Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy (2021) 14:135–152

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-020-09349-0

Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK

Work Programme

A. Whitworth 1
Received: 22 August 2019 / Accepted: 21 June 2020 /
Published online: 14 July 2020
# The Author(s) 2020

Abstract
Public policies are inherently spatial in nature yet their geographical dimensions remain
frequently underdeveloped and marginalised in policy practice and scholarship. This
paper reflects critically on these common spatial blind spots, using as its case study
example the UK’s Work Programme employment support policy. Whilst social
‘creaming’ (i.e. deliberate prioritisation) and ‘parking’ (i.e. deliberate neglect) by
providers of differently placed service users within public policies is widely acknowl-
edged and researched, this paper introduces to the literature equivalent but neglected
risks around spatial creaming and parking of differently positioned local areas. The
paper’s framing identifies that the Work Programme’s particular treatment of place
exposes areas to high risks of spatial creaming and parking. Building on these critical
spatial foundations, the paper moves on to present sophisticated statistical analyses of
official and comprehensive Work Programme data. These original analyses demon-
strate systematic spatial inequality in outcomes and financial resource that are at the
expense of already more deprived geographies and that are consistent with our spatial
creaming and parking hypotheses. The paper highlights the need to consider more fully
the role of place within public policy practice and scholarship.

Keywords Spatial inequality . Creaming and parking . Outcomes-based commissioning .

Employment support . Activation . Spatial public policy

The Neglected Spatialities of Public Policy Scholarship and Practice

Though sometimes overlooked, public policies are inherently spatial in nature. Policy
thinking – its goals, norms, approaches and outcomes – take on distinctive (Esping-
Andersen 1990; Arts and Gelissen 2002) and path-dependent (Pierson 1994, 2004)

* A. Whitworth
[email protected]

1
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter St, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S10
2TN, UK
136 A. Whitworth

forms across different welfare contexts. So too do policy practices and the allocation of
policy responsibilities across tiers of government (van Berkel et al. 2011; Peters and
Pierre 2016), with powers waxing and waning between scales as policy makers seek
alternative spatial solutions to new problems and priorities as they emerge (van Berkel
et al. 2011). Places are also themselves frequently the object of policy interventions,
and social policy interventions are always experienced by service users and frontline
practitioners in, by and through the social, cultural, economic and political contexts in
which they are embedded and interact (Skinner 2005; McKenzie 2015).
Public policy scholarship too is similarly enriched by a range of debates that are
inherently geographical in nature. Global and comparative social policy research, for
example, reflect vibrant sub-disciplinary fields of enquiry (Wood and Gough 2006;
Yeates 2014), drawing out deeper understandings about policy options, dependencies
and implications. Indeed, an entire sub-literature has emerged in this vein around
welfare typologies (Esping-Andersen 1990; Arts and Gelissen 2002; Powell and
Barrientos 2015) as well as around the circulatory transfer of policy ideas around
cross-national learning networks (Peck and Theodore 2012; Obinger et al., 2012). At
the level of communities and service users geography can again be seen to flow through
social policy scholarship. Spatial research has also illuminated understandings of
neighbourhood effects (van Ham et al. 2011) as well as the importance of spatial
rhythms, journeys and external environments in shaping policy effectiveness and wider
social outcomes (Wiles and Costello 2000; Skinner 2005).
However, at the same time spatial considerations occupy a peripheral place amongst
policy debates and scholarship in key ways, partitioned off into discrete debates and
particular sub-disciplinary fields rather than flowing through mainstream academic
debates and policy practices. Conceptually, for instance, a rich seam of geography
scholarship focuses on alternative conceptualisations of what space is and might be
(Crang and Thrift 2000; Hubbard et al. 2002; Harvey 2006; Jessop et al. 2008; Jones
2009). This conceptual geographical richness has the potential to enhance social policy
scholarship and practice but remains neglected by a partial and limited absolute view of
space as boundaries on maps defining passive spatial containers to be filled up with
objects (Whitworth 2019). Causally, policy interventions that are at heart seeking to
tackle policy problems driven by spatial processes are frequently designed aspatially,
undercutting their appropriateness and effectiveness (Massey 2001). Methodologically,
a series of explicitly spatial techniques including quantitative and qualitative GIS as
well as spatial statistics are routinely ignored in policy scholarship and practice, despite
their ability to better understand many processes and outcomes of policy interest
(Orford and Webb 2019; Harris 2019). And analytically, key spatial perspectives
around geographical impacts, inequalities and clusterings are frequently overlooked
within policy analyses that favour (albeit important) attention to outcomes across social
groups or at geographically vast national or regional levels that conceal the majority of
the spatial story within them.
Whether by absence, partiality or design, those spatial blind spots in scholarship and
practice have material impacts on the ways in which policies are designed, implement-
ed, experienced and impact. Geography shapes the areas that contracts cover and the
spatial edges within which providers’ services will be bounded and separated. In doing
so geography importantly shapes the units at which performance will be measured,
monitored and managed by commissioners and creates behavioural incentives for
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 137

