Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme

Abstract

Public policies are inherently spatial in nature yet their geographical dimensions remain frequently underdeveloped and marginalised in policy practice and scholarship. This paper reflects critically on these common spatial blind spots, using as its case study example the UK's Work Programme employment support policy. Whilst social 'creaming' (i.e. deliberate prioritisation) and 'parking' (i.e. deliberate neglect) by providers of differently placed service users within public policies is widely acknowledged and researched, this paper introduces to the literature equivalent but neglected risks around spatial creaming and parking of differently positioned local areas. The paper's framing identifies that the Work Programme's particular treatment of place exposes areas to high risks of spatial creaming and parking. Building on these critical spatial foundations, the paper moves on to present sophisticated statistical analyses of official and comprehensive Work Programme data. These original analyses demonstrate systematic spatial inequality in outcomes and financial resource that are at the expense of already more deprived geographies and that are consistent with our spatial creaming and parking hypotheses. The paper highlights the need to consider more fully the role of place within public policy practice and scholarship.

Re‐placing welfare neoliberalism: The neglected role of geography in neoliberal public policies

“…Further, the empirical analyses further seek to speak for the first time in the literature to the new conceptual hypothesis of spatial creaming and parking recently introduced to the literature (Whitworth, 2020). Specifically, they ask whether any of these evidenced systematic spatial inequalities in outcomes may be partly attributable to deliberate provider behaviours to prioritise less challenging local geographical contexts and conversely to neglect more challenging local contexts.…”

“…A final desire in these analyses is to explore for the first time in the literature whether those geographical inequalities in outcomes appear to be driven by geographically contingent behaviours of spatial creaming and parking by providers. This concept of spatial creaming and parking and its conceptual logic and possibility have only recently been introduced to the literature (Whitworth, 2020) alongside the more commonly researched phenomenon of social creaming and parking, and as yet have never been examined empirically.…”

“…Although important, this focus on social inequalities in the outcomes and experiences of different types of service users within neoliberal activation policies has not been accompanied by similar attention to the equivalent spatial risks and possibilities. These geographic blind spots are surprising given that the logics, risks, and incentives understood to drive these social inequalities apply equally in a spatial sense across different types of geographical localities (Whitworth, 2020) and that they neglect calls for broader geographically rooted concepts of employability (McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005). They are also surprising given previous international evidence from neoliberal activation schemes of the 1990s and 2000s that less buoyant local labour markets show consistently weaker outcomes performance – and vice versa – in such interventions (Martin & Morrison, 2003), including in the present article’s UK case study context (Sunley et al, 2006; Theodore, 2007; Turok & Webster, 1998).…”

Labour market policies on a sub-national level

“…Employment rates remained high during the 1970s and 1980s due to the expansion of the public sector. The private sector did not expand as rapidly however (Weiss 1998;Erixon 2010). In the 1980s, the rates of social assistance begun to rise.…”

An Investigation of the Impact and Resilience of British High Streets Following the COVID-19 Lockdown Restrictions

“…That said, a national measure of resilience is a useful tool for planning since it enables a baseline for comparison between areas that can be used to benchmark successes and failures. It can also reveal the differences in high streets’ ability to withstand external shocks, which are often driven by the geographical contexts in which they are operating, a factor that can be overlooked in policy strategies (Whitworth, 2021 ).…”