Dissertation-JSmith

Jason I J Smith (19021588) An Evaluation of the Economic Impact of the UK City of Culture Submitted April 2022 This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Master of Science by The Manchester Metropolitan University Business School. Sponsoring Department: Institute of Place Management 1 Declarations The author has not, whilst being registered for the Masters award, been a registered candidate for another award of a university. No material in this dissertation has been used in any other submission for an academic award. 2 Abstract Since the perceived successes of Liverpool and Glasgow European Capital of Culture (Garcia, 2005), there has been an emphasis by successive UK governments, and particularly by those within the cultural sector to promote cultural activities as a panacea to place based problems (Lash & Urry, 1994) (Miles & Paddison, 2005) By examining the bids by applicant locations for the UK City of Culture initiative and the published information by the awarding body, it is evident that alongside posited benefits to community cohesion, place identity, raised profile and enrichment of the cultural life of local communities and visitors there have also been assumptions and in many cases promises that The UK City of Culture initiative would bring both immediate and long term economic benefits including: improved footfall, improvements in retail vacancy rates, increased visitor numbers and improved hotel occupancy rates, lowered unemployment rates- including specifically amongst young people, job creation, inward investment and regeneration. The following study contains quantitative analysis of evidence from bidding documents and other sources from applicant cities bidding to become UK City of culture, in order to extract the “hard” economic benefits that organisers often imply are intrinsically linked to becoming a host city/location and aims to show whether the economic promise lives up to the hype of the epistemological meta-narratives assigned to culture led exemplar cities (O'Dowd & Komarova, 2013). A detailed examination has been made of the bid documents and surrounding literature for the 2017 Kingston upon Hull (Hull) and 2013 Derry/Londonderry bids, examining the detail and quantum of economic promises made in these bids and comparing this with the statistical evidence to indicate whether hosting the UK City of Culture had the impact that was promised. Data was drawn from UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) NOMIS national labour statistics, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) labour and Tourism statistics, Springboard, Centre for Cities, Local Authority and LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership) sources to examine some of the key sustained economic improvements that were claimed would be a result of hosting UK City of Culture in bid documents for Hull and Derry/Londonderry relating to employment and youth employment, visitor numbers, Hotel occupancy rates, capital investment and retail vacancy rates. The results of the data show that in the areas analysed, little to no long term economic benefits could be directly attributed to the hosting of UK City of Culture and that short term benefits were quickly amortised and the analysis casts doubts over whether in fact there are 3 any longer-term economic impact from hosting UK City of Culture and generates caveats as to the validity of places legitimately using assumed long term economic benefits as an argument to support their bids to become UK City of Culture. The results further raise the question as to the opportunity cost of being a host city and whether the significant investment by places in terms of money and other resources would be better spent on directly on regeneration, stimulating job creation and inward investment rather than indirectly with the hope that there will be an economic osmosis. 4 Acknowledgements The development of the following research project and dissertation has been one that benefited hugely from the support and information provided by a number of parties who the author would like to acknowledge. Firstly, thanks to Dr Steve Millington, Prof. Cathy Parker and their colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University for providing the excellent tuition, mentoring, academic and emotional support both inside and outside of the academic environment. Similar thanks to staff of the Institute of Place Management (Manchester), whose resource has been invaluable. A special thanks to Dr Louise Platt also of Manchester Metropolitan University whose indepth understanding of the topics analysed in this document and support in finding original source material helped steer the direction of the research. The author is very grateful for the titbits of information that arrived from time to time by email and that added to the overall understanding of the topics discussed. Much appreciated was the free assistance given by Jane Osborn of Local Data Company whose historical information helped develop a quantitative picture of the success of UK City of Culture in impacting retail and leisure vacancy rates. The author is especially grateful to former leader of Gloucester City Council, Paul James who supported the author’s pursuit of academic studies and has been a continuous sounding board as the project developed. 5 Contents Table of Figures 7 Chapter One - Introduction 8 1.1 Summary outline of the main contents of the report Chapter Two - Literature Review 9 11 2.1 Great expectations – culture as a panacea? Identifying problems with the narrative 12 2.2 Examining the evidence gap for claims of long-term economic impacts of large events 14 2.3 Using independent information sources to evaluate stakeholder narrative Chapter Three - Methodology 15 17 Introduction 17 3.1 Research Approach 17 3.2 Research Design and Implementation 19 3.3 Data management and analysis 23 3.4 Conclusion – critical evaluation of methodology 24 Chapter Four: Analysis and Discussion of findings 4.1 The empirical evidence 26 27 4.1.1 Employment 27 4.1.2 Youth Employment 32 4.1.3 Visitor Economy (short Term/long term) 35 4.1.4 Hotel Occupancy (short term/long term) 40 4.1.5 Capital investment/Regeneration/High Street 40 4.1.6 Hull Retail Vacancy Rate 41 4.1.7 Inward investment 44 4.2 So does UK City of Culture deliver on its promise? 45 4.3 Wider implications of the findings for theory, practice and policy 45 Chapter Five - Conclusions 49 References 54 List of abbreviations/acronyms 61 Appendices 62 Appendix A: Youth Claimant Count Hull c.f. National 6 62 Table of Figures Figure 1: Word count analysis of bid/strategy documents for UK City of Culture 20 Figure 2: Chart illustrating weighted analysis of subset of words and phrases used by successful bidding cities 22 Figure 3: Employee Jobs in Derry and Strabane District Council area 2009, 2011, 2013 28 Figure 4: Employment rates for population aged 16 and over Derry and Strabane District Council/NI 28 Figure 5: Claimant count unemployment in Derry City and Strabane District Council Area 2011-2015 29 Figure 6: Extract from post event evaluation report by Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC) 30 Figure 7: Unemployment rate Hull, regional and UK 31 Figure 8: Variance in unemployment rate Hull, and UK 31 Figure 9: Hull youth Claimant Count 33 Figure 10: variance Hull/National youth claimant count 34 Figure 11: Forecast overnight visitor trips Derry/Londonderry with projected impact of UK City of Culture 36 Figure 12: Forecast overnight visitor trips/Total Trips Derry/Londonderry 37 Figure 13: Tourism impacts projected in the bid document c.f. actuals for Hull City of Culture 2017 38 Figure 14: Visitor Economy Impact actuals Hull 39 Figure 15: Overnight visitor trips/Sum of Nights Derry/Londonderry 2011-2016 40 Figure 16: Chart of Hull/National vacancy rates 2014-2019 43 Figure 17: Hull/National vacancy rates 2014-2019 43 Figure 18: Youth claimant count Hull c.f. national 62 7 Chapter One - Introduction Whilst many macro and micro interventions have been touted for place problems (Parker, et al., 2014), few have been hyped as much as the UK City of Culture which has been held up to be the panacea to problems including place reputation, topophilia, youth unemployment, overall employment, graduate retention, inward investment, regeneration, increased visitor numbers, improved vacancy rates and footfall to mention a few. (Derry City Council, 2013b) (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015) (Arts Council England, 2012). The neoliberal concept of mobilising culture for economic and social benefits was set out in the UK’s (Department for Culture, Media and Sports, 1998) which looked to replicate the apparent successes of the European Capitals of Culture (EuCoC) including those hosted by Glasgow and Liverpool. The dilemma facing a true evaluation of the success of the subsequent UK City of Culture events is that much of the published reporting and evaluation post-event is produced or commissioned by the same bodies commissioning or organising the events, and which it could be argued have a vested interest in reporting only the successes and presenting a glowing report of the impact of events (Hankinson, 2004) (Harvey, 2012). This is exemplified by a comparison of the original promises made in bid documents and the subsequent reporting post event for both Derry/Londonderry and Hull which show a contrariety between the promised “hard impacts” and the reporting of the actuality which often measured different indices and creates a difficulty for accurate quantifiable data analysis that would allow conclusions to be drawn as to whether the hyperbole was matched by reality – especially in terms of economic impact (Boland, et al., 2016) (Garcia, 2005). This is particularly noticeable in the Derry/Londonderry case where the post event evaluation report claims improvements but often don’t give baselines (Derry City Council , 2010) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). The objective of this report is to provide a critical analysis of some of the secondary data sources which represent the recorded impact of UK City of Culture and which challenge some of the existing narrative from organisers protagonists, actors and institutions involved which almost consistently represent UK City of Culture as a driver for economic growth and job creation (Arts Council England, 2012) (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015) (Derry City Council , 2010) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). By scrutinising original promises made for the impact of UK City of Culture and comparing this with authoritative 8 independent datasets this report will aim to provide percipience’s of the economic impact of the UK City of Culture initiative 1.1 Summary outline of the main contents of the report Following the introduction in chapter one above, the report continues in chapter two with a review of the literature relating to the transformative potential of cultural events and megaevents, especially UK City of Culture, and outlines some of the criticisms of the narrative and of the evidence that has been used to measure success. There is an examination of the tendency for bidders to host events to hyper-inflate potential impacts due the the competitive nature of the bidding process. Additional sources are examined which shine a light on further difficulties with measurement of the effectiveness of City of Culture events as a tool for urban physical and social regeneration. The difficulties examined include the lack of baselines often being agreed in advance and often a lack of resource or desire to measure impacts over longer periods and the resource required to produce and analyse data in the detail needed to facilitate accurate evaluation of long-term impacts. Further issues are highlighted around potential deliberate obfuscation by organisers and those associated with UK City of Culture events who for vested interests may wish to promote the most positive narrative. The report goes on to describe in chapter three, the methodology developed to source and analyse data to provide independent benchmarks for reporting the impact of UK City of Culture and to allow comparison of the results promised or projected by bidders with the actual impacts. The research approach is detailed, and explanation of the methodology laid out, highlighting how it has been designed to eliminate bias in reporting through focusing on quantifiable and independently verified data. For the research, thirteen different city’s UK City of Culture bid and strategy documents were examined, with those for Derry/Londonderry, Hull and Coventry examined in further detail. Analysis was also done to allow a hierarchy of economic impact priorities to be developed that informed the direction of research. The methodology goes on to list in detail which independent sources were used to provide data for analysis and comparison and concludes with a critical evaluation of the methodology. In chapter four there is an analysis and discussion of findings and in particular the empirical evidence for impacts of UK City of Culture on: employment and youth employment, the visitor economy, retail vacancy rates, inward investment and regeneration. It concludes that while there are some short-term impacts in some of the areas measured these impacts are 9 at best inconsistent and there is little to no evidence of these being sustained long term. Consistently the research shows a significant shortfall between promised benefits and actual benefits. The same chapter goes on to discuss wider implications of the findings for theory, practice and policy highlighting that the “travelling circus” of consultants and performers may have little real benefit on local economies which could possibly act as a dampener on the genesis and “development of indigenous local talent and the diminishing of authentic home grown and Foucauldian heterotopic resources within a city. Additional questions are raised as to value for money of the UK City of Culture and caveats given regarding the opportunity cost of hosting and whether resource would be better directed to addressing issues head on. The conclusion in chapter five builds on this argument, examining commentary and research from the literature which gives societal and economic criticism of the top-down approach to using culture as a tool for urban regeneration. It concludes with an encouragement for a renewal in the approach to cultural-based regeneration projects that is firmly founded on evidence and allows for a dialogue on alternative to produce the same desired results alongside transparent cost-benefit analysis to help facilitate decision making. 