providers to act in particular ways (and not act in other ways). Crucially, these spatial
decisions and impacts take place within processes of policy design and implementation
irrespective of whether they are actively considered and taken explicitly or, rather,
occur implicitly by default due to the neglect or partiality of geography and its
implications.
In this context the present article introduces to the academic literature the notion of
spatial creaming and parking. A body of international research evidence has raised
consistent fears that in lightly regulated outcomes-based interventions (especially for-
profit) providers respond to financial pressures and incentives by ‘creaming’ (i.e.
deliberately prioritising) participants closer to the labour market whilst ‘parking’ (i.e.
deliberately neglecting) those farthest from the labour market (Struyven and Steurs,
2007; Bredgaard and Larsen 2008; Considine et al. 2011; de Graaf and Sirovatka
2012). The logic to park such service users is that they have more complex (and
expensive) support needs and are considered less likely by the provider to achieve
payable employment outcomes, and the inverse with respect to creaming.
In contrast to this dominant discourse, we suggest that this current understanding of
creaming and parking within the current academic literature and policy debate is
conceptually and empirically partial in its form and specificity, pushing from view
equivalent geographical risks and, potentially, geographical processes and outcomes.
For although important to reveal, the current fixation with social creaming and parking
alone has been accompanied by a neglect of the equivalent geographical risks and
incentives around what we term spatial creaming and parking both as concept and in
terms of empirical research. This neglect of geography is particularly surprising in the
field of employment activation given its international experimentation with outcomes-
based commissioning and calls in the literature for broader geographically rooted
concepts of employability (McQuaid et al. 2005; McQuaid and Lindsay 2005) and
consistent evidence that geographic context matters for employment outcomes (Turok
and Webster 1998; Sunley et al. 2006; Theodore 2007).
It is this relationship between local labour market context and the likelihood of job
outcomes (and hence outcome payments) in activation programmes that are at the heart
of our spatial creaming and parking hypothesis. In the social creaming and parking
scenario it is the systematically varying costs of support and likelihoods of payable
employment outcomes or performance targets across differently positioned service
users that are key to provider’s incentives to cream and park different individuals.
The corollary in our spatial creaming and parking hypothesis is instead their systematic
variation across more and less economically buoyant local labour market contexts that
shape equivalent risks and incentives for providers to cream and park different local
geographies. Specifically, it is hypothesised that in less deprived local areas where job
opportunities (and hence the likelihoods of payable outcomes and/or performance
targets) are strongest providers face an incentive to focus their energies and resources
(spatial creaming). Conversely, it is hypothesised that in more deprived local areas
where job opportunities (and hence the likelihoods of payable outcomes and/or perfor-
mance targets) are weakest providers face an incentive to deprioritise their energies and
resources (spatial parking).
Taking as its case study example the UK’s recent large-scale and aggressively quasi-
marketised Work Programme employment support programme, the remainder of this
article shines a rare empirical spotlight on the spatial creaming and parking hypothesis
138 A. Whitworth

in terms of the presence and extent of programme outcomes patterned systematically by

local labour market context. To provide policy context for the later empirical analyses
the next section begins by outlining the nature of the Work Programme case study and
its particular spatialities.

