Rochdale fares badly in the 2015 Cities Outlook report

The Centre for Cities’ 2015 Cities Outlook report shows the gap between Britain’s best and worst performing cities*, and Rochdale fares particularly badly.

Looking over a 10-year period from 2004 to 2013 – which allows an analysis of longer term trends rather than year-to-year fluctuations - Rochdale ranked lower than all but Gloucester for jobs growth with 12.2% fewer jobs, and jobs in the private sector fell by 12.7%.

However, the growth in manufacturing jobs has been a success story for Rochdale over the decade with a 15.6% increase putting Rochdale in the top ten.

Rochdale also fares badly in the employment stakes with one of the lowest employment rates, 62.8%, a ranking of 60th with employment decreasing by 0.6% in the past year.

Rochdale had the biggest change in its public to private ratio from 2012, with 13 per cent of its public sector jobs lost in 2013, bringing it in line with the national average of 2.7 private sector jobs to every public sector job.

Skills levels are a key component of the success of a city economy. Those cities that have a higher proportion of graduates tend to have stronger economies than those that have a large number of people with no formal qualifications.

Rochdale is amongst the 10 with the lowest percentage of high qualifications and also in the 10 with the highest percentage with no formal qualifications.

Workforce earnings reflect the types of jobs available in cities. Those cities that have higher wages are likely to have a greater number of high-skilled jobs than those that do not, and Rochdale ranks in the 10 with the lowest weekly earnings.

However, the JSA claimant count in Rochdale has decreased by 0.9% since 2008.  

• Rochdale statistics at a glance...

In response to the report, Rochdale Council strongly refutes the figures on jobs and cites some of the employment successes over the last 24 months.

The leader of Rochdale Council, Councillor Richard Farnell criticised the report as “wholly misleading” and said: “The picture of Rochdale painted by the bare numbers in this report is not one that we in the town recognise.

“Over the last two years Rochdale has received unprecedented levels of public investment in major infrastructure projects such as Metrolink, a new transport interchange and our flagship customer services centre, council building and library, Number One Riverside, which is officially the best public building in the UK.

“Private investment has followed and far from being in decline Rochdale is on the rise.

“In the last 12 months 27 companies moved into the Borough and more than 100 of our businesses enjoyed expansion in excess of 5% in the last two years – five companies increasing staffing by more than 600. Those are big numbers.

“The textile sector is having a renaissance in the borough and 15 companies have successfully bid for grants totalling more than £10m.

“We fully understand the importance of job creation and are the only town in Greater Manchester to have our own Development Agency, which has worked hard to successfully attract new companies and create new opportunities for growth.

“The report compares us to cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds but against other similar towns we are punching well above our weight and delivering huge successes.”

* The analysis undertaken in Cities Outlook compares cities’ Primary Urban Areas (PUAs) – a measure of the built-up areas of a city, rather than individual local authority districts.

A PUA is the city-level definition used in the Department for Communities and Local Government’s State of the Cities Report. It is said to be useful as a consistent measure to compare 'cities' across the country and has been used since the first edition of Cities Outlook in 2008.

The 'cities' compared: 

• Aldershot 
• Aberdeen 
• Barnsley
• Belfast
• Birkenhead
• Birmingham
• Blackburn
• Blackpool
• Bolton
• Bournemouth
• Bradford
• Brighton
• Bristol
• Burnley
• Cambridge
• Cardiff
• Chatham
• Coventry
• Crawley
• Derby
• Doncaster
• Dundee
• Edinburgh
• Glasgow
• Gloucester
• Grimsby
• Huddersfield
• Hull
• Ipswich
• Leeds
• Leicester 
• Liverpool
• London
• Luton
• Manchester 
• Mansfield
• Middlesbrough
• Milton Keynes
• Newcastle
• Newport
• Northampton 
• Nottingham
• Norwich
• Oxford
• Peterborough
• Plymouth
• Portsmouth
• Preston
• Reading
• Rochdale
• Sheffield
• Stoke
• Sunderland 
• Swansea
• Southampton
• Southend
• Swindon
• Telford
• Wakefield
• Warrington 
• Wigan
• Worthing 
• York

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