10 Chapter Two - Literature Review Edensor and Millington (2010) building on the work of Allen Scott (2008) and Csikszentmihalyi (1997) highlighted the need to “unpick dominant discourses of creativity” and develop empirical studies to account for its transformative potential. Taking as a theoretical construct, (Willer & Webster, 1970) that there is a lack of objectivity by invested stakeholders in the widespread presentation of UK City of Culture as a “success”, the research for this report has resulted in the collation of a number of reliable secondary quantitative data sources and documents predating and postdating the UK City of Culture activities in Derry/Londonderry and Hull and examined the promises made in these and in the current Coventry bid and compared these with pre and post event statistics. There is an ongoing narrative, highlighting the transformative value of cultural events and their potential to have a genuine socio-economic benefits (Arts Council England, 2012) (Lash & Urry, 1994), and although it is possible to express distaste at an economic reductionist approach to examining the benefits of cultural events in solely socio-economic terms it is possibly inevitable in a neoliberal society that, in practice, promoting the benefits and especially economic benefits to a place has in fact become a central tenet for those bidding to become UK City of Culture and governmental sponsors of the event (Boland, et al., 2020) (Cunningham & Platt, 2018) including DCMS and ACE who continuously publicise these potential impacts (Arts Council England, 2012) (Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), 2019) Understanding that both researchers and contributors often have preconceived philosophical backgrounds that can influence not only the results of research but the framing of what is researched encourages consideration of the ethics of research. A need for epistemic justification indicates that at some point the claims that are being evidenced by the researcher will be “warranted knowledge” (Flowerdew, 2005) in the expectation that the claims of the research will be challenged but can be justified by the researcher. The above will strongly help determine the conceptual framework given the potential for a principal-agent dilemma in the asymmetric reporting of data (Peacock & Rizzo, 1994) and it is proposed that the economic reasoning needs to be buttressed by statistical and econometric techniques that will hopefully cut through the hyperbole to provide insights into the (mainly economic) impact of UK City of Culture providing a discursive and noetic approach proceeding by argument or reasoning rather than by intuition, and whilst this body of research in itself will not examine in detail or aim to extrapolate the opportunity cost of 11 pursuing UK City of Culture initiatives rather than a more direct form of economic stimulus, it is hoped that it can provide a building block of a larger corpus of cost/benefit analyses. 2.1 Great expectations – culture as a panacea? Identifying problems with the narrative The model for UK City of Culture was designed to follow the model which led to the perceived successes of Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008 being European Capitals of Culture. Liverpool 2008. Expectations were high that the event could lead to a long-term boost in tourism drive regeneration and economic development (Falk & Hagsten, 2017). In examining these Garcia (2017) comments that the two cities were “widely perceived to be paradigmatic …. of successful culture-led regeneration” which had led to very high expectations for the European City of Culture to be “a catalyst for urban transformation”. The belief that cultural activities can be a key change mechanism for regeneration were emphasised by commentator Charles Landry (2008) who developed a “conceptual Toolkit of creativity” based on the belief that “people’s skills and creativity which drive urban development” and advocated “a cultural approach to any type of public policy” that “provides the momentum for development”. The emphasis on the economic “consumption-orientated” approach to cultural activities is noted as being a driver for “copycat creative city movements” where “the dominant objective behind most interventions was economic development and employment” (Evans, 2009). According to Garcia (2017) a “belief in the power of cultural interventions as catalysts for broader urban change is widespread and dominates policy discourse across the globe”. This narrative has been emphasised by UNESCO and The World Bank which maintained in a 2021 publication that the creative industries drive the creative economy, creating jobs, developing local economies, delivering innovation, and acting as a catalyst for growth, urban regeneration and community cohesion and can “create opportunities for those who are often socially and economically excluded.” (UNESCO, World Bank, 2021) It appears that there were high expectations of the first UK City of Culture hosted by Derry/Londonderry as highlighted by sentiments reported on in research published in 2020 which was based on interviews with a number of people directly involved in designing and delivering Derry/Londonderry’ bid document for UK City of Culture and the legacy plans including: Derry City Council, Culture Company, Ilex Urban Regeneration Company and senior local politicians (Boland, et al., 2020). In the bid document for Derry/Londonderry and in associated statements by bidders and organisers locally it was anticipated that hosting the 12 UK City of Culture would bring benefits locally including: £100 million of media coverage, £300 million capital investment (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) growth in Hotel occupancy and an increase in visitors of 563,000 (ILEX, 2014) alongside driving long term growth in employment and ending the “brain drain” amongst youth (Derry City Council , 2010) (Derry City Council, 2013b) Expectations were also high that the UK City of Culture initiative could drive long-term sustainable growth in tourism despite caveats by commentators such as Sjøholt (1999) who had made an in-depth study into the European Capital of Culture and had warned against the expectations that events such as this could or would boost growth. According to researchers such as Clare Colomb (2011) there is still a significant question mark over whether these broader benefits promised by for top-down creative and cultural led regeneration initiatives “trickle down” to populations which are disadvantaged and marginalised, and she further polemised that the academic literature over fifteen years has indicated that there is no demonstrable “automatic” positive link between “flagship cultural projects” and the delivery of “urban regeneration initiatives”. This raises further questions as to whether these benefits could be achieved at all through the artifice of the top-down model of UK City of Culture. As much of the literature reports, the measurement of any benefits is not without its difficulties. Commentators such as Graham Evans (2005) point out the complications in sourcing “robust” evidence linking cause and effect, particular in areas such as regeneration which typically take several years to foment and crystalise and include many protagonists whose motivations and reasons for decision making are difficult to pin down and often outside the political processes taking place locally. As early as 2004 (Bailey, et al.) it was highlighted that there was a lack of in-depth research into culture-led regeneration which could drive a culture of evidence based-policy making. It is also widely noted in the literature that difficulties are also caused by the indicators which are used to evaluate success, with these often not being agreed upon “a priori” (Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993) (Li & McCabe, 2012) (Liu, 2014). Also, those successes which have been reported have been decried as “dubious” by some commentators on neoliberal cultural regeneration including Jim McGuigan (2010) and Beatriz Garcia (2005) who have misgivings about claims made for the potential impacts alleged to be provided by winning or bidding for UK City of Culture. Boland, Murtagh and Shirlow (2020) in their analysis of Cities of Culture literature were particularly critical of what they perceived to be exaggerated claims for the potential benefits by bidders for UK City of Culture and European Capital of Culture, claiming that “Competing cities, and 13 judging panels, unofficially acknowledge the necessity to elevate the anticipated impact otherwise the bid will almost certainly fail” and that impact inflation is an ad naturum effect of competitive nature of the event concluding that there is a disconnect between the “myth/rhetoric” of success and “ambivalent legacies” and “authentic lived realities” revealed in concentrations of unemployment, poverty and multiple deprivation’. The core issue is that competition to secure City/Capital of Culture status incentivises applicants to out-bid rival cities and inflate the projected impacts (Garcia & Cox, 2013). The key aim of this current research has been to provide unbiased insight into the direct economic impact of UK City of Culture. To facilitate this, key secondary open-source datasets have been identified, and relevant information is being extracted for analysis (Edensor, et al., 2010). 2.2 Examining the evidence gap for claims of long-term economic impacts of large events There is a significant body of work discussing the impact of sporting and cultural national and “mega events” on local and national economies (Burbank, et al., 2002) (Wilson, 2019) (Baumann & Matheson, 2018) (Robertson, 2006) yet there is still criticism that there is “little coherent, long-term evidence on the inputs and outcomes of mega-events” and that “as a consequence, decision-makers bid for and host mega-events on anecdotal evidence, often compiled by event owners …… or consultancies, both of which have a stake in the outcome” (Müller, 2021). The same commentators also point out that hosting mega events or national events which could be extended to include UK City of Culture are often a very much one-off occasion for host cities/regions and that this impacts the quality and extent of the data collected, since the one-off nature of these events provides little incentive to set up systems and procedures to collect data that will improve decision making in the future (Evans, 2005). Whilst critical mention was made earlier of impact inflation by those bidding to host UK City of Culture (Boland, et al., 2020) the literature also points to the conflict of interest of event owners who have a “strong incentive to highlight the positive and ignore the negative outcomes in order to curry favourable media coverage and keep cities and countries interested in bidding” (Müller, 2021). Whilst Hankinson (2004) indicates that this emphasising of “the good bits” is a common and perhaps expected result of place and event marketing, it nevertheless creates difficulties for those trying to make a true evaluation of the 14 economic impact of an event, particularly since, even where data is published, it is “often limited to a few financial indicators …… or focused only on a specific aspect” (Müller, 2021). There are particular difficulties in longitudinal studies to measure the “legacy” of events due to the resource needed – particularly over the extended periods of time and the multiple indices needed to make a qualified evaluation (Evans, 2005) and although there are many claims that events, such as UK City of Culture, have impacts beyond the duration of the event a review of extant analyses of legacy of events by Scheu et al. (2019) indicated that these were heavy on “commentary” and light on “empirical research”. Evans (2005) is particularly critical of the evidence base for claims for culture-led regeneration and the implications made by its advocates that the cause and effect are “endogenous, almost guaranteed” and whilst he goes on to opine that there is a wide acceptance that culture can have a significant impact in regeneration he further states that there is “much less understanding of the very different effects that different types of cultural intervention produce in the short and longer term” and there is a need to “develop an appropriate evaluation model and schema”. It is within the above context that an examination has been made of the corpus of documents and literature relating to UK City of Culture, and the European capital of Culture which preceded it. 2.3 Using independent information sources to evaluate stakeholder narrative When analysing the literature and documents relating to UK City of Culture, particular attention was paid to the promises and forecast that were being made for the benefits the event would