The Particular Place of Place in the UK Work Programme

Implemented in 2011 and ceasing new referrals in 2018, the UK’s Work Programme is
a large scale vanguard experiment in aggressively quasi-marketized employment
support. Work Programme has worked with around 2 million unemployed individuals
since 2011 at a total cost of around £3 billion (DWP 2012). Work Programme delivery
is structured geographically into 18 national/regional Contract Package Areas (CPAs)
across England, Scotland and Wales and each CPA contains two or three large well-
capitalized ‘Prime’ providers who can deliver services themselves and/or sub-contract
delivery through supply chains of sub-prime organisations. These CPAs are geograph-
ically large – all of Scotland is a single CPA for example – and CPAs represent the key
geographical scale of Work Programme. CPAs are the geography at which commis-
sioning and contracting took place, across which providers are required to build
delivery networks and offer provision, and at which performance data are aggregated,
monitored and utilized for the performance management of providers by the Depart-
ment for Work and Pensions (DWP) central government commissioner.
Despite their centrality to the policy, however, the rationale for the choice of CPA as
the key spatial scale within Work Programme has never been clearly articulated by
DWP. Indeed, the decision to build the programme around these large regional/national
CPAs spatial units faced fierce criticism from local authorities and third sector organi-
sations for being too detached from local contexts, priorities and services and too large
(financially and geographically) for third sector organisations (NCVO 2011; Taylor
et al. 2017). DWP’s documentation on Work Programme design and delivery arrange-
ments offers no rationale for the CPA geography. Instead, the earlier DWP-
commissioned Freud report setting out the blueprint for DWP’s commissioning strategy
suggests that the large geographies of these contract areas was intended to offer the
large financial scale “appropriate to attract major players from around the world”
(Freud 2007: 63). These providers were desired partly because they were felt by
government to be of sufficient financial scale to provide the cash flow and/or to arrange
the necessary private finance to bear the financial risk and payment delay of an
aggressively outcomes-based payment like Work Programme. Such large capitalised
providers were also argued to offer strong performance management and to minimise
the contract management requirements of DWP itself given the relatively small number
of large contracts that result. Interestingly, however, nowhere does the choice of CPAs
as the key programme geography of Work Programme relate to them as an internally
coherent or meaningful economic geography for the programme and nowhere do DWP
consider the risks or implications of this spatial policy decision.
Within the Work Programme design logic outcomes rather than process was the
mantra. This was in keeping with the responsible Minister’s belief in using welfare
markets to “unleash the creativity that a ‘black box’ approach to the Work Programme
can offer, rather than put providers in straightjackets” (Grayling 2010). Work
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 139

Programme deliberately offered extensive flexibility for providers over the type and
frequency of support for participants. Minimal prescription over delivery existed and
provider flexibility was enhanced further in practice by the combination of weak and
frequently unenforceable service guarantees alongside light monitoring and oversight
by the DWP below the aggregated Prime provider and CPA levels (Whitworth and
Carter, 2018). Instead, the key policy lever that the DWP relied on was an unusually
aggressive payment-by-results model that was heavily – and since 2014 entirely –
weighted towards payment for employment outcomes only (Whitworth and Carter
2018; Carter and Whitworth 2015).
DWP’s Work Programme design team were well aware of these risks and in response
designed a differential payment model with varying payment levels across nine payments
groups intended to proxy extent of support needs and distance to labour market. DWP’s
hope was that this differential payments model would incentive providers to work effectively
with all service users regardless of the complexity of their support needs. Unfortunately, this
differential payments model has been widely evidence to be an overly crude basis on which
to proxy distance to the labour market and, as a consequence, an ineffective basis on which
to calibrate provider incentives (Lane et al. 2013; WPSC 2013; Carter and Whitworth 2017).
Unsurprisingly given its weak performance levers (Whitworth and Carter 2018), Work
Programme’s live running was marred by constant political, media and academic evidence
of poor quality support and, particularly, seemingly endemic creaming and parking (Newton
et al. 2012; Lane et al. 2013; Meager et al. 2013; PAC 2013; WPSC 2013; Rees et al. 2014).
Such creaming and parking practices are problematic at an individual level because they
undermine the experiences and outcomes of already more disadvantaged service users.
However, they are also problematic at the policy level. Firstly, from a fiscal perspective they
undercut taxpayer value-for-money given that they imply that the DWP are systematically
overpaying for outcomes. This occurs because whilst payment levels are based on averages
of payment group characteristics the group in practice sees providers excluding service users
with more challenging support needs. Secondly, in terms of policy objectives creaming and
parking undermines DWP’s stated objective in Work Programme to reduce gaps in
performance outcomes between the easier- and harder-to-help groups and areas (DWP
2010).
Table 1 reflects critically on Work Programme’s key geographical features and
outlines the authors’ perceptions of the resultant high levels of risk around spatial
variability and parking that emerge from their particular configuration.
In order to offer rare empirical insights into these neglected possibilities for spatial
creaming and parking within such public policy designs the remainder of the article
presents original and comprehensive statistical analyses of the spatial variability in
Work Programme performance and its association with local labour market context.

