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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 2011 Travel to Work Areas 1991 TTWAs = 308 2001 TTWAs = 243
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2018

5. DEGURBA classification

6. DEGURBA classification

7. 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…

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

9. 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

10. 2011 Census statistics for Urban and Rural – E&W
Number of LSOAs
% of LSOAs
Workplace population
16-74
% Workplace population
Economically Active 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

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