Newcastle upon Tyne A simple model for the City: Population, Housing, Employment and Poverty Sub-title Driving the Local Area Agreement- Work in progress

Key Objectives  1.Understand the City.  2.Measure interactions.  3.Ask “What if”……. We need a stronger, more coherent evidence base for the Local Area Agreement.

Importance of the issue “Life in my neighbourhood has gone downhill since it became student dominated. I feel that the council is deliberately ignoring the problems to residents when a community becomes dominated by students. We can either find a way of integrating the two groups or we can create ghetto communities.”

Current reasons  Firstly, to understand the City, getting a handle on the interactions between the various measures and issues.  Links to 200 national indicators (NIxyz).  Does creating more houses, even in they are ‘affordable’, increase the population or simply move people around?

Other questions we can start to answer  What will be the impact of raising over, the next decade, on the number of jobs required, of the female retirement age, to 65?

Immediate issues  No district is an island on these issues.  Clearly, we are affected by what goes on internationally, nationally, regionally and in neighbouring authorities, e.g. house building outside the City.  Additionally, we cannot ignore the local relationships and the possibly complex nature of these interactions.

Population and change (1)  What population & age/sex structure do we expect to have?  Do we agree with ONS’s projections?  What will be the impact of these changes?  Do we expect any change in population to be in ‘communal establishments’ or in ‘private households’?  This will, affect the number of dwellings that we need to build.

Population and change (2)  Migration – Ins and Outs – biggest, but most unreliable component of change.  Births exceed deaths, so, naturally, the population is growing.  As is well-known, population is, overall, however, expected to get older with issues for healthy life expectancy; those aged 75+ increase from, in 2006, 20,700 to 28,300 in (NI137).

Age structure and general issues  Young – School population projections, leading to N.E.E.T. (NI117).  Working age – jobs, unemployment and benefits. (NI116, NI152 & NI153).  The “Young – Old” – to keep active.  The “Old – Old” – care requirements – dementia and rising national costs.

Definition matters  Comparing current JSA definitions. a) TWRI use Economically Active (EA). b) NOMIS use for the denominator Working Age (WA).  Both have problems, but changing student numbers affects the second but not the first.

Interrelationships of 3 NI indicators  NI116 (Children), NI152 (City-wide) & NI153 (Poorer areas) are clearly inter-related.  If we can tackle NI116 & NI153, by working with those in poorer areas, with children, into jobs, then we are improving all 3.  Conversely, if we were only to tackle those who live alone in the more affluent areas, then we are only improving NI152.

Jobs required (1)  How many new jobs are required if we want to expand the population by in- migration of adults of Working Age?  Will we find an increase in the number of young people in this inward migration? Will there be jobs for them?  Will the down-turn disproportionately affect young people? By how much and when?

Jobs required (2)  What percentage of jobs created will be taken up by those who live in the City?  What kinds of jobs are required? If we can create ‘high-spec’ jobs, will these be taken up by people who live outside the City? If so, the impact on the City’s economy would be limited (but not zero); would this encourage extra in-commuting with, possibly, further traffic congestion?  We are looking for a source of this information and related implications.

Health issues  An ageing population generally leads to more health issues. (NI120a & NI120b).  Is it right to assume, that unless we can make significant health progress, that the same proportion of the elderly (e.g. those aged 80 to 84) will suffer from dementia as at present? Could it be higher? What are the knock-on effects for resource re-allocation?

Residential properties  If the population expands how many new dwellings are required? Put another way, what do we assume about household headship rates of this new population?  How many affordable homes do we need? (NI155)  What are we demolishing/ renovating/building? (NI154 & NI158)  What should be the size of new build?  Does this meet our needs or the needs builders?

Conclusions  We would want the model to be interactive and to be able to ask “What if?”.  We have made some progress, by getting some of the data in the same place.  We must be able to update the results regularly when new data arises, e.g. JSA.  We can do some of this analysis, but it is not joined up.  We need to work with partners.