Data and Methods

The analyses below are based on DWP’s official Work Programme statistics. These are
the official, validated and comprehensive data and are available publicly via DWP’s
StatXplore1 data portal. The data used include attachments (i.e. programme starts) as

1
https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/jsf/login.xhtml
140 A. Whitworth

Table 1 Work Programme’s key spatial features and resulting spatial risks

Work Programme’s spatial approach Resultant spatial risks

within CPAs

Political ownership and • Central government only High

accountability • CPAs map onto no meaningful political
entities
• No roles for local authorities
Policy design • Regional CPAs set as the key programme High
geography
• Key payment-by-results varies by user type
but not area type
• ‘Black box’ model, weak service guarantees
and oversight
Policy implementation • Central government only High
• Performance focus at regional CPA level only
• Aggregated, simplified data at local authority
level only

well as the two ways in which Work Programme outcomes are measured and paid:
initial job outcomes payments for successful transitions into employment and then
monthly sustainment payments for each further month that those jobs are sustained.
A question exists around how best to capture ‘performance’ given these multiple
outcome measures in play within the programme. The programme’s payment-by-
results structure itself provides the most complete and appropriate lens through which
to trace this mix of performance priorities. The empirical analyses below adopt this
holistic measure of performance and takes as its outcome measure average unit costs –
the average cash payment per service user – paid to providers in each local authority.
This figure is calculated for each local authority based on the service user volumes in
each area across each of the three elements of the payment profile – attachments, job
outcomes and job sustainments – multiplied by the published payment values associ-
ated with each in each year of the programme (DWP 2013:5). In order to ensure
comparability across areas this total cash payment value is divided by the number of
programme attachments in each local authority in order to give average unit costs. As
desired analytically, these earned average unit costs will vary across areas dependent
upon programme performance given Work Programme’s aggressve payment-by-results
model.
Although a single published ‘official’ payment profile exists (DWP 2013) in reality
Work Programme bidding and contract success was influenced by discounting from
providers below those published payment values during the commissioning process
(Inclusion 2011), though the extent of this discounting is not known publicly for
reasons of commercial confidentiality. The empirical analyses presented below are by
necessity based on the published payment profile rather than the commercially agreed
payment profile that providers will have actually received. This is not considered
unduly problematic for the later empirical analyses for two reasons however. Firstly
there are reasons of principle. The published prices that fed into the commissioning
process reflect DWP’s planned policy intention on the basis of their design modelling
rather than an unplanned set of commercial negotiations. Whilst DWP had worked
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 141

extensively (if, as noted above, largely unsuccesfully) to seek to mitigate social

creaming and parking in the payment model it is notable that there were no similar
attempts to mitigate equivalent risks of spatial creaming and parking explicitly in that
payment model or any other design features. By using the planned pricing profile
acceptable to the DWP design team the empirical analyses reveal what, if any,
neglected spatial implications result. Secondly there are reasons of practice. Where
discounting occurred to comparable extents across CPAs then the pricing levels will be
uniformly lower compared the published levels used in these empirical analyses.
However, even discounting would not introduce spatial variability – this paper’s key
empirical interest – and hence the overall message would remain, albeit at a somewhat
lower absolute level in terms of the average unit costs. There is reason to think that
relatively similar levels of discounting may have occurred. All CPA commisisoning
processes were highly competitive as all providers were keenly aware that these large
Work Programme contracts were to be by far the largest contracts over coming years in
the UK and that losing out would have serious financial and delivery implications for
their organisations.
The data used cover the period from programme launch in June 2011 up until the
end of December 2017, the latest date for which data are available. This covers the
duration of the programme’s referrals window and almost all of its delivery window.
Some further minor outcomes payments not captured here would be expected beyond
January 2018 but these would not affect the overall findings. The data analysed contain
1.9 million programme attachments. To maintain a clear focus the analyses concentrate
only the four main Work Programme payment groups that together contain 89% of the
total attachments over the period:
• Payment group 1: Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) recipients (and Universal Credit
(UC) equivalents) aged 18–24 years old. These unemployed individuals are deemed fit
to work by the DWP and make up 17% of these Work Programme attachments;
• Payment group 2: JSA recipients (and UC equivalents) aged 25 years and above.
This group makes up 43% of Work Programme attachments;
• Payment group 3: JSA (and UC equivalent) Early Entrants reflect a mixed group of
vulnerable benefit recipients, young people not in education, employment or training
(NEETs), and individuals experiencing cycling between work and benefits (22 of the
past 24 months have been in rceipt of benefits). This group comprises 17% of all
attachments;
• Payment group 6: New Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) recipients
(and UC equivalents) who are benefit recipients deemed by the DWP as not being fit
for work due to their health condition or disability unless specific health-related
supports are in place. This group makes up 12% of all attachments.

