The UK economy has suffered through two deep recessions over the last decade and, as a consequence, its productive structure has undergone a major transformation. The most visible consequences of these events include two waves of large scale job shedding (with profoundly different regional impacts) accompanied by persistently high unemployment throughout the 1980s and early-1990s. This time period has also seen steeply rising small and large firm failure rates, a major reshuffling in the ownership of many businesses, severe imbalances between the supply of and demand for certain types of skills exacerbated by regional immobilities in labour, a crisis of consumer confidence coupled with a reluctance by consumers to take on (or add to) their long-term debt, and a general decline in the authority and confidence with which demand management policies have been pursued.