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Rural Work Travel
The Census of Population Work Travel data are our most important source of comprehensive and comparable information on the extent and nature of the interaction of rural with urban and rural with rural areas. They therefore constitute a key indirect source of information on the employment sources of rural household incomes, job opportunities and rural productivity (Defra, Productivity in Rural England, 2005).
However, up until now we have been able to analyse broad rural/urban and urban/rural flows of work journeys much more easily than rural/rural flows, with the consequence that our understanding of the way that rural England is articulated in employment terms has been partial, if not biased.
This project has two innovative elements:
- it will analyse Census 2001 Work Travel within the context of the new ‘spectrum’ definition of rural settlements that includes an indicator of ‘sparsity’ as well as a hierarchy of rural settlement types. This will be combined with the structure of urban settlement identified for the local authority classification,
- it will include, within the rural urban settlement framework, an analysis of changes in work travel between 1981 and 2001 to give an indication of the travel impacts of rural social and economic development. The results will be reported in a series of short notes and case studies that will form the basis of seminars with Defra officers.