Results: Placing Work Programme Outcomes in their Context

To set the scene the left pane of Fig. 1 maps the eighteen key regional CPA geograph-
ical contract areas of the Work Programme. Inside each CPA are shown Britain’s
politically and administratively key local authority (municipality) geographies. These
are shaded in five equally sized quintiles according to a UK-wide harmonised Index of
Multiple Deprivation (Abel et al. 2016) taking account of all underlying domains in
142 A. Whitworth

Fig. 1 Work Programme regional CPA geography (left) and size (below)

order to provide economic context for the later discussion. The spatial patterns seen are
well known to those familiar with the economic geography of Great Britain. In light
yellow are the 20% wealthiest local authorities in Britain that concentrate around
London and its extended South East England commuter belt. In dark brown are the
20% most deprived local authorities centred around the former industrial areas of the
North, Midlands and south Wales whose traditional economies have declined since the
1970s and whose on-going reincarnation as new places and increasingly service based
economies has not yet fully recovered. To offer a sense of CPA’s physical and financial
size the right pane of Fig. 1 shows each CPA’s physical area (blue bars) and its total
number of Work Programme participants to Dec 2017. The nations of both Wales and
Scotland present single CPA areas in the programme with Scotland by far the largest
CPA territorially, providing particular challenges for its provider(s) in working with
such a large geography with many areas of low population density. In contrast, CPAs
containing major urban areas offer providers markedly smaller and denser CPAs but
with relatively similar expected volumes and financial values.
To start to explore the spatial inequality in performance across Work Programme
Fig. 2 presents the distributions of earned average unit costs for the four main payment
groups across the programme’s key CPA geographies. Immediately striking is that
earned average unit costs are around £600 lower across all CPAs for payment group six
– service users with formally recognised health conditions and disabilities. As noted
above, this payment group proved to be a source of continued disappointing perfor-
mance, user experiences and media and political attention for at least the first half of
Work Programme’s lifetime (WPSC 2013). Indeed, these earned average unit costs for
payment group six are around 60% of the level that DWP intended and desired to spend
on these service users (Inclusion 2014), with disappointing performance driving a
vicious cycle of iteratively decreasing payments and resources for these service users
within the programme. Payment group one (JSA 18–24) and payment group two (JSA
25+) show earned average unit costs around £1500 as a modal value across CPAs
whilst payment group three (JSA Early Entrants) shows earned average unit costs
somewhat higher at around £1850 as a modal value. Also notable in the case of all four
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 143

Fig. 2 Spatial variation in earned average unit costs across the CPA contract geographies

payment groups is the variability of earned average unit costs even at this high-level
CPA scale. This spread covers around £200 difference in earned average unit costs
across the highest and lowest CPA values for the same customer type for payment
groups one and six and up to a roughly £600 difference in earned average unit costs for
payment group 3. Hence, whilst geography does not feature strongly in Work Pro-
gramme design and analysis the degree of spatial variability in earned outcomes
certainly is material spatially.
To begin exploring empirically the neglected possibilities of spatial creaming and
parking Fig. 3 presents scatterplots of the association between multi-dimensional
deprivation and earned average unit costs at CPA level. Given the varying ranges in
earned average unit costs across the four payment groups scales are tailored to each
group and hence differ across the four charts. A clear and consistent set of visual
patterns emerges. In terms of the statistical evidence, the Pearson’s correlation coeffi-
cients are negative and moderately strong across all four payment groups indicating that
as CPA deprivation increases the earned average unit costs tend on average to decrease.
Although perhaps in contrast to the intuitive expectation that areas of greater need
would receive greater resource, this seemingly counter-intuitive resource targeting is of
course entirely in keeping with the pro-cyclical logic of payment-by-results policy
approaches in which policies deliver better outcomes in times and places of economic
buoyancy and with individuals needing least support. The inverse care law (Hart 1971)
– the commonly found ‘law’ whereby populations with greatest health need tend to be
least well served by health care systems – is by now well known in health policy
debates and seems to apply equally in this quasi-marketised employment support
policy.
Whilst those correlation coefficients summarise the general fit and covariance of
these data they do not offer an indication of the steepness of the slope across these
relationships. A series of bivariate linear regressions are therefore conducted to offer
144 A. Whitworth