bring to a place and its people. An assessment was made of the emphasis on each factor that was promised would be impacted by hosting the city of culture which would indicate the priority placed upon it by the writers and the quantum of change that was promised. To make a specific analysis of whether the hype of the promised benefits from UK City of Culture lived up to the reality, the original sources for examining what successes were being forecast or promised by organisers for cities bidding for UK City of Culture have been directly extracted from bid documents from 13 bidding places including especial attention given to those of Derry/Londonderry, Hull and Coventry (Coventry City of Culture Trust, 2018) where these predictions could be directly compared with independent quantitative data. An 15 examination of the methodology used to develop the hierarchy of analysis appears alter in this paper. An analysis was made of copies of original documents by Derry City and Derry and Strabane District Council (Derry City Council, 2013a) (Derry City Council, 2013b) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA, 2017) ILEX, Derry development Company (ILEX, 2014), Hull City Council and Humber LEP (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015) (Hull City Council, 2018) (Hull City Council a, 2020) (Hull City Council b, 2020). All of these events that were published before the event were highly positive about the potential impact on the local economy that would be brought about by UK City of Culture. While those documents which reported post-event did to a greater or lesser extent report some of the shortfalls on unmet targets/projections, in general these were de-emphasised and the - often unsubstantiated - benefits of hosting the event were those most emphasised. This is in line with findings mentioned earlier from commentators such as Hankinson (2004) and Müller (2021) on the inclination and vested interest of those involved in events and place marketing to put a positive spin on statistics. It should be noted that where possible data used to analyse impacts of UK City of Culture has been sourced from organisations external to the UK City of Culture organisers, who may have a perceived bias to reporting only the positive facts (Hankinson, 2004) (Harvey, 2012). These external sources included Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (2017) UK Office for National Statistics, NOMIS official labour market statistics (2021) Centre for Cities (2020) and Local data Company (2020). By utilising these independent sources it has been possible in the following report to clear some of the smokescreen of positivity surrounding the UK City of Culture event and provide additional evidence to demonstrate that as an event it is not necessarily the poster child for cultural led regeneration and does not deliver the full gamut of promised results often publicised. 16 Chapter Three - Methodology Introduction As demonstrated in the literature review, commentators express concerns that much of the reporting on the economic impact of the events analysed might obfuscate the real results of the UK City of Culture event due to impact inflation caused by the competitive nature of the bidding process, combined with political and personal pressures to report “success” of events or at least paint the rosiest picture of any impacts. It has therefore been important to develop a methodology which aims to eliminate these effects by looking at independent sources that would allow unbiased measurement of the true economic impact of the event and facilitate an analysis to permit benchmarking of the projected results compared with actual results. Identifying which economic factors, were claimed would be impacted by UK City of Culture was also an important element as it helped define the “universe” of areas analysed employment, visitors and so-on. This universe was to be defined by referring to the claims made by bidders, organisers and owners of the UK City of Culture. Ultimately it is the aim of this analysis to provide additional insight into the economic impact of UK City of Culture and see whether the results of an independent analysis matches with the official narrative. 3.1 Research Approach Commentators such as Elspeth Graham (Flowerdew, 2005) draw attention to the epistemic justification of the rationale for belief and the impact of ethical, metaphysical and logical considerations. Human agency and social structures may be, and often are represented in contrasting ways dependent on the political and philosophical belief of protagonists and commentators. Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, Marxism, Feminism and Judeo-Christian philosophies and so-on, can and do impact on the nature and methodology of research and its perceived value. This leads to a multiplicity of methodological approaches. Graham (Flowerdew, 2005) further elaborates, arguing that the key element in formulating and implementing any research method – qualitative or quantitative is to ensure that results of the research will add to knowledge and understanding of a topic. Subsequently the 17 formulation of the methodology requires appropriate (and answerable) questions to be posed and sources identified and interrogated to provide data that hopefully provides insights that further the advancement and acquisition of knowledge – this of itself evidences the importance of an understanding of the philosophy of epistemology by the researcher, and also how subjects could possibly be effected by their own personal philosophies, which could in turn impact results of any research. This is of course of import when undertaking qualitative research but can even impact quantitative research. One example of this could be research which aimed to measure the success of an activity - for example the UK City of Culture initiative. Dependent on the political and philosophical belief of the agents involved, success could be measured in different ways. The impact of some of these are easier to quantify than others – with “hard” impacts such as job creation, retail vacancies, hotel occupancy being perhaps simpler to measure and less open to interpretation than “soft” impacts such as topophilia, “engagement” with activities, feelings of well-being, and “invisible” economic impacts such as volunteer hours. (Liu, 2014) (Garcia, 2005) (Van der Borg & Russo, 2005). The UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) through its agency Arts Council England (ACE), which are the initiators and sponsors of the UK City of Culture event highlight some of the benefits and dangers of undertaking an Economic Impact Assessment of arts and culture noting the distorting effects on accurate reporting that displacement and substitution effects (is the money just moving from being spent in one place to another), leakage (will extra spending stay locally or “leak” out of the area) and deadweight (would spending have happened anyway regardless of the arts/cultural event or venue). Indeed there has been much criticism of the Shellard method of Economic Impact Assessment which ignores these additionality effects (Arts Council England, 2012). There is an interesting contrast between the promises made for the UK’s City of Culture bid for hosting in 2013 in Derry/Londonderry and those made for Hull’s bid for 2017 where some of the rhetoric - especially regarding measurable economic impact - was scaled down or readjusted to be measured in “soft” impacts rather than “hard” impacts. These “soft” impacts are more challenging to measure compared with the the easier to quantify “hard” impacts such as employment levels and can include such things as tourist expenditure, improvement in topophilia or reopening of formerly unused buildings for cultural activities and other, more intangible or indirect benefits (Van der Borg & Russo, 2005). It might be overly cynical to assume a policy of deliberate obfuscation by UK City of Culture organisers and stakeholders - who were heavily invested in demonstrating UK City of Culture as a success - however a comparative analysis of the initial bid documents and subsequent post event impact reports by both Derry/Londonderry and Hull UK City of Culture organisers 18 ostensibly the local government authorities - show a disconnect between the promised “hard impacts” and the reporting of the actuality which often measures different indices and creates a difficulty for accurate quantifiable data analysis that would allow conclusions to be drawn as to whether the hyperbole was matched by reality – especially in terms of economic impact (Boland, et al., 2016) (Garcia, 2005). This is particularly noticeable in the Derry/Londonderry case where the post event evaluation report claims improvements but often don’t give baselines (Derry City Council , 2010) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). To ensure that there is an independent scientific approach to measuring the realisation of the promised benefits of hosting UK City of Culture, the research has been designed to mitigate any perceived bias by UK City of Culture organisers, who may have the incentive to report in a way that shine a positive light, without telling the whole story (Hankinson, 2004) (Harvey, 2012). Rather than attempting to undertake, a likely to be inaccurate, global economic impact assessment the following research attempts to provide an examination of specific socio-economic promises, projections or reports made within UK City of Culture documents for different bidding and host cities and compare these with independently verifiable sources. 3.2 Research Design and Implementation To benchmark whether UK City of Culture was achieving its economic impact claims, firstly a word count analysis was first done of UK City of Culture bidding documents to extrapolate which economic impacts were mentioned in the commentary and develop a hierarchy with weighting which allowed analysis of which terms and phrases relating to economic, social and cultural impact were most common within the documents analysed. Thirteen fields of words, synonyms or synonym phrases were identified through the word count. Where the words or phrases were synonyms or antonyms these were batched together e.g. “economic”, “economy”, “prosperity”, “poverty” were combined to be one field. The results of this analysis can be seen in Table 1. 19 Figure 1: Word count analysis of bid/strategy documents for UK City of Culture 8 CoC Bid CoC Bid Cultural Strategy Cultural Strategy Cultural Strategy Cultural Strategy 42698 12153 DRAFT SOUTHAMPTON TOGETHER - CULTURAL STRATEGY 2021-2031 7 YOUR GUIDE TO COVENTRY’S UK CITY OF CULTURE BID Total 6 Sheffield: UK City of Culture 2013 TOTAL WORD COUNT Economic/economy/prospe rity/poverty Jobs/employment/unemplo yment/employed Regeneration Investment/Inward investment Financial/finance Measurable Social (impacts) Inequality/deprivation/depr ived Visitor economy/visitor(s) spend/tourism/tourist(s) High Street/Retail/Town or City Centres Culture/cultural community audience engage/engagement inclusive/inclusion 5 Culture derby. Culture strategy for Derby 2020-2030 CoC Bid 4 Durham Cultural Vision and Action Plan: This is Durham: Illuminating our Culture This is Durham: Illuminating our Culture is Durham: Illuminating our Culture,Creativity and Creativity and Heritage. CoC Bid UK City of Culture 2017 Final Bid - Hull Document classification 3 UK City of Culture 2017 Dundee 2017 | The Tipping Point Stage 2 Final Bid Submission 2 CRACKING THE CULTURAL CODE - DerryLondonderry UK City of Culture 2013 Bid Document 1 TOTAL % 2992 153 117 85 155 34 8 9 20 581 7.4 126 90 112 39 93 49 9 13 7 12 3 3 5 0 15 10 370 216 4.7 2.7 47 8 30 12 45 26 38 9 30 4 9 0 3 0 15 2 217 61 2.8 0.8 113 17 91 61 4 6 4 11 307 3.9 222 390 193 336 30 3 9 11 1194 15.2 724 109 78 113 15 34 736 139 125 184 5 15 814 136 75 146 13 429 106 65 82 3 330 20 33 38 0 1 94 3 7 0 0 8 45 3 1 5 0 1 150 14 6 8 10 59 3322 530 390 576 46 0.7 42.2 6.7 5.0 7.3 0.6 1798 1940 1781 1306 542 137 92 273 7869 100.0 The word count analysis was combined with an analysis of explicit forecasts for economic impacts made within the bid documents enabling a defining of the universe of measurable impacts that would be analysed i.e.: 1. Employment 2. Youth Employment 20 3. Visitor Numbers (short Term/long term) 4. Hotel Occupancy (short term/long term) 5. Capital investment/Regeneration 6. Inward investment Note that no analysis was made of the “Economy” per se with analysis of regional gross value added using production (GVA(P)) and income (GVA(I)) approaches (Office for National Statistics, 2022)1 since GVA figures were both difficult to extract with any accuracy for the places hosting UK City of Culture and were not consistently referenced in the source documents even though mentioned as an important measure of economic impact by Arts Council England (ACE) (Arts Council England, 2012) additionally as the research developed it became clear that there was criticism of the use of secondary multipliers in economic impact studies and “ formulaic impact methods, including disaggregated visitor and economic data, [which] are seldom representative and are often out of date and not sectorally derived” (Evans, 2005). Establishing an accurate estimate of retained GVA for UK Cities of Culture could easily be a research project on its own and beyond the remit of this current research document. Key datasets were identified, and relevant information extracted for analysis of the impact of UK City of Culture on the fields selected, allowing an establishment of baselines pre-event and measures of change during and post event. Sources included Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA, 2017) UK Office for National Statistics (Office for National Statistics, 