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Other Community, Social and Personal Services

October 2007

Photograph of a statue outside the National Football Museum, Preston

Introduction

This sector covers a wide miscellany of services provided by businesses, governments and voluntary organisations to individuals, other businesses or to the community as a whole. They include such activities as sanitary, sewage and refuse disposal services; membership organisations (e.g. business and professional organisations, trade unions, religious and political organisations, special interest groups, etc.); recreational, cultural and sporting activities (including theatre, film, radio and television, amusement parks, sports facilities, libraries, gambling and betting, etc.); and a range of other mainly personal services from laundering and hairdressing and other beauty treatments to physical well-being, funeral services, and escort and dating services. In occupational terms employees are concentrated in professional and associate professional roles and in personal services.

Bar chart showing the number of employee jobs in community, social and personal services for each of Lancashire's local authorities - see text for details Source ONS - Annual Business Inquiry

In spite of the catch-all and rather heterogeneous nature of the sector, it is nonetheless of some considerable economic significance nationally comprising over 166,000 separate enterprises employing about 1.4m people and with annual turnover of nearly £130bn generating some £44bn in gross value added. By value, the most important components are radio and television activities, other sporting activities, gambling and betting, the collection and disposal of sewage, artistic and literary creation, hairdressing and other beauty treatment, motion picture and video production, and activities of other membership organisations.

Employment

This diverse group of activities comprise about 4,200 separate establishments in Lancashire and employ over 24,600 people or 4.1%% of the sub-region's employee workforce, a share somewhat below the 5.2% in Great Britain at large. Male employees are in the majority (just), comprising over 51% of the local sector's workforce. Around 46% of the employee jobs are part-time, rising to 55% in the case of female employees alone (Table 1).

Preston North End Football Stadium, viewed from Moor Park

To a large extent the distribution of employee jobs across the County is linked to population distribution: thus 46% of the total jobs are to be found in the four main urban centres of Blackburn, Blackpool, Lancaster and Preston. Locally, the importance of the sector is greatest in Blackburn and Blackpool where it accounts for close to 6% of the districts' jobs. In Blackburn sporting activities are of some importance but in Blackpool and elsewhere the sector also has strong linkages with the tourism industry (e.g. amusement parks and other entertainment and recreational activities). Conversely, the sector provides for only about 3% of local jobs in Pendle and Ribble Valley.

The industry is highly fragmented. Statistically the "average" establishment employs just 6 people and the majority of the companies are small: 96% have fewer than 25 employees and only a handful employ more than 100 people (Table 2). Larger employers within the County include Cannon Hygiene, the Sunlight Group and LWS Waste Services; a number of local theme/amusement park operators such as Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Camelot at Charnock Richard; Blackpool's Leisure Parcs Ltd and Rank Leisure operators of entertainment facilities; a number of sizable church institutions/charity organisations, including many with multi-sites across the area (e.g. The Salvation Army, Age Concern, British Red Cross, etc.) and some of the bigger local sporting/athletic clubs, including professional football league teams at Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley and Preston.

Employment Trends

Though because of its diversity and small average size of establishment, not a high profile sector, it has experienced steady but unspectacular expansion for decades (Figure 2). Over the 1990s availability of new job opportunities accelerated with employee numbers rising correspondingly. There was also a rapid increase in the number of net new businesses established over this same period, which exceeded that nationally. More recently there has been an apparent pause in this growth. In part this appears to be attributable to some reclassification of certain activities into other sectors such as hotels and restaurants rather than any real net loss of jobs.

Graph showing how the number of employee jobs in community, social and personal services has changed from 1950 to 2005 - see text for details Source Ministry of Labour/ONS - ERII Employment Records

Because of such classification and methodological changes, sub-sectoral patterns are not always clear and employment trends in what in many cases are rather tiny sectors have been variable. Until very recently the strongest jobs gains appear to have been in the mixed bag of activities included under "other services not elsewhere classified" ranging from activities as diverse as escort and dating services and marriage bureaux to porters, valet car parkers and genealogical etc., whilst other personal services such as hairdressing, beauty treatment and physical well-being activities also recorded some gains. Employee numbers in various forms of membership organisation (business organisations, trade unions, religious, political and charitable, etc organisations) have been less buoyant whilst growth in refuse disposal, etc is presumably a reflection of the increased importance of municipal recycling. Employee trends in the largest sub-sector of recreational, cultural and sporting activities, many linked to the tourism industry have been fairly modest in contrast to strong growth nationally. The strongest growth has been in sporting activities. It should be remembered, however, that there is probably also a large element of casual and seasonal working in some of these sectors within Lancashire that is not necessarily captured by official statistics. Additionally, a relatively high proportion of jobs in some of the sub-sectors are likely to be of people working on their own account. Such self-employment is not captured within the employee job estimates.

General Characteristics

The sector is highly diverse in the way its component parts are organised. It not only includes both private sector (e.g. media) and public sector (e.g. libraries and museums) activities but also activities which are in the private sector but subject to public subsidy and/or regulation like arts and gambling as well as voluntary and charitable organisations of all kinds operating under a myriad of formats.

The Community, Social and Personal Services sector is, by and large, a labour intensive consumer-orientated activity with strong linkages to the tourism and leisure markets and benefiting from increased personal disposable incomes and greater leisure time. Traditionally, many people working within the sector have received training on the job but an increasing number of occupations have introduced certificates to encourage the more formal development of skills and to improve the quality and range of services offered to customers. Encompassing as it does, many of the so-called and much vaunted "creative industries" in literary and artistic occupations, the media and sport, it is expected to be a significant source of new jobs over the coming decade, many of which are likely to be well-paid. However, it is likely that a large slice of this growth will be amongst those working on their own account rather than of employees per se.

This page was compiled by Peter Kivell .

All enquiries from the media should be sent to Corporate.Communications@lancashire.gov.uk .

Any other questions about the content of this page may be sent to EconInfo@lancashire.gov.uk .

For all enquiries about the county council's services , contact the Customer Service Centre on 0845 0530000 (01772 530000) or at Enquiries@css.lancscc.gov.uk .

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