Fig. 3 Deprivation against earned average unit costs across the CPA contract geographies

these slope estimates. The aim of these statistical analyses is to simply offer indicative
quantitative information about the substantive nature of these relationships and not to
over-reach around their substantive implications (given that no controls are used) or
their statistical significance (given the a priori expectation of detection challenges with
this limited CPA sample size)(Ziliak and McCloskey 2008). For three of the four
payment groups the resulting slope estimates suggest that for every one point increase
in the level of deprivation in the CPA the earned average unit cost tends on average to
fall by between 2.5 and 3.5 pounds sterling. With CPA deprivation scores varying
between 30 and 70 points this effect would compound as deprivation gaps between
wealthier and poorer CPAs grow. At the extremes of the deprivation range, for
example, the roughly 40 point would equate to an earned average unit cost per service
user between around £100 and £140 lower in the most deprived compared to the least
deprived CPA. For the JSA Early Entry payment group the relationship is notably
stronger and suggests that for every one point increase in the level of deprivation in the
CPA the earned average unit cost tends on average to fall by 7.35 pounds sterling. This
would equate to the most deprived CPA receiving around £300 less per Work
Programme participant as an earned average unit cost compared to that seen in the
least deprived CPA. For information, the presence of asterisks shows that in most cases
these statistical indicators are statistically significant at the 5% level despite the
inevitably small CPA sample size.
Stepping on from these results, in terms of evidence suggestive of spatial creaming
and parking these findings raise the question of whether tensions exist between
aggregate CPA performance and within-CPA spatial inequalities in performance. For
although statistical analyses such as these, however sophisticated, cannot prove
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 145

causality, if deliberate spatial creaming and parking were taking place by providers in
the chase for programmatically key headline CPA performance then one would expect
to find two further sets of findings. Firstly, one would expect to find a pattern of higher
inequality of performance across local authority areas within those CPAs alongside
higher levels of aggregate CPA performance. Secondly, one would in addition expect
to find that this underlying spatial inequality in constituent local authority performance
would itself be structured systematically according to area’s varying levels of economic
buoyancy that are differentially attractive to providers in terms of the framework of
geographical invectives at play in the programme.
To explore these questions Fig. 4 scatters each CPA’s earned average unit costs
against the standard deviation of their constituent local authority’s earned average unit
costs. Scales are again tailored to each payment group on these charts. Consistent with
the first expectation positive associations are seen between the two across all four
payment groups whereby as CPA performance increases the level of spatial inequality
in performance across smaller local authority geographies within those CPAs also tends
to increase. In terms of the statistical indicators, correlation coefficients are all positive
and are low to moderate in strength, highest for the New ESA payment group at +0.60.
Slope estimates are again all positive and range from 0.42 to a high of 1.04, though
noting that evidence of statistical significance at the 5% level is more limited. If taken,
however, such substantive relationships would imply that every additional pound in a
CPA’s earned average unit cost level tends on average to be associated with large
increases of between £0.42 and £1.04 in the standard deviation of the constituent local
authority’s earned average unit costs depending on the payment group.
Figure 5 moves on to the second expectation of whether that sub-CPA spatial
inequality is itself structured systematically according to local labour market context
in the way that would also be hypothesised in a spatial creaming and parking hypoth-
esis. Scales are again tailored to each payment group. Figure 5 shows that at the smaller
local authority level a clear and consistent negative association is indeed found between
deprivation and earned average unit costs across all four payment groups. Correlation
coefficients are consistently moderate in strength and the slope estimates suggest
somewhat stronger negative associations between the two than at the CPA scale, in
line with the tendency of aggregation to average out some of the subtlety in any set of
data. For three of the four payment groups these simple bivariate slope estimates
suggest a relationship whereby a single point increase in deprivation at the local
authority levels tends to associate with a five pound fall in the earned average unit
cost. With a range of around 90 points on the deprivation scale this would entail an
earned average unit cost in the most deprived local authority around £360 lower per
service user than in the least deprived local authority. The JSA Early Entry payment
group shows a somewhat larger slope estimate of −8.95 and this would equate to a
difference in earned average unit costs of around £800 per service user between the
most and least deprived local authority. The detection of statistical significance is
inevitably simpler with this larger local authority sample size and all findings are
statistically significant at the 5% level, as denoted by the asterisks.
It is clear from Fig. 5 that the relationship between earned average unit cost and local
authority deprivation is downward sloping and with the slope being a function of the
payment group. In this scenario formal statistical models can be utilised to test the
paper’s stated hypotheses formally and examine the effects of these key factors of
146 A. Whitworth