2020) Nomis - Official Labour Market Statistics, Derry City and Strabane District Council (Derry City Council, 2013a) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018), ILEX (Derry development Company) (2014), Hull City Council and Humber LEP (Hull City Council a, 2020) (Hull City Council b, 2020) and Centre for Cities (Centre for Cities, 2020). The social-historical-political location of researchers influence their orientations as often they are not separate from the social processes studied. Although it is posited that one cannot escape the social world lived in to allow it to be studied without pre-conceptions (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019) it should be noted that where possible data has been sourced from organisations external to the UK City of Culture organisers, who through positionality may have wittingly or unwittingly a tendency to a Panglossian narrative when reporting (Hankinson, 2004) (Harvey, 2012) 1 Gross Value Added (GVA) Regional gross value added using production (GVA(P)) and income (GVA(I)) approaches. Regional gross value added is the value generated by any unit engaged in the production of goods and services. GVA per head is a useful way of comparing regions of different sizes. It is not, however, a measure of regional productivity (Office for National Statistics, 2022) 21 Wherever practicable, quantitative, rather than qualitative techniques have been used. Analysis was also made of external factors that might have skewed impact in a particular period or location to allow those to be reported upon or accounted for, the major example of this being the massive investment in renewable offshore energy which took place in Hull which affected the employment figures but is highly unlikely to be related to UK City of Culture. Figure 2: Chart illustrating weighted analysis of subset of words and phrases used by successful bidding cities Weighting of words/phrases UKCoC Bids Derry/Londerry/Hull/Coventry inclusive/inclusion engage/engagement audience community Culture/cultural High Street/Retail/Town or City Centres Visitor economy/visitor(s) spend/tourism/tourist(s) Measurable Social (impacts) Inequality/deprivation/deprived Financial/finance Investment/Inward investment Regeneration Jobs/employment/unemployment/employed Economic/economy/prosperity/poverty 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% CRACKING THE CULTURAL CODE - DerryLondonderry UK City of Culture 2013 Bid Document Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Final Bid YOUR GUIDE TO COVENTRY’S UK CITY OF CULTURE BID (2021) It is interesting to note the results of the secondary weighted analysis of the words and phrases which examined a subset of the main universe of source documents that only included documents produced by the winning bidders for UK City of Culture i.e. 22 Derry/Londonderry, Hull and Coventry (see Fig. 2). Whilst phrases used to indicate success markers such as “Visitor Economy/visitor(s) spend/tourism/tourist” and Jobs/employment/unemployment/employed” remained relatively constant in their usage through all three sequential UK City of Culture bids, other phrases such as “Regeneration” appear to have fallen out of favour whilst, notably, references to “High Street/Retail/Town or City Centres” have jumped dramatically in line with the contemporary trend to highlight the decline of town and city centres highlighted by a number of actors including in the Portas review (2011)which highlighted a “town centre first“ policy (Barrett & Felsted, 2011) the influential work by the Institute of Place Management (Millington, et al., 2014) and revision for the High Street Task Force in 2020 which scientifically categorised and set a hierarchy for the priorities to ameliorate problems facing town and city centres. Remarkably bid writers have ascribed potential benefits to UK City of Culture related to contemporary perceived problems such as retail vacancies without appearing to give much evidence supporting the validity of their position, thus potentially laying themselves open to accusations of merely jumping on the bandwagon of the flavour of the month to achieve funding. 3.3 Data management and analysis Six fields were identified for evaluation and appropriate independent datasets sourced to allow analysis comparing data from before, during and post event by location and comparing with national and regional data where possible; the datasets analysed are as follows: 1. Employment 1.1. Nomis official labour market statistics 1.2. ONS, Annual Population Survey, resident analysis. DfE NI, District Council Labour Market Structure Statistics for Belfast. 2. Youth Employment 2.1. Labour Force Survey (NI) Derry/Londonderry 2.2. Data generated from: https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/506a2355 ONS, Claimant Count based ONS, Population Estimates. Note: Data differ to NOMIS claimant count rates as latest available population estimates are used to calculate the figures. 3. Visitor Numbers (short Term/long term) 3.1. NISRA https://www.nisra.gov.uk/sites/nisra.gov.uk/files/publications/NI-LGDTourism-Statistics-Microdata-2016_0.xlsx 23 3.2. Hull City Council economic development study (2020) 4. Hotel Occupancy (short term/long term) 4.1. https://www.nisra.gov.uk/sites/nisra.gov.uk/files/publications/NI-LGDTourism-Statistics-Microdata-2016_0.xlsx 5. Capital investment/Regeneration/High Street 5.1. Local Data Company retail vacancy figures Hull, 2014 – 2019 6. Inward investment 6.1. Derry City and Strabane District Council and ILEX own figures All data for the above analysis were imported into MS Excel™ spreadsheets to permit evaluation and comparison on a like for like basis. All data was taken at face value and under the assumption that UK City of Culture organisers would utilise the standard norms for assessment, calculation and definition of the individual fields. For example it was assumed that UK City of Culture bid documents would use the same definition of a person qualified to be classed as “unemployed” as used in NOMIS, the labour statistics database of the UK Office of national statistics. Similar principles were applied to all other fields analysed. In all cases above, commentary has not been made or allowances made on any changes in reporting methods that may have taken place over the period reported on and thus assumptions have been made that reporting methodology used by the third party sources has provided figures that can be fairly compared year on year. All data sources have been identified based on being, wherever possible, independent of UK City of Culture organisers and being of a type which was able to give information for a reasonably long period, before, during and post the hosting of UK City of Culture 3.4 Conclusion – critical evaluation of methodology There was significant variation in the quality and quantum of information for each category investigated, and in particular a great difference in the independent status of the sources. In some cases, such as with employment data, the sources were central government databases e.g. Nomis, in other cases such as the figures for Inward Investment, the data was unavailable from an independent supplier and thus was procured from local sources e.g. Derry City and Strabane District Council and ILEX provided the information on inward investment. In the latter cases the needed information was unavailable from a totally independent source which placed a number of limitations on the utility of the information since these sources were often generating information for the sole purpose of promoting 24 their place as a host for UK City of Culture, or extolling the virtues in post-event evaluation and could be subject to issues of impact inflation (Boland, 2010). The methodology for this report was developed to evaluate the economic impact of the UK City of Culture Initiative empirically and all cases where change was measure it was measure using similar indices. As pointed out earlier in this report there are a number of obstacles for those looking to measure the impacts of an event such as UK City of Culture including obtaining “robust” evidence for direct stimulus-response, this is especially so with regeneration which typically takes a long time to come to fruit and which, because of the many protagonists involved, means there is a significant amount of causal inference as causality would be difficult to prove (Evans, 2005). The Literature also indicates the problems developing metrics to measure success when the indicators of evaluation success, are not agreed upon in advance (Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993) (Li & McCabe, 2012) (Liu, 2014). To counter some of these difficulties it would have been simpler in this current report to eliminate examining cases where the needed information was unavailable from a totally independent source. This would have the benefit of leaving the interpretation of the results open to less criticism as the source data would only be from those sources reasonably unconnected to the UK City of Culture event, however eliminating these would have robbed the report of some of its richness – particularly in the narrative account relating to the significant disparity between the forecast benefits and the (self-reported) falling short on those targets. 25 Chapter Four: Analysis and Discussion of findings The objective of the research is to examine the value proposition of UK CoC and assess in detail some of the claims made for the event’s impact and whether it is ‘life and place changing’ or a ‘12 month party’? (Boland, et al., 2016). Many sources propound culture as a causative factor or catalyst for economic and social benefits (McGuigan, 2010) (DCMS, 2017) (Boland, et al., 2018) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) and have developed a rationale narrating culture as an apparatus of economic development (Van der Borg & Russo, 2005) (Cunningham & Platt, 2018) Under Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS) mapping document: “The Creative Industries” (Department for Culture, Media and Sports, 1998) this narrative was given sanction and actively promoted (Arts Council England, 2012). A number of commentators have indicated that there is a need to try and cut through the peddled narrative projecting cultural activities as catalysers or direct actors in the development and regeneration of place and focus on the imperative to develop studies to account for and measure empirically the “transformative potential of creativity” Edensor and Millington (2010) Allen Scott (2008) and Csikszentmihalyi (1997) While some attention to this principal of measurement has been paid lip service to – including by organisers of UK City of Culture (Arts Council England, 2012) much of the appraisement seems to lose detail – particularly when reporting takes place post event - as demonstrated by the the Derry/Londonderry case where the post event evaluation report claims improvements but often don’t give baselines (Derry City Council , 2010) c.f. (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). Even the excellent work reviewing Liverpool’s hosting of the European City of Culture which was completed under the auspices of Liverpool University (Garcia, et al., 2010) contained much detail on sponsorship income, visitor numbers and perceptions of place but was light on reporting detailed metrics which showed the quantum of effect on the local economy and employment. The following empirical evidence has been developed by examining the original quantitative promises or forecasts for the impact of UK City of Culture by organisers and measuring the impacts using external impartial sources with the aim of drawing conclusions as to what impact City of Culture hosting had upon the local economy during and post event. 26 4.1 The empirical evidence A wide range of data sources were examined to examine whether the promise of UK City of Culture lived up to the expectations. The field of results evaluated were selected based on a sample of bid documents and strategy documents by bidding organisations and especially on those related to Hull and Derry/Londonderry. Statistical information sources were chosen that were not under the direct control of the bidding organisation and partners. The following were highlighted as likely to achieve positive impacts through UK City of Culture: 4.1.1 Employment Benefits on employment from UK City of Culture were highlighted across all the bid documents with textual analysis of 8 bid documents showing that employment and related phrases were mentioned at an average ratio of approximately 1 in 8 (4.8:42.4) c.f. mentions of culture and related phrases (see fig. 1). Textual analysis of documents from winning bidders Derry/Londonderry, Hull and Coventry also demonstrated similar level of emphasis on UK City of Culture being a driver of employment opportunities both during the year of hosting the event and post event benefits. 