National policies, local people

A primary aim of the GELLM research programme was to uncover, through secondary analysis of official statistics at the local level, a truer picture of women's and men's situations in the labour market in England. Earlier work in this field showed that central government often relied on national level analysis to assess men's and women's position in the labour market and to set the level of any employment targets, despite the fact that much implementation of labour market policy falls to local and regional agencies (Bruegel, 2000; DWP, 2007). The European Union had already set an overall employment target of 60% for women by 2010 (EU, 2004), while in the UK the government had decided to strive for an 80% overall employment rate. In practice, most labour market policies have tended to be assessed and monitored using national indicators, with little attention given to local-level data unless particular problems are identified in a locality or region.

Despite this, implementation of labour market policies occurs, in reality, primarily at the local level, through the activities and interventions of local councils, local agencies and local employers. It falls to local Jobcentre Plus offices to implement national programmes such as the New Deal programmes that support people from welfare into work and, together with local employment and recruitment agencies and local employers, fill local vacancies that meet national employment targets.

In implementing labour market policy at sub-national level, agencies have frequently relied on local labour market assessments, such as those commissioned by the Training and Enterprise Councils in the early 1990s, even though this work rarely used the detailed gender-disaggregated data available, or considered its significance and implications (Escott and Buckner, 2005). A substantial body of academic work exploring employment and labour market issues at the regional level has been undertaken too, but very little of this analysis had been disaggregated by gender. The GELLM research programme was in part inspired by work for the Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber to prepare for the ‘gender mainstreaming’ required by European Structural Funds regulations.