Fig. 4 Aggregate CPA performance against within-CPA spatial inequality in performance

Fig. 5 Deprivation against earned average unit costs across constituent local authority areas
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 147

interest on the earned average unit costs of each payment group across local authorities.
Given that the data are hierarchically structured in nature – payment groups (level 1)
nested inside local authorities (level 2) themselves nested inside contract package areas
(level 3) – a three-level multilevel regression structure is explored and found in the
likelihood ratio test to be a statistically superior fit to the data than the standard single
level specification. This three-level multilevel linear model is therefore fitted with the
‘mixed’ command in Stata 16 with 1494 observations in all models.
Table 2 presents the results from these models, gradually building up their specifi-
cation to explore the interplay between explanatory variables in their associations with
the earned average unit costs.
Model 1 presents the simplest specification including only payment groups and the
local authority harmonised Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score. Controlling for
deprivation, the JSA Early Entry group shows markedly higher earned average unit
costs and the New ESA payment groups markedly lower earned average unit costs
compared to the reference category of JSA 18–24, whilst the JSA 25+ payment group
shows only slightly higher average unit costs than this reference group. The negative
association between deprivation and earned average unit costs is statistically significant
and estimated as equating on average to a £5.40 fall in earned average unit costs for
every one point increase on the IMD scale, controlling for payment group.
Model 2 widens the scope of the analysis to include the potential for spatial spillover
effects between local authority areas. This recognises the geographical possibility that
local authority outcomes in public policies such as Work Programme may well be
embedded within and affected by the wider regional contexts in which they are situated
and interconnected. An on-going estimation challenge for multilevel models with
spatial effects is the potential for bias in the estimated coefficients (Corrado and
Fingleton, 2011). This estimation problem remains but any adjustment for endogeneity
bias in unlikely to affect the findings materially. As such, Model 2 introduces a spatial
lag of the earned average unit cost outcome variable calculated across first-order
contiguous local authorities based on Queen’s continuity. The findings for this spatial

Table 2 Modelling the local authority earned average unit costs

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Constant 1835.8** 990.2** 1004.9**

Payment group (Ref = JSA 18–24) JSA 25+ 31.2** 13.9 9.4
JSA Early Entry 361.5** 161.4** 317.7**
New ESA −522.3** −250.3** −264.3**
Local labour market context Harmonised IMD score −5.4** −5.0** −4.25**
(0–100 scale)
Spatial connectivity Spatial lag of earned average 0.52** 0.49**
unit cost
Interaction effect payment group & JSA25 + *IMD 0.1
deprivation JSA Early Entry*IMD −3.1**
New ESA*IMD −0.04

Note: ** denotes statistical significance at the 1% level or below; * denotes statistical significance at the 5%
level or below
148 A. Whitworth

lag variable serve to evidence the relevance of the wider regional context to Work
Programme’s local authority outcomes. Controlling for the other factors in Model 2, for
each £1 increase in the value of the spatial lag of the outcome there is a tendency on
average for a £0.52 increase in the earned average unit cost in the local authority. There
is, in other words, evidence of strong and positively correlated spatial clustering of local
authority earned average unit costs, even having taken account of deprivation and
payment group composition in local authorities. Across the remaining variables in
Model 2 the payment group dummies show marked changes in their effects once the
spatial lag of the outcome is introduced. For both the JSA Early Entry and New ESA
payment groups effects remain statistically significant and in the same direction but are
roughly halved in their size. For the JSA 25+ payment group there no longer remains
statistically significance evidence of any difference in earned average unit cots com-
pared to the JSA 18–24 reference group. In contrast, the effect of local authority
deprivation reduces only slightly in size and remains statistically significant.
Finally, Model 3 introduces an interaction effect between payment group and
local authority deprivation in order to explore the possibility that the effect of
deprivation varies by payment group. Only the negative interaction effect relating
to the JSA Early Entry group is statistically significant. This highlights that for the
JSA Early Entry group the earned average unit costs are markedly more sensitive
to the level of deprivation locally (estimated to be −7.35**) compared to the
negative association between local authority deprivation and earned average unit
costs found more generally across all other payment groups (estimated at
−4.25**). Unlike earlier models, with an interaction effect present the main effects
relating to deprivation and payment groups now show estimated effects when the
value of the other variable in the interaction equals zero. Given that their interac-
tion effects are statistically insignificant the main effects for the JSA 25+ and New
ESA payment groups unsurprisingly remain relatively stable. The main effect for
the JSA Early Entry payment group is notably larger than in Model 2 however.
Compared to Model 2 without the interaction effect, this conveys a picture
whereby at lower levels of deprivation the estimated earned average unit cost
for the JSA Early Entry to be notably higher but then slopes drops more steeply as
the level of local authority deprivation increases.