4.1.1.a Derry/Londonderry Employment The Derry/Londonderry Bid document (Derry City Council , 2010) mentioned the words “Jobs”, “employment”, “unemployment”, “employed” a total of 126 times and gave a forecast that the hosting of UK City of Culture by Derry/Londonderry would be a direct driver for employment, forecasting that Derry/Londonderry City of Culture status was expected to deliver significant economic benefits. Overall, local organisers own econometric modelling suggested that the City of Culture award including the preparation 'pre-event' phase, the City of Culture year in 2013 and legacy effects would result in 2,800 net additional workplace jobs, 2,300 of which would be for residents, including almost 1,000 from the bottom half of the most deprived wards. In monetary terms, it was anticipated that £98 million in additional wages would be realised by 2020. Projections in the model were based heavily on the employment arising from construction projects most of which did not happen. The employment rate of the working age population for Derry & Strabane in 2014 was 56.6%, well below the NI average of 67.7%. The total number of employee jobs in the Council area 27 in 2013 was just over 50,000 which was slightly less than two years earlier, although there was a slight increase in the number of full-time jobs. Figure 3: Employee Jobs in Derry and Strabane District Council area 2009, 2011, 2013 Figure 4: Employment rates for population aged 16 and over Derry and Strabane District Council/NI As the table above (Fig. 4) shows the number of jobs available in the DCSDC (Derry City and Strabane Council) area remained fairly static between 2011 and 2013 the year Derry/Londonderry hosted UK City of Culture. It further shows that the employment rate for the area, which measures the proportion of the population aged 16 and over who are in employment fell between 2011 and 2014 and as of 2014 was at a level of 48.8% significantly below the NI average of 56.4%. The post event evaluation for Derry/Londonderry admitted that improved employment had “not yet been addressed” (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). 28 Probably most significant though is that comparison of the gap between the percentage of claimant count unemployed compared with the Northern Ireland figures where the negative gap widened during the hosting year of UK City of Culture and appears to have been little, if at all positively impacted by the hosting of the event. Figure 5: Claimant count unemployment in Derry City and Strabane District Council Area 2011-2015 The promised employment increases appear to have not been forthcoming, as according to Derry/Londonderry’s own figures only 300-400 jobs were created short term during the event (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018)with regional employment statistics showing no extra, long term employment having being created during 2014 (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) and as the table (Fig. 5) demonstrates while in real terms claimant count unemployment in Derry and Strabane District Council area (including Derry/Londonderry) fell in 2015, this only reflected a wider fall in claimant numbers across the whole nation of Northern Ireland and was not reflective of any special improvement in Derry/Londonderry. An examination of the marginal difference between local and national claimant count unemployment shows that in 2015 the percentage point difference remained at 3%, virtually the same as it was pre-event There appears to be quite a disconnect in the Derry/Londonderry reporting post event where it stated “It was not anticipated in the business case that the City of Culture would result in an immediate transformation of the economic fortunes of the city but that this was just the first step in a longer-term process of economic regeneration. The evidence from other cities is that while there is a short-term spike in the local economy during the year of the events, these broader labour market impacts take some years to be realised.” (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) This appears to be in strong contrast to Derry/Londonderry’s bid document which stated that UK City of Culture would lead to 2,300 more residents in employment one thousand of whom would be from the most deprived 29 wards as shown by the following extract from a post event evaluation report by Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC). Figure 6: Extract from post event evaluation report by Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC) Source (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) 4.1.1.b Hull 2017 Employment The Hull bid to host UK City of Culture in 2017 (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015)was redolent with promises regarding the employment opportunities that would be generated by UK City of Culture with opportunities to remedy the youth unemployment rates, both of which were high relative to national averages. It was claimed that the visitor economy would generate over 1000 jobs directly related to UK City of Culture from a level of 5,737 employed in tourism [and hospitality] in 2013 to 6,800 in 2017 (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015). As the chart (Fig.7) illustrates there was a small drop in total unemployment rates during and post 2017 with rates in 2018 and 2019 showing improvements, however a comparison with the claimant numbers demonstrates that caution should be applied to accepting any claim that UK City of Culture has been responsible for effecting unemployment levels (Doak, 2014). The number of unemployed reached an estimated high of 20,000 in Hull July 2011-June 2012 which had already fallen to 10,100 by the period July 2015 to June 2016 and remained relatively stable through 2017 to 2019. Employment rates likewise remained relatively stable and did not show signs of the ambitious 10 percent growth forecast in Hull’s UK City of Culture bid document, 6 per cent of which was estimated would be directly attributable to the 30 UK City of Culture by 2020. It is notable that an additional 1,000 jobs were created locally by Siemens to support offshore wind farms during this period with it being highly unlikely that these have been created due to Hull’s City of Culture hosting. Figure 7: Unemployment rate Hull, regional and UK Unemployment Rate Hull c.f regional and national 18.0 16.0 14.0 12.0 10.0 8.0 6.0 4.0 2.0 Jan 2004-Dec 2004 Jul 2004-Jun 2005 Jan 2005-Dec 2005 Jul 2005-Jun 2006 Jan 2006-Dec 2006 Jul 2006-Jun 2007 Jan 2007-Dec 2007 Jul 2007-Jun 2008 Jan 2008-Dec 2008 Jul 2008-Jun 2009 Jan 2009-Dec 2009 Jul 2009-Jun 2010 Jan 2010-Dec 2010 Jul 2010-Jun 2011 Jan 2011-Dec 2011 Jul 2011-Jun 2012 Jan 2012-Dec 2012 Jul 2012-Jun 2013 Jan 2013-Dec 2013 Jul 2013-Jun 2014 Jan 2014-Dec 2014 Jul 2014-Jun 2015 Jan 2015-Dec 2015 Jul 2015-Jun 2016 Jan 2016-Dec 2016 Jul 2016-Jun 2017 Jan 2017-Dec 2017 Jul 2017-Jun 2018 Jan 2018-Dec 2018 Jul 2018-Jun 2019 0.0 Kingston upon Hull, City of Yorkshire and The Humber Great Britain ONS Crown Copyright Reserved [from Nomis on 9 March 2020] Figure 8: Variance in unemployment rate Hull, and UK Employment Rate (all) 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2012 (%) 2013 (%) 2014 (%) Hull 2015 (%) National Average 31 2016 (%) Difference 2017 (%) 2018 (%) Data generated from: (Centre for Cities, 2020) 4.1.2 Youth Employment 4.1.2.a Young People Hull A further analysis was made of the levels of youth employment and unemployment as this was highlighted as a key area that would be improved by Hull’s hosting of Uk City of Culture. Within the bid document Councillor Steven Bayes, Hull City Council Cabinet member for Cultural Strategy was quoted as saying that hosting the “UK City of Culture will enable us to deliver a transformational opportunity for the next generation of young people”. The same document states that hosting of UK City of Culture will help “improve [youth] employment opportunities” and that as part of the plans for development of legacy benefits and delivering social impact provide “opportunities for them to re-engage with working life, giving them valuable work experience and the chance to improve their future employability” (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015). As shown by Figure 9 there seems little evidence that the event had any impact on youth unemployment levels. Figure 10 demonstrates that broadly the Hull youth claimant count followed national trends and it notable that the claimant rate of 4.67% in August 2015 was almost the same as the 4.66% recorded for April 2019 with most of the intervening period showing little change. 32 Figure 9: Hull youth Claimant Count Youth Claimant Count 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 Jan-13 Apr-13 Jul-13 Oct-13 Jan-14 Apr-14 Jul-14 Oct-14 Jan-15 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 Apr-16 Jul-16 Oct-16 Jan-17 Apr-17 Jul-17 Oct-17 Jan-18 Apr-18 Jul-18 Oct-18 Jan-19 Apr-19 Jul-19 Oct-19 0 Hull National Average Source Nomis official labour statistics (2021) An analysis was also made of the difference ratio between national youth claimant count using the following formula: Hull Youth Claimant count (%) ÷ National Youth Claimant Count (%) = difference ratio Using the above formula, it is possible to assess the relative improvements or otherwise and if there is a narrowing of the gap between Hull’s youth claimant rate and the national figure. It can be demonstrated that during the period recorded the ratio of Hull’s youth claimant count c.f national youth claimant count ranged between a peak of 2.2 to 1 in January 2016 and a low of 1.4 to 1 in February 2019 - a difference in range across the whole period of 0.8, although between May 2019 and November 2019 the ratio of Hull to national levels remained steady at 1.7 to 1 marking an improvement of 0.5 across the whole period since the peak of 2.2 to 1 in January 2016. As the following chart shows there was a slight improvement in Hull’s performance compared to the national figures with the gap narrowing through 2017 and 2018. These relative improvements were reversed in 2019 with the gap widening and the difference ratio showing an upward trend returning to levels seen in November 2017. 33 Figure 10: variance Hull/National youth claimant count Source Nomis official labour statistics (2021) An analysis of the difference ratio between national and local youth claimants in Hull demonstrates that there was in fact some improvement in performance within the local area starting in 2017 and continuing through to February 2019. At the time of writing the final bid for city of culture in 2015, it was claimed that Hull had 2,000 young unemployed and 700 NEETS2. Section F of the bid highlighted a plan for the Hull 2017 Skills Pathway which utilised the Hull Youth Enterprise Partnership, including all the major educational, private sector and community players to try and address this problem. It appears that while there may have been some moderate short-term success - possibly credited to local initiatives such as the Hull 2017 Skills Pathway, these improvements do not appear to have been sustained. 4.1.2.b Young People Derry/Londonderry In a post event study of the impact on young people of the hosting of UK City of Culture by Derry/Londonderry in 2013 (Boland, et al., 2018) the authors highlighted that young people had been emphasised as being the “ultimate beneficiaries” of the legacy of hosting the event (Derry City Council, 2013b) but go on to state that their research “problematises the claim” NEET is an acronym for ‘not in employment, education or training’, used to refer to the situation of many young persons, aged between 15 and 29, in Europe. (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 2022) 2 34 They further go on to say that “22.3% of young people aged 18–24 were unemployed, 30% of the total unemployed were aged 18–24, and there was a long-standing trend of emigration among young people.” It was a stated aim of the organisers of the Derry/Londonderry event and the local authority that the perceived “brain drain” of young people would be reversed and that jobs would be created for them. As shown in section 4.1.1.a and in figures 3 and 4, it is evident that the promised jobs were not forthcoming. And as for the hope that hosting the event would reduce the brain drain? The same report by Boland, Mullan and Murtagh (2018) goes on to state “66.5% of young people expect that they will be living somewhere other than D/L and 68.7% want to live elsewhere. This is a revelatory finding. In contradistinction to claims that young people would be the ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of CoC we have revealed they are in fact continuing to act as economic migrants” 4.1.3 Visitor Economy (short Term/long term) In the word count analysis of thirteen bid documents to become UK City of Culture including those of successful bidders, Derry/Londonderry, Hull and Coventry (Fig.1) the visitor economy, visitors and related terms was the most referenced item that bidders highlighted as likely to benefit from hosting UK City of Culture - second only to culture and related terms. The Derry/Londonderry bid document mentioned words and phrase related to the visitor economy 222 times compared with 724 mentions of culture and related terms at an approximate ratio of 1:3 and the subsequent Hull bid mentioned words and phrase related to the visitor economy 360 times compared with 746 mentions of culture and related terms at an approximate ratio of 1:2. It is evident that these bidders expected the Visitor Economy to be one of the biggest beneficiaries from hosting of UK City of Culture 4.1.3.a Visitor Economy - Derry/Londonderry Derry/Londonderry made a number of forecasts for the impact of hosting UK City of Culture in 2013 including that “UK CoC designation would enable us to double visitors and hence multiplier effect for the economy of the City” (Derry City Council , 2010), in fact the document “Cracking The Cultural Code – Derry/Londonderry UK City of Culture 2013 Bid Document” published the following chart highlighting their projections: 35 Figure 11: Forecast overnight visitor trips Derry/Londonderry with projected impact of UK City of Culture Source Derry City Council (2013a) Explicitly the same document highlighted that: i. There would be a doubling of overnight visitors in 2013 c.f. 2010 ii. 290,000 additional out of state tourist nights per year Worthy of note is the paradigm of Euclidian dramatic narrative reflected in the above forecasting chart, nonetheless as the actual recorded figures show (Fig. 12) the reality was nowhere near as dramatic, with overnight trips peaking at 150,878 in 2013 a shortfall of over 200,000 trips compared with the forecast figures, and although there was an approximately 47% uplift in overnight trips from 2011 to 2013, the total “sum of nights stayed” only increased by 12% over the same period. 