Introduction

The election of the Thatcher government in May 1979 heralded a new era of spatial policy in the UK. The political and economic crises of the mid-1970s and the acceptance of International Monetary Fund loans, under the Callaghan government, had already reduced the scale of support for the Development Areas (DAs). However, from 1979, the rationalities, objectives, and scale of regional policy began to undergo a more significant change. What emerged, as Jones (1997) suggests, was a new strategy of ‘spatial selection’ in which the needs of growth areas would be prioritised in the drive for greater national economic competitiveness. The old DAs would receive trickle-down benefits from the fast-growing areas in the short term and would be inspired to develop new strategies to match the competitiveness of these stronger regions in the longer term. Regional divergence became a policy aim, rather than a ‘problem’ to be tackled, as growth places, it was argued, should not be ‘held back’ through a redistributive spatial policy. In many ways there was, therefore, a return to pre-war agendas in which spatial policy regarded the laggard regions of the UK ‘as plague-spots, to be diagnosed by specialists and treated as something apart from the rest of the community’ (The Economist, 1945b, p 270; see also Chapter Three). As we will see, similar characterisations of spatial policy were to emerge through the programmes of the Major government of the 1990s and the strategies pursued under Tony Blair in the 2000s.

This chapter examines the shift in thinking over the concept of the ‘key worker’ (KW) within these wider regional policy changes from the end of the 1970s up to the present day. It explores the ways in which new types of creative and entrepreneurial KWs were defined and how their presence and/or creation was seen as essential to the construction of sustainable and competitive places and communities. The absence of such workers was presented as one of the key problems that the DAs faced. In the fast-growing, globally competitive, and economically buoyant regions of the South and East of Britain the situation was very different. The chapter begins by examining the changing rationalities of spatial policy and the wider debates that took place in the late 1970s/early 1980s over its objectives before turning to the changes that have characterised post-Thatcher spatial policy.