Discussion

The present paper has argued that whilst public policies are inherently spatial in nature
their geographical dimensions are too often underdeveloped or pushed to the margins
of policy practice and scholarship. The analyses here outline the deleterious conse-
quences of these spatial policy blinkers for the perpetuation of existing spatial inequal-
ities and highlight the need for deliberate and critically reflective geographical thinking
within mainstream policy practice and scholarship.
The article’s conceptual framing introduces for the first time in the literature to our
knowledge the notion of spatial creaming and parking, a neglected but equivalent form
of creaming and parking to its customary social conceptualisation. The conceptual
framing then moves on to highlight a priori reasons to be concerned about the risks of
spatial variability and spatial creaming and parking in Work Programme’s outcomes
Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme 149

and resultant resourcing given the particular and partial treatment of geography within
the programme’s design and live running.
Building on these critical spatial foundations, the article’s original and comprehen-
sive statistical analyses of Work Programme’s geographical outcomes advance to shine
a rare spotlight on the neglected spatial dimension of the creaming and parking debate.
The paper’s motivation is justified, with the same spatially patterned risks and experi-
ences consistently found as seen within the dominant social creaming and parking
debate. Across all four main payment groups and at both the local authority and larger
CPA geographies the spatial patterns of earned average unit costs found associate
strongly and systematically with deprivation. Within a multilevel statistical framework
these association between deprivation and earned average unit costs remain large,
negative and statistically significant even after introducing a range of contextual and
compositional controls.
The practical consequence of these findings geographically is that wealthier areas
see higher earned average unit costs and more deprived areas see lower earned average
unit costs. The financial differences seen between more and less deprived geographies
amounting to hundreds of pounds per service user. Moreover, aggregate CPA perfor-
mance is found to associate positively and consistently with within-CPA variability in
performance across smaller local authority geographies. This important finding lends
support to the view that Work Programme providers may have been both incentivised
and enabled by the programme to seek to optimise performance at the programmati-
cally key aggregate CPA scale at least in part through deliberate spatial creaming and
parking of smaller constituent geographies with more or less amenable local labour
market contexts within those headline CPA geographies.
Naturally, although these findings are consistent with the expectations of our spatial
creaming and parking hypothesis no quantitative analyses, however rigorous in their
methods and consistent in their findings, can prove creaming and parking given that it
is by its nature a causal process of deliberate provider behaviours. Future research in
this neglected spatial area is required and should combine quantitative and qualitative
methods in order to build the most robust and holistic evidence base possible. Partic-
ularly useful would be analyses of any systematic variation in provider estates or spend
by spatial context (which DWP’s shift to Open Book Accounting in the successor
Work and Health Programme should now enable) as well as qualitative interviews with
frontline provider staff and DWP contract managers. Given that any form of creaming
and parking undercuts value-for-money as well as equity it is in the DWP’s – and wider
Treasury’s interests – to more fully understand these programme risks and provider
behaviours around spatial creaming and parking.
In terms of the quantum and wider implications of the financial sums involved, the
differences in earned average unit costs seen across areas reflect not only financial
rewards to providers for performance. Crucially, they also reflect public policy deci-
sions around the level of public resource for the policy in different areas as well as the
incentive for providers to operate more or less enthusiastically in different geographical
contexts. That these spatial patterns in financial resources are structured systematically
and inversely to deprivation fuels concerns around the role of outcomes-based policy
approaches as further catalysts rather than alleviators of spatial as well as social
inequality. This is perhaps contrary to intuitive public expectations – as well as stated
DWP Work Programme objectives (DWP, 2010) – of the role of welfare policies as
150 A. Whitworth

aiming to narrow rather than widen pre-existing gaps. Given the prevalence of
outcomes-based approaches across policy domains and international contexts these
counter-cyclical implications of outcomes-based policy approaches require fuller schol-
arly attention and debate.

Funding information The research in this article was not funded by any grant and there is no financial
conflict of interest.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Informed Consent “Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.”

Research Involving Human Participants and/or Animals “This article does not contain any studies with
human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.”

Conflict of Interest I can confirm that there are no conflicts of interest.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and
indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the
article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not
included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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