36 Figure 12: Forecast overnight visitor trips/Total Trips Derry/Londonderry Source Derry City Council (2013a) When comparing the above forecast overnight trips with the baseline and forecast figures in the projections produced for Derry City Council (Derry City Council , 2010) it is evident that their expectations were wildly ambitious and that growth in overnight visitors was much closer to baseline projections than to those which included an anticipated boost due to hosting UK City of Culture. Post event evaluation from Derry/Londonderry reported that there was a forecast of 562,000 visitors to the city for the year of the event with actual number of visitors being 320,000 by their measurement a 43% shortfall on expectations. (ILEX, 2014) (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) 4.1.3.b Visitor Economy - Hull Hull was very ambitious in its projections for delivering Tourism impact, with the UK City of Culture bid document claiming “Hull 2017 will generate an estimated £184 million in new tourism spend in Hull over the 2015-20 period (and a further £118 million in the surrounding East Yorkshire area)” (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015) Hull projected that they would achieve a 7.5% growth in visitor spend during 2015, 2016 & 2018 and 15% growth in 2017 returning to 5% growth per annum in 2019 & 2020. The 5% target was one adopted for Hull and reflected national growth rates. The full range of impacts projected in the bid document are shown in Fig. 13 along with the actual results in the column entitled “2017 Actual” 37 Figure 13: Tourism impacts projected in the bid document c.f. actuals for Hull City of Culture 2017 Geographical area to which the figures refer: City of Hull Indicator 2017 Target without UKCC 2017 (b) Baseline (a) Total Visitor Numbers Total Visitor Spend (£m) Total Overnight Stays Total International Visitor Numbers Total International Visitor Spend (£m) 2017 Target with UKCC 2017 (c) Projected Impact of UKCC 2017 (c b) 2017 Actual 5,000,000 6,300,000 7,423,00 943,000 6,200,000 £220m £280m £321m £41m £239.3m 430,000 547,000 628,500 81,500 416,000 55,000 70,000 85,500 15,500 £25m £32m £36.6m £4.6m Sources: Visitor Economy Impact projections (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015) with actual figures (Hull City Council, 2018) What is particularly striking about the results from Hull is the huge discrepancy between the figures projected in 2015 and the actuals. In all the cases where like for like data was able to be sourced i.e. ”Total Visitor Numbers”, “Total Visitor Spend” and “Total Overnight stays” the 2017 actual results fell far short of the projections which had factored in the impact of hosting the UK City of Culture and in fact in each of those metrics also fell short of the targets set if UK City of Culture was not to be held. The quite shocking result is that if one was to measure the success of UK City of culture by the metrics used by the bidders in Hull in their original bid document from 2015 then the 2017 actual results showed that by all metrics recorded the 2017 actual figures underperformed the projected target for 2017 without UK City of Culture and thus that the hosting of UK City of Culture had no impact at all on visitor numbers, spend and overnight stays - yet it is far more likely that the authors of the projection were victims of “impact inflation” – something that will be dealt with in depth later in this document. Comparison of the above projections with the actual figures shown in table shown in fig.14 allows this topic to be delved into deeper and presents a more nuanced picture of the impact on the city. 38 Figure 14: Visitor Economy Impact actuals Hull Source Hull City Council (2018) As can be seen from the above figures (fig.14) there was evidential growth in each of the above metrics year on year with the exception of 2013 when there was a small contraction of 0.34% in the volume of total visits from 4,768,100 to 4,752,000. According to Hull City Council’s own analysis “Hull UK City of Culture 2017 has had a significant impact on both the value and volume of visitor data to Hull and has delivered unprecedented annual growth of 10%” (Hull City Council, 2018). This is probably aligned to the 9.82% growth in 2017 over 2016 in “Value of Tourism”. Overnight visitor spend rose by 5.34% over the same period, day visitor spend grew by 12.44% and international overnight visitor spend dropped by 0.55% from £18.1 million to £18 million, there is no explanation given for this and given the reported increase of 11.68% in nights stayed by international visitors it is possibly worth further investigation. The total value of Tourism for 2017 – the host year of UK City of Culture for Hull was calculated to be £313 million a growth of 9.82% or £28 million on 2016. Hull averaged a 3% growth in this metric 2012-2016, the national growth in Tourism for the same period was c. 1%. if these growth rates were extrapolated to assume similar organic growth rates of between 1% and 3% for 2017 one could perhaps estimate that between £19.45 million and £25.15 million of the growth in the Value of Tourism was directly attributable to the UK City of Culture activity. In any event there was still a huge shortfall of £81.7 million in the total visitor spend which had been projected (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015). 39 4.1.4 Hotel Occupancy (short term/long term) Figure 15: Overnight visitor trips/Sum of Nights Derry/Londonderry 2011-2016 Sum of Derry City & Overnight Sum of Sum of Strabane Trips Nights Expenditure (£) 2011 102,328 652,781 21,971,926 2012 116,698 583,678 20,876,327 2013 150,878 732,959 32,320,800 2014 141,992 662,076 30,515,697 2015 149,918 752,546 31,043,864 2016 168,428 735,404 36,505,253 Source: People and Places, Local Government District Tourism Statistics (Northern Ireland) (NISRA, 2017) Room sales in the Derry/Londonderry rose from 124,000 in 2012 to 152,000 in 2013 an increase of 23% and fell back again in 2014 to 140,000 but still recorded a growth from the 2012 baseline and this growth has continued year on year with 2016 outperforming 2013 sales with a 6.23% growth at 161,208. There were five record performing months in 2016. (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). It is also worth noting that the capacity for hosting overnight stays had increased by 40% between 2012 and 2019 which for most of the period had occupancy rates at a peak of 66 percent comparable with the rest of the North Ireland region at 62 per cent (Derry Journal, 2019). 4.1.5 Capital investment/Regeneration/High Street As the UK City of Culture event has developed there has been a notable change in emphasis shown in the word count of the bid documents with High Street/Retail/Town Centres/City Centres becoming more frequently mentioned (see Fig.1) as time has progressed. This is a trend that appears likely to continue as UK Governments continue to develop policies that attempt to address the decline of many of the UK’s Town and City centres Even setting aside the significant economic impacts on UK town and City centres caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, evidence demonstrates that many towns and cities throughout the UK have shown a decline in footfall and investment and a rise in retail property vacancy rates with 409 large and medium sized retailers having gone into administration between 40 2008 and May 2018, affecting 28,378 retail stores and 280,425 employees (Bamfield, 2018) with concomitant fears being expressed both at a local and national level of wider socioeconomic damage (Thomas, et al., 2004). The reasons for this decline have included historically the rise of out-of-town shopping centres (Weltevreden, et al., 2014) and more recently the rapid growth of online shopping alongside some other more localised issues (Weltevreden, 2007) (BBC, 2021) (Astbury, 2014). Increasingly as the “High Street” and City, Town and Local centres in the UK have been perceived to have been under threat (Parker, et al., 2014) (Portas, 2011) (Grimsey, 2018). It can be noted that as the profile of these threats have risen on the agenda of local and national government and the public, there has been a corresponding growth in the the positioning of the UK City of Culture and cultural activities in general as a solution to failing or fading City and Town Centres (Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), 2019). The earlier word count analysis of bid documents and strategies by cities competing to be UK City of Culture demonstrates that before 2013 there was no mention of “High Street/Retail/Town or City Centres”, whereas post 2013 most documents analysed have included references to one or more than one of these. Examples of the expectations raised are shown by the Dundee Final Bid Submission which mentioned these terms on fifteen occasions and indicated that the percentage “of city centre retail units which [were] vacant increased from 12% in 2007 to 17% in 2013” and indicated that an expected “legacy/change” that would be brought about if Dundee hosted the UK City of Culture would be “ 40% reduction in unoccupied commercial properties” and improvements in “the town centre environment and retail experience” they also forecast that should the city be successful in hosting the event that there would be a reduction in retail vacancies from 17% to 12% reversing the losses between 2013 and 2013. (Dundee Partnership, 2013). 4.1.6 Hull Retail Vacancy Rate While the Hull bid does not give specific targets for improvements in the retail and leisure vacancy rates, nevertheless it does place significant emphasis on the economic impact of hosting UK City of Culture caused be increased visitor numbers. To evaluate whether the event had any impact on these vacancy rates, information was sourced from Local Data Company which collects their data by by physically visiting town centres and out of town locations across GB, typically they claim to visit 650 major towns in Great Britain, 898 shopping centres and 1,234 retail parks and further claim that the information is updated on a 6- or 12-months cycle. The information relating to Hull for the period September 2014 to 41 December 2019 and compared with national rates is illustrated in Fig. 16 and details are contained in the table below (Fig.17). 42 Figure 16: Chart of Hull/National vacancy rates 2014-2019 Hull/National Vacancy Rates % 25 20 15 10 5 0 Sep-14 Mar-15 Sep-15 Mar-16 Sep-16 Mar-17 Oct-17 Apr-18 Oct-18 May-19 Dec-19 All Vacancy Rate (Hull) (%) National rates (all) (%) Source Local Data Company (2020) Figure 17: Hull/National vacancy rates 2014-2019 Hull Vacancy Rates Dec-19 May-19 Oct-18 Apr-18 Oct-17 Mar-17 Sep-16 Mar-16 Sep-15 Mar-15 Sep-14 All Retail Leisure Vacancy Vacancy Vacancy Rate National Rate (%) Rate (%) (Hull) (%) rates (all) 22.6 13.9 20 12 22.2 13.4 19.5 11.6 23.3 13.1 20.2 11.1 21.3 13.9 19.1 11.1 21.5 14.6 19.5 10.9 22.1 15.2 20.1 9.3 22.4 14.8 20.3 9.5 21.6 16.4 20.1 9.6 22.2 17.9 21 9.1 22.5 15.6 20.6 10.4 23.3 13.8 20.6 10.4 Source Local Data Company (2020) 43 Looking at the information shown in Fig. 16 and Fig 17 it would be difficult to argue that the UK City of culture had any significant impact on retail and leisure vacancy rates during the year of the event as the total “all vacancy" rates remained almost flat. This is particularly noticeable in the retail vacancy rates which were at an annual high of 22.4% in September 2016, dipped slightly to 21.5% in October 2017 and then rose to 23.3% in 2018 and 22.6% in December 2019. Whilst there may have been a marginal impact on retail vacancy rates in 2017 it is evident that there was no sustained significant step change which brought Hull’s vacancy rates to the national average. There was a marginal improvement though, with the gap of 10 plus percentage points by which Hull consistently underperformed the national average before 2017 being reduced to a gap of less than 9 percentage point from 2017 through to 2019. Figures were not available for Derry/Londonderry. 