment projections and skills strategies emphasise the importance of (highly) skilled labour for competitiveness. A strategic focus on ‘attracting the best talent’ globally may conflict with policies to ‘grow local talent’. This issue is considered in the UK context of a shift from a liberal immigration regime to a demand-led system characteris...

Structural changes in the labour markets of developed economies, and changes in their institutional characteristics, have led to growing unease about the nature of low-paid employment. Related concerns have been expressed about the persistence of low-pay, the fragmentation of work and the growth of under-employment. While all these factors have pot...

Inclusive growth is a major issue in the UK and internationally. How do international cities lead inclusive growth agendas? To generate ideas to influence UK city leaders this research examined international examples of cities that have developed and implemented agendas and policies to combine economic growth and social inclusion. The report shows:...

Low pay is a significant and growing issue in many developed economies. Sectoral approaches are often used in both economic development and labour market policy, yet there is little evidence on how low pay and earnings mobility vary by sector. This article investigates this issue in the UK. It shows pronounced sectoral variations in low pay and ear...

This report is available at http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/29188/1/ER7_The_UK_s_Skill_System_Training__Employability_and_Gaps_in_Provision_Redacted.pdf This review was commissioned as part of the UK government’s Foresight Future of Skills and Lifelong Learning project. The views expressed do not represent policy of any government or organisation.

This article uses the concepts of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘soft outcomes’ previously developed in relation to the study of local economic development and planning and applies them to the related, but not identical, field of localised welfare-to-work initiatives. The specific example of the City Strategy initiative in Great Britain provides evidence of th...

What can city stakeholders do to help individuals progress out of lo-paid jobs? Enabling progression is important for tackling in-work poverty. In the context of Universal Credit, employer co-investment in skills, and cities gaining more devolved powers, there are opportunities to develop progression-focused policies. This report presents proposal...

Over the last decade two key changes affecting employability, labour market operation and policy delivery are austerity and the expansion of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), especially web-based technologies. Increasingly, given pressures for cost savings and developments in ICT, employers’ recruitment and selection stra...

Employability policies targeting urban job seekers have often had a ‘work first’ focus on quick job entries, neglecting sustainability and progression. This article reviews evidence on ‘what works’, drawing generic lessons from research on locally-focused urban policy initiatives in Great Britain operationalised in the context of persistent workles...

Women’s rates of employment are lower than men’s. Housing association residents' rates of employment are lower than those in other tenures. Thus women housing association tenants have high rates of out-of-work benefit claims and high rates of poverty. It is known that women housing association residents with children face constraints to employment,...

In some countries in Europe the economic crisis starting in 2008 was marked not only by a rise in unemployment, but also by increases in individuals in part-time and temporary working, so emphasising the need to examine employment composition as well as non-employment. The promotion of non-standard forms of employment – such as part-time and tempor...

Medium-term employment trends highlight increasing labour market disadvantage for people with no/low qualifications. Consequently, established local populations with no/low qualifications have been reported as being hostile to ‘new arrivals’ filling local jobs, on the basis that they are perceived as taking employment opportunities away from them....

Over the last two decades a vibrant body of research committed to investigating the complex inter-relationships between ‘the social’ and ‘the spatial’ has gathered momentum within sociology and the social sciences more generally. Focusing on young people, this article seeks to develop further insights regarding the sociology of place using the spat...

The development of a fast and reliable Internet, new technologies online payment systems, and changes in work structure that enable and demand flexible working patterns have driven a move to a new form of Internet-enabled labour exchange called crowdsourcing. Evidence from an in-depth qualitative study is presented, focusing on selected users' inte...

Cities are drivers of economic growth, but how does growth affect poverty? This report explores the connection between growth and poverty in UK cities, and examines how strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction can be aligned. The report finds that: • there is no guarantee that economic growth will reduce poverty: some economically expan...

There are substantial variations in labour market outcomes between neighbourhoods. One potential partial explanation is that residents of some neighbourhoods face discrimination from employers. Although studies of deprived areas have recorded resident perceptions of discrimination by employers and negative employer perceptions of certain areas, unt...

Green A. E. and Livanos I. Involuntary non-standard employment and the economic crisis: regional insights from the UK, Regional Studies. Increases in unemployment and non-employment in the 2008–2009 economic crisis were less marked than expected in the UK given experience of previous recessions. To capture more fully the regional dimensions of econ...

