ABSTRACT
The city itself has a population of around fifty thousand people, which rises to one hundred thousand if neighbouring areas such as Morecambe are included. At the beginning of 1990 the official unemployment rate in the Lancaster area was around nine per cent, similar to the rest of the northwest of England as a whole and around 2 per cent higher than the national figure. These figures hide pockets of extreme poverty, however, and one area of Morecambe had the highest unemployment rate in Lancashire at 30 per cent.