4.1.7 Inward investment There are a number factors which have been identified which can lead to difficulties in accurate measurement of inward investment, not least of these is the tendency for impact inflation both pre and post event (Boland, et al., 2020) due to the previously mentioned vested interest by stakeholders to report only the successes and presenting a glowing report of the “best bits” of the impact of events (Hankinson, 2004) (Harvey, 2012). There is also the difficulties of filtering out capital investment that would have happened anyway and which has been appropriated by those reporting on the impact of the UK City of Culture. Both impacts will be discussed further, later in this document. To facilitate an analysis of the levels of inward investment, the bid documents for Derry/Londonderry and Hull were analysed and levels forecast extracted these were then compared with post event evaluation documents. Whilst this is unlikely to be the most accurate or satisfactory method and does not follow the methodology of using third party independent metrics as used for the the other factors evaluated, it does at least allow a comparison between what organisers were promising and what they later assessed was delivered. In the case of Derry the bid document claimed that hosting the UK City of Culture would bring in £300 million of capital investment (Derry City Council , 2010) in their own post event evaluation the actual capital investment was downgraded to £90 million (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) 44 4.2 So does UK City of Culture deliver on its promise? The above evidence indicates that that the targets for economic impact and legacy were largely not met across the areas examined. It is worth noting that organisers and stakeholder evaluators have in some cases continued with the narrative of “impact inflation” post event as shown by the report “Cultural Transformations - The Impacts of Hull UK City of Culture 2017” by Hull university which claimed the headline news that “Almost 800 new jobs have been created in the visitor economy and cultural sector since 2013” with the implication that hosting of UK City of Culture was responsible for this – an assertation which at best seems simplistic and over optimistic. (Culture, Place and Policy Institute, 2018). Reading further into the same document it is in fact evident that the headline figure was not telling the whole story, as “according to the latest figures available (which refer to 2016 and don’t take into account the impact of Hull 2017) cultural sector employment was still about 30% lower than in 2010”. It is difficult to find any credible evidence of a direct and significant impact on sustainable local jobs brought about directly because of the event. Likewise in Derry/Londonderry it is evident that the forecasts produced for the organisers by Oxford Economics were wildly optimistic (Derry City Council , 2010), something even recognised in the post event evaluation produced on behalf of the local authority (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018). A later evaluation for Queen’s University Belfast of the Derry/Londonderry hosting of UK City of Culture and its legacy (Boland, et al., 2020) argues that “extravagant and excessive economic targets for impact and legacy” are implicit in the intense inter-city competition that is created by neoliberal urbanism. Various commentators have raised caveats regarding the value for money of City/Capital of Culture events, including Philip Boland (2010) who highlights evidence regarding the funding of Liverpool’s 2008 European Capital of Culture bid, of which £75.1 million was sourced from Liverpool City Council which reportedly led to a 4.9 per cent increase on council tax, almost £39 extra per household and although it would be difficult to prove a direct correlation, it is worth noting that post the 2008 event, Liverpool City Council’s finances were in a great deal of difficulty with a reported £90 Million “black Hole” in its finances which led to the council looking to decrease its workforce by 1,000 in 2009-10 in addition to the 200 jobs that had been shed during 2008-2009 to help meet the council’s economy savings of £60 million. 4.3 Wider implications of the findings for theory, practice and policy 45 While it is widely reported in the literature that creative industries can be significant actors in a city’s neighbourhood revitalisation, cultural development and economic development (Scott, 2008) (Florida, 2003)the results of the analysis made in this document raise some significant caveats regarding claims made specifically for the efficacy of UK City of Culture initiative as a tool for achieving these aims. Positive impacts for local employment and youth employment rates attributable to UK City of Culture seem negligeable and short term at best, with little discernibly measurable medium to long term benefits in reversing the decline of high streets and town/city centres. Likewise the more recently heralded, promised benefits to City centres helping to reverse the trends caused by the decline of the high street do not appear to be forthcoming with vacancy rates in Hull being a stark indicator of this failure. Whilst undoubtedly the UK City of Culture events have helped drive visitor numbers during the year of the event, in the examples studied there was a serious shortfall between the numbers forecast and the number delivered, especially in terms of overnight visitors. Additionally, the hoped for and promised long term impact on visitor numbers did not appear to be forthcoming. Worth noting is that the projections for visitor numbers in Hulls’ bid Hull projected that after achieving a 15% growth in visitor for the year of hosting the event in 2017 that this would returning to 5% growth per annum in 2019 & 2020 which reflected national growth rates projections by Visit Britain. This indicates that those making the projections did not expect that there would be continued accelerated growth post event and that any impact on accelerating growth would have run its course by the end of 2018. This does seem to counter the narrative of those promoting the event as “transformative” (Culture, Place and Policy Institute, 2018) and having a sustained impact. In fact, the results reflect similar research analysing thirty-four host cities, exploring the impact of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) on tourism demand, measuring overnight stays between 19982014. The results of this research highlighted that “A difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimator shows that hosting the ECoC leads to an increase in overnight stays of 8% on average during the year of the event but does not stimulate tourism demand in subsequent years” (Falk & Hagsten, 2017) Italics added. Of particular note is that although the lack of impact on employment was recognised in the Derry Post Project Evaluation of City of Culture 2013 this lesson does not not seem to have been learned by subsequent bidders to host UK City of Culture as the word count analysis in (Fig.1) demonstrates, with; employment, regeneration and economic prosperity (and associated terms for these), being among the elements most emphasised as potential 46 benefits of hosting UK City of Culture by bidders for UK City of Culture and winning host cities. Rantisi and Leslie (Edensor, et al., 2010) commenting in a chapter entitled “Creativity by Design” cited interviews with 86 key actors in Montreal, Canada, with 60 of these interviews being held with local people involved in the creative sector, they also compared this with regional and local policy documents. They concluded that “top-down”, “institutionalized” policies alone will not lead to the benefits to places promised through the utilisation of the creative industries and that local actors are often better placed to understand the “complex dynamics” of place. Commentators such as Sarah Cohen (2007) in her analysis of Liverpool, post its hosting the European City of Culture and Boland, Murtagh and Shirlow (2016) emphasise that the very institutional nature of the CoC initiative limits its ability to make an impact and that better results might be achieved through more freedom, funding and empowerment being given to local agents of creativity. Interestingly the literature does seem to indicate a disjunction between the proposed aims of the top-down institutionalised government sanctioned festivals such as UK City of Culture and those festivals which have “organically” grown from within the communities of places themselves. A 2007 Australian study of festivals by Chris Gibson, Chris Brennan-Horley and Jim Walmsley (Edensor, et al., 2010) demonstrated that overwhelmingly organisers of such festivals were more focussed on promoting or showcasing a place/theme/activity and a place’s sometimes Foucauldian assets (Ntounis & Kanellopoulou, 2017) than they were in increasing regional income and rarely were they “instruments for the powerful within the local community to feather their own nests and entrench their political power” – a criticism sometimes made of the UK City of Culture (Edensor, et al., 2010). Indeed, festivals often appear to have more impact in developing communities and identity formation and in “changing the image of a place” (Garcia, 2005) than they do in prosaic retained economic benefits. It is possible that particularly in the case of UK City of Culture, the top-down peripatetic nature of the event is disenfranchising for local people and existing organisations which “don’t fit the mould” of the DCMS replicable model for the festival (Liu, 2014). This could lead to much of the potential economic benefit being absorbed by itinerant consultants and artists (Boland, et al., 2016) many of whom move from festival to festival commissioning cultural activities that, while on the surface, are designed to represent place are no more than a glorified circus act that is at the core the same, but is dressed up to give the impression of being grounded in the locality and where the event is being hosted as part of a narcissistic Disneyfication or grobalisation by national or London centric arts organisations 47 (Matusitz & Palermo, 2014). There is the further concern as many of the benefits that are arguably derived from cultural and creative activities are due to the distinctiveness’s that are created by local embedded producers. Ntounis and Kanellopoulou (2017) highlight the risk of these potential opportunity costs of a top-down cultural UK City of Culture travelling circus exemplified by the model described by Boland et al., (2020) and Cunningham and Platt (2018) as they point out the potential for disenfranchisement and displacement from city centres caused by imported City of Culture “roadshows” which could possibly act as a dampener on the genesis and “development of indigenous local talent and the diminishing of authentic home grown and Foucauldian heterotopic resources within a city, that offer the promise of a more sustainable conduit to coherent communities, wealth and job creation.” (Smith, 2019). The competitive advantage this brings are underscored by commentators such as Heather E. Mclean (2010) and Jane Jacobs (2011). The example of ILEX, the failed urban regeneration company for Derry/Londonderry could also provide a salutary lesson. Its closure in 2015, just two years after the city hosted UK city of Culture was credited, in part, to not being “sufficiently focused on its core purpose, the development of Ebrington (or Fort George)” and a significant factor for this was reported to be because ”there has been mission drift as the organisation has been involved in other activities e.g. City of Culture” (BBC, 2015). It is counterintuitive to claim that the purely economic activities of an event such as UK City of Culture would have a significant long-term impact on a host location, if when after the event is left all that remains is a pleasant memory rather than a strong legacy built on existing authentic and vernacular human and physical assets. Returning to an assessment of the impacts of European Capital of Culture between 1995 and 2004 it was proposed that the host cities frequently focussed their resource on funding the delivery of “one-off events and projects” with less focus and resource being put into sustaining a legacy from those events and into investments that would maintain and continue growth long-term. (PalmerRae Associates, 2004) 48 Chapter Five - Conclusions In discussing the impact on Glasgow and Liverpool of hosting The European City of Culture, and drawing parallels with Derry/Londonderry, Peter Doak (2014) highlights the “dubious accounts of the successes disseminated by proponents of culture-led regeneration and held up as being delivered through the European Capitals/Cities of Culture and underscores the contradictions between narrative of success and the reality of delivery. There have been a number of other commentators who also have have been dismissive of the rhetoric disseminated by organisers of City of Culture events (Booth, 1996) (Mooney, 2004) (Garcia, 2005) (Boland, 2010) and in particular the use of such events to be a masque used to cover up social and economic problems without addressing the underlying causes of such issues (Garcia, 2005). Further commentators have branded City of Culture initiatives as a travelling “Circus” wherein an international or national “cultural workforce” are parachuted in ignoring or appropriating local culture (Kemp, 1991) where the the administrators became “mediators of taste” (Richards, 1991). Certainly, a cursory glance at the Linkedin profiles of main protagonists within the UK City of Culture events including the Director of Hull City of Culture and the Creative Director of Coventry City of Culture demonstrates that some of the criticisms that the festival is a London Centric roadshow may not be without grounding (Snow, 2021). There has been further censure of spending going on events designed to satiate middle class aspirations, driven by cultural elites, and aimed mainly at audiences which are external, with local residents and a city's disadvantaged communities thereby ignored (Boland, 2010). Although there is evidence that “city elites” have developed strategies for “incorporating dissenting groups” and managing potential conflicts there is some evidence that often this is a sop and does not affect the outcome planned by the city elites (Basset, et al., 2002). There has also been some criticism of the appropriation of successes in regeneration, economic indicators and other areas which have been claimed by organisers of City of Culture initiatives but actually have their roots elsewhere – It is interesting to note the contrasting opinions of Claire McColgan MBE, Director of Culture Liverpool who states that “culture has been the backbone of Liverpool’s renaissance” (Culture Liverpool, 2018) and those expressed by commentators such as Philip Boland, Brendan Murtagh and Peter Shirlow (Boland, et al., 2016). Boland (2010) raises a particularly salient point highlighting that between February 2008 and February 2009 the number of those claiming benefits in 49 Liverpool