Report for Advantage West Midlands. http://www.wmro.org/resources/res.aspx/CmsResource/resourceFilename/1788/Economic-Migrants-Final_V1.0_Report_SM.pdf

This chapter provides a detailed look at the research undertaken in the West Midlands region of England. Following an introduction that includes a summary outline of current training-related policy direction in the United Kingdom, there is a discussion of the results obtained from the TSME survey, with a particular focus on barriers to training, an...

Boundaries are an essential part of definition. Without creating a boundary, what is being defined can never be adequately separated from ‘the rest’, and boundaries are a critical part of how we view the world and ourselves. Yet these boundaries are rarely fixed and finite. Grey areas always exist between defined categories: In geography, regions s...

The period since 2008 has seen considerable changes in the global political and economic environment as a consequence of the ongoing financial crisis that originated in the USA. Within individual nations, after a long period of expansion, economic and jobs growth has slowed or even reversed, the brakes have been put on public spending, risk and unc...

Women have made important quantitative and qualitative gains in the labour market in recent years. A key feature of women’s employment is their disproportionate concentration in the public sector, and this helps to explain the advances they have made in the labour market given the availability of high quality jobs and opportunities for skills devel...

By 2009 four in every five job seekers in Great Britain were making use of the Internet in job search, generally alongside other methods. While the Internet has created new opportunities for job seekers, there are concerns that inequalities in use of and access to the Internet will intensify difficulties experienced by disadvantaged groups in findi...

This report describes the task for jobseekers in the UK labour market in 2010–11. It focuses on young jobseekers with limited education and skills, and particularly on those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The research covers three areas of the UK with varying levels of unemployment. It explores the availability of jobs and the number of jobseek...

Welfare to work policy in Great Britain has traditionally been planned centrally to ensure even application across areas. More recently questions have been raised about the ability of such a system to address the requirements of those workless people with the most complex and severe needs. Accordingly attempts have been made to enhance local decisi...

This article explores the impact of low population density and transport constraints on skills development and the take up of learning and training opportunities in a rural area of eastern England. It draws on analyses of secondary data sources, qualitative interviews and a focus group discussion with employers, trainers and other actors in the lab...

GREEN A. E. and ORTON M. Policy innovation in a fragmented and complex multilevel governance context: worklessness and the City Strategy in Great Britain, Regional Studies. This paper examines whether innovative policy development within fragmented and complex multilevel governance frameworks provides a paradox in that fragmentation and complexity...

The rising interest in children’s and young people’s geographies in recent years has led to broader and deeper insights being made into their lives. These insights have further unravelled the complex meanings, frameworks, identities and subjective relationships that children and young people have in relation to place and space (see James, 1990; Mat...

The paper analyses the work-related spatial mobility intentions of incapacity benefit (IB) claimants in Northern Ireland using a new survey dataset. Greater understanding of the prospective mobility of benefit claimants contributes to debates about employability, inclusion in the labour market and arguments about spatial mismatch. The analysis find...

This paper aims to provide insights into the recruitment and retention issues faced by employers in rural areas. To this end, information gathered through interviews with employers and labour market intermediaries in the predominantly rural county of Lincolnshire, UK was used as a source of data and focal point to discuss the demand side of the lab...

Drawing on case study evidence from three deprived urban neighbourhoods in England, this paper explores the influence of social networks and attachment to place on young people's access to training and employment opportunities. The findings presented contribute to the emerging literature which highlights the importance that place-based social netwo...

This policy review of vocational education and training in the West Midlands, United Kingdom was prepared within the framework of the OECD LEED project, "Leveraging Training and Skills Development in SMEs". The report identifies ways of overcoming some of the barriers to workforce development in SMEs.

Geographical unevenness in labour market and social conditions is one reason why the ‘local’ has been emphasised increasingly in the delivery of labour market policy in the UK. This article explores the extent to which there are local differences in labour market conditions using the characteristics and experiences of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claima...

The aspiration of creating sustainable communities has been an important part of the UK government's agenda over the past decade, with the role for planning and other professions involved in place-making changing to include expectations of greater consultation and involvement of communities in decision-making. To date, most attention has been given...