economic sectors

I wanted to run these two stories alongside each other because they concern the swings and roundabouts which are affecting many communities, a disproportionate number of which are rural and which rely on defence spending for an element of their economic viability the first explains:

“The redundancies mark the first wave of the coalition’s cuts to service personnel as part of the effort to tackle the deficit and bring the defence budget under control. Almost 1,000 RAF personnel will find out tomorrow whether they have lost their jobs, along with a similar number from the Army. The plans to cut the posts were announced earlier this year and form part of a programme which could see 11,000 redundancies across the RAF, Army and Royal Navy by April 2015”.

The second goes on to offer an upside for theNorth West– with pictures of the building of the new Astute class of submarines in Barrow.

I wonder how many local authorities, particularly in relation to their statutory functions, such as planning, really think in the round about what key sectors, like defence mean to their economies?

I was talking to a really switched on planner in a rural district today about how the economic impact of planning proposals are considered. He reflected that his team knew little or nothing about the wider sectoral nature of their economy and that over and above gross employment numbers haven’t looked at issues such as the importance of economic clusters or strengthening local supply chain effects in the context of their planning considerations. He admitted that it would be very useful to be able to do this should the information to help planners in relation to these issues be easily to hand.