increased from 15,298 (5.3 per cent) to 20,055 (7 per cent). It is telling that between 2000 and the end of 2008, Liverpool city centre witnessed up to £4bn of investment in its physical infrastructure mostly if not all of which was unrelated to the City of Culture initiative and in comparing this with the £122.4 million spent on the Liverpool European City of Culture initiative (including payments in kind) it might be hard to justify McColgan’s claims as to the backbone to the renaissance being culturally led and it would be worth further scrutiny to unwrap which bits of the renaissance could be directly linked to the cultural activities. Likewise Derry/Londonderry which promised a £300 million inward investment bonus (Derry City Council , 2010) due to hosting of UK City of Culture. While the shortfall to the calculated £90 million actual investment (Derry City and Strabane District Council, 2018) was put down to global economic downturn and to a mistaken assumption of a very significant public and private sector infrastructure investment in the city which did not materialize, even the investment that did happen may well have happened anyway or was already in planning as shown by the most significant inward investment and regeneration site at Ebrington which saw the “relocation of the DoE’s Planning Office headquarters, the opening of the Walled City Brewery and Ollies Restaurant and the completion of a 214-space underground car park.” A similar narrative structure can be seen in relation to Hull’s hosting of the UK City of Culture which according to the organisers aimed to generate 140 new jobs in the creative sector (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015). A far more ambitious forecast by researchers from the University of Warwick, Institute of Economic Research (2014) claimed that the event would “lead to around 3,000 extra jobs in the creative sector in Yorkshire and the Humber. As demonstrated by the figures recorded and illustrated in fig.16 and fig.17, it would be very difficult to show that the event had been successful in achieving these goals – or indeed had any sustained impact on job creation - for the direct investment of a reported £18 million spent on hosting the UK City of Culture. And although it was promised that UK City of culture would support job creation pre, during and post event these jobs do not appear to have been forthcoming, indeed in a 2018 report on the Hull City of Culture bid it was stated that “according to the latest figures available (which refer to 2016 and don’t take into account the impact of Hull 2017) cultural sector employment was still about 30% lower than in 2010” (University of Hull, 2020). It would certainly be disingenuous to claim that the additional 1,000 jobs created locally by Siemens to support offshore wind farms were a result of Hull’s UK City of Culture Host status although the organisers claimed that both this investment and 50 the Greenport initiatives “where winning Hull 2017 [UK City of Culture] will make a difference” (Hull UK City of Culture 2017 Ltd, 2015). Notwithstanding the above critiques of whether the hype matches reality, the research undertaken and reported upon within this document does highlight serious disparities between the expectations and promises given by event organisers and the delivery. When examining the results of what has been projected or promised as hard economic benefits of the UK City of Culture activities there appears to be little evidence of sustained economic impact. There appears to be no evidence that hosting UK City of Culture has had any longterm direct impact on jobs, youth employment or retail vacancy rates (empty shops). Yet the narrative being pedalled by organisers both locally and at the The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) seems to ignore this lack of evidence for the wide range of promises made for local economies and employment. In a 2022 article in The Guardian (online edition) when reviewing Southampton and Bradford’s inclusion on the shortlist of bidders to become UK City of Culture 2025, Sir Phil Redmond, chair of the city of culture expert advisory panel, was quoted as saying “Culture can act as a ……… driver for economic and social change” claiming this was as previously seen in Derry-Londonderry (2013), Hull (2017) and Coventry (2021) with Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay cited as stating that the UK city of culture competition showed the “important role that culture could play in levelling up our towns, cities and rural communities” and bringing investment (Khomami, 2022) clearly linking the UK City of Culture to the aims of the UK Government’s stated “Levelling Up” policy to drive “economic growth and the higher productivity” (HM Government, 2021). The editorial highlighted contenders hoped to use the UK City of Culture status as a “springboard” for social and economic recovery with Sir Phil seeming to infer that “simply taking part” in the bidding process could “catalyst for community engagement, civic cohesion and a driver for economic and social change” (Khomami, 2022). Indeed, the continued focus on the potential economic benefits, including an impact in employment is clearly shown in Hull’s bid document (2015) and from the analysis of the word count (Fig 1) which shows that (with the exclusion of words relating to “culture”, “cultural” et similia) the economic impact and impact on jobs were those most referenced In contrast it is, perhaps, the ability to create a duality or multiplicity of ontological and epistemological narratives that could be the defining mark of success of City of Culture initiatives or any attempts to rebrand or change the perceptions of a place (O'Dowd & Komarova, 2013). The UK City of Culture status should ideally act as a catalyst for developing a holistic methodology for building a strategy based on or through the generation 51 of a “clear or shared” sense of the personality of a place (Millington & Ntounis, 2017) and accompanying city branding. Commentators such as Garcia (2017) have highlighted that there is a potential selfgenerating beneficial circle for place reputation, in that if there is a high enough volume of media coverage positing that a place is undergoing reputational change it becomes a selffulfilling prophecy and in itself can be the significant driver in changing perception of place, however as Kavaratzis and Ashworth (2005) point out, if this is not correctly understood and applied it can end up being nothing more than a “transitory marketing trick” and as Skinner (2018) has pointed out, with the upsurge of social media and user created content, the public in general are now becoming “co-creators” of place brand and can speedily create content that can impact the reputation of a place - positively or negatively. Building on the work by Garcia (2017) and Skinner (2018) it would be an interesting exercise for further research to measure “sentiment” in social media relating to places hosting UK City of Culture and examine what impacts the event had on topophilia and external perception of the city’s brand/reputation. Evidentially there are clear dichotomies relating to the hyperbole and impact inflation in the bids and subsequent reporting for and actual impact of UK City of Culture, even in the popular press questions have been asked whether the “Creative City” really leads to regeneration, or if the accepted narrative is a case of “the emperor's new clothes” (Higginbottom, 2011). It would warrant further research to establish whether the events genuinely can be a force for economic and social impact or in their current form are just a ‘12 month party’? (Boland, et al., 2016). Following a scrutiny of the experience of Liverpool’s financing of the European City of Culture it could be argued that the funding by local taxpayers of the event through Liverpool Council actually led to significant deficits and job losses (Boland, 2010) and this invites further research. Especially useful to expand understanding of the performance of UK City of Culture and impact on place would be additional research, examining the sources and quantum of finance for the events and tracing exactly where and with whom that funding was spent. This would permit an analysis of how much money is/was being spent locally, as opposed to being spent with external agents and assist in development of a model for retained GVA and the local economic impact. The results of this research, would be valuable in determining whether there is validity in the argument of those critics of this type of event who caution against a roadshow that benefits elites but does little to help grass root communities (Kemp, 1991) (Boland, 2010) (Boland, et al., 2020) (Ferilli, et al., 2016) (Richards, 1991). A deeper understanding of the sources of the financing of the event, in cash and in-kind terms would 52 assist in permitting developing a baseline for analysis of the opportunity cost of the event. Indeed there is a serious question mark raised by the current research about the validity of the claims for “economic osmosis” effects of the UK City of Culture events (Smith, 2019) and whether this offers real value for money. The doubts about the long-term legacy of the UK City of Culture align with analysis of non-cultural event based and culture-led event based regeneration attempts, such as Montreal’s hosting of the Olympics, and events in Barcelona, Lisbon, Sydney, Glasgow and Bilbao with commentators claiming that these did not deliver “sustained benefits or ownership by residents” (Evans, 2005) (Garcia, 2005) (Rodríguez, et al., 2001). Understanding the opportunity cost of potential missed opportunities when a place chooses to invest in City of Culture over another other more direct forms of investment will assist better decision making. For example, if organisations responsible for place strategy identify needs to improve employment, encourage inward investment and regeneration it would be very helpful to understand the value for money, return on investment and utilisation of resource would be in attempting to do these through a successful or potentially unsuccessful UK City of Culture bid compared with a direct investment. As previously mentioned, the detail still needs to be established as to where the - not insignificant - funding is going. Ensuring that the investment is spent and retained locally is likely to be a priority for local decision makers, especially as in the UK, and globally, cities are being forced to make tough decisions about the future nature of their places as the continuing deterioration of traditional retail uses and the aftermath of Covid 19 hit the vitality of city centres. 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ZARCH, 13(13), pp. 34-39. 60 List of abbreviations/acronyms ACE Arts Council England CoC City/Capital of Culture DCMS UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport DCSDC Derry City and Strabane District Council ECoC European Capital of Culture GVA Gross Value Added - measure of economic activity ILEX Derry's urban regeneration company (closed 2015) LEP Local Enterprise Partnership NISRA Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency NOMIS Service provided by ONS, providing UK labour market statistics ONS Office for National Statistics UKCoC UK City of Culture UKGOV UK Government UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 61 Appendices Appendix A: Youth Claimant Count Hull c.f. National Figure 18: Youth claimant count Hull c.f. national 6.5 6.35 3.2 3.13 2.0 2.0 Jun-16 May-16 Apr-16 Mar-16 Feb-16 Jan-16 Dec-15 Nov-15 Oct-15 Sep-15 Aug-15 Jul-15 5.03 4.94 4.67 4.68 4.63 4.46 4.58 4.96 4.92 4.63 4.42 4.32 4.2 2.36 2.43 2.48 2.45 2.39 2.23 2.15 2.26 2.41 2.44 2.37 2.31 2.24 2.1 2.0 1.9 1.9 1.9 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.0 1.9 1.9 1.9 1.9 Mar-18 Feb-18 Jan-18 Dec-17 Nov-17 Oct-17 Sep-17 Aug-17 Jul-17 Jun-17 May-17 Apr-17 Mar-17 4.62 4.52 4.39 4.26 4.15 4.15 4.12 4.09 3.92 3.89 4.04 4.17 4.31 2.42 2.41 2.34 2.3 2.27 2.31 2.32 2.3 2.26 2.2 2.27 2.43 2.5 1.9 1.9 1.9 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.7 1.8 1.8 1.7 1.7 Nov-19 Oct-19 Sep-19 Aug-19 Jul-19 Jun-19 May-19 Apr-19 Mar-19 Feb-19 Jan-19 Dec-18 3.81 2.62 1.5 Jun-15 4.33 2.32 1.9 Nov-18 Oct-18 Sep-18 3.75 2.61 1.4 5.22 2.44 2.1 Feb-17 4.21 2.21 1.9 May-15 5.47 2.57 2.1 Jan-17 Dec-16 3.71 3.74 2.5 2.55 1.5 1.5 Apr-15 Mar-15 4.15 4.13 2.32 2.21 1.8 1.9 Aug-18 Jul-18 3.78 2.45 1.5 5.86 5.68 2.83 2.72 2.1 2.1 Nov-16 4.25 2.38 1.8 Feb-15 Oct-16 Jun-18 3.9 2.44 1.6 Jan-15 4.26 2.37 1.8 5.72 2.69 2.1 Sep-14 Aug-14 Jul-14 Jun-14 May-14 Apr-14 Mar-14 Feb-14 Jan-14 Dec-13 Nov-13 Oct-13 Sep-13 Aug-13 Jul-13 Jun-13 May-13 Apr-13 5.53 2.58 2.1 Sep-16 4.13 2.48 1.7 Dec-14 4.3 2.54 1.7 4.25 2.37 1.8 May-18 Apr-18 Hull National Average Ratio 5.81 2.75 2.1 Aug-16 4.29 2.29 1.9 Nov-14 6.05 2.97 2.0 Jul-16 Hull National Average Ratio Mar-13 11.9 11.91 11.63 11.23 10.94 10.7 10.59 10.44 10.06 9.21 8.9 8.59 8.86 8.89 8.65 8.18 7.63 7.19 6.81 5.68 5.89 5.76 5.45 5.24 5.01 5.06 4.99 4.78 4.5 4.23 4.05 4.19 4.29 4.09 3.79 3.54 3.27 3.28 2.1 2.0 2.0 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.0 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.2 2.2 2.2 2.1 Oct-14 Hull National Average Ratio Feb-13 Jan-13 Hull National Average Ratio 3.72 3.92 4.01 4.45 4.66 5 5.21 5.27 5.29 5.21 5.56 5.66 2.56 2.63 2.8 2.92 2.96 2.95 2.99 3.05 3.14 3.13 3.18 3.24 1.5 1.5 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 Youth Claimant Count ONS, Claimant Count. ONS, Population Estimates. Note: Data differ to NOMIS claimant count rates as latest available population estimates are used to calculate the figures. Data generated from: https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/506a2355 62