UK Labour Market Areas and Rural Urban Characteristics Andy Bates Office for National Statistics

Outline Overview of TTWAs - UK equivalent to LMAs Rural Urban commuting characteristics DEGURBA England & Wales LSOA Rural Urban Classification Reconciling R code and Fortran code Consideration of building blocks for LMAs

UK Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) TTWAs became the official British definition of local labour market areas in the 1960s, although their predecessors go further back in time Following each national census from the 1971 Census, TTWAs have been defined using commuting flow data for workers based on their area of residence and workplace Long standing working relationship with Newcastle University for them to produce TTWAs from 1981 TTWAs onwards Updated 2011 UK TTWAs published in 2015

2011 Travel to Work Areas 1991 TTWAs = 308 2001 TTWAs = 243 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2018

DEGURBA classification

DEGURBA classification

LAU2 Characteristics LAU2 geography issues DEGURBA Classification Number of LAU2s Percentage of LAU2s Cities 3,845 37.2 Towns and suburbs 3,919 37.9 Rural 2,573 24.9 Total 10,337 100.0 LAU2 geography issues In UK, LAU2 = wards DEGURBA classification based on 2014 ward boundaries Census statistics are based on 2011 Census ward boundaries Cannot easily match resident and workplace statistics from 2011 Census with DEGURBA 2014 boundaries (though possible) To undertake analysis of rural urban commuting, a different approach is needed…

DEGURBA and E&W Rural Urban Classification LAU2 (2014) LSOA (2011)

Rural Urban Classification and TTWAs UK = 228 England and Wales = 173 9 TTWAs in England and Wales contain no Urban LSOAs TTWAs covering England and Wales: 173

2011 Census statistics for Urban and Rural – E&W Number of LSOAs % of LSOAs Workplace population 16-74 % Workplace population Economically Active 16-74 in Employment (residence based) % Economically Active Urban 28,549 82.4 22.3m 84.3 20.7m 81.4 Rural 6,204 17.6 4.1m 15.7 4.7m 18.6 Total 34,753 100.0 26.4m 25.4m LSOAs designed to have population 1,000 to 3,000 (av. 1,700) Discrepancy in totals for workplace and economically active pop. Urban workplace population > Urban resident workers Rural workplace population < Rural resident workers

Rural Urban Commuting Flows for LSOAs – E&W Workplace* Number of workers % of all workers Residence Rural Rural – work at home 0.8m 18.5 Rural – work in Rural area 1.4m 32.1 Rural – work in Urban area 2.2m 49.4 Total 4.5m 100.0 Urban Urban – work at home 1.9m 9.8 Urban – work in Urban area 16.5m 82.7 Urban – work in Rural area 1.5m 7.5 19.9m * Excludes workers stating no fixed workplace, working elsewhere in the UK, outside the UK or at offshore gas installation Higher proportion of home workers in Rural areas than Urban areas Nearly half of all workers living in a Rural LSOA commute to an Urban LSOA (2.2m) 7.5% of workers living in an Urban LSOA commute to a Rural LSOA (1.5m) Net flow of 731,000 workers commuting from Rural areas to Urban areas Highlights the attraction of working in an Urban area and living in a Rural area

Creation of LMAs (2 versions) & TTWAs Building block geography SOAs Lower Layer SOAs (England & Wales) Data Zones (Scotland) Super Output Areas (Northern Ireland) LAU2 (wards) No. of areas in building block geography 42,619 10,192 Mean population 1,551 6,415 Parameters min size = 3,500 target size = 25,000 min self containment = 66.7% target self containment = 75.0% Code used R v2 Fortran R v1 Number of areas 49 228 99 By way of further comparison, in Italy there are 611 LMAs

Resolving the differences Using the same parameters, we get 49 LMAs and 228 TTWAs Investigation into these differences has been undertaken by Istat using UK commuting flow data Istat identified interpretational differences for the method resulting in different R code implementation for the reserve list part for proto TTWAs Further work being done by Istat to create an alternative version of the R code which more closely matches the intended application of the method used to create TTWAs

Consideration of building block size for creating LMAs To consider: are there better statistical building blocks than LAU2?

Could grid squares be the answer? Mid-2006 Population Estimates by 1km grid