The North-East Coast

The North-east Coast contained before the war the heaviest concentration of unemployment in England. The North-east Coast was also one of the areas where cyclical unemployment was heaviest; in all three of the North-eastern counties the excess of the percentage of workers unemployed over the figure for the country as a whole increased rapidly between 1929 and 1932, and returned to near its previous level by 1937. The North-east Coast was one of the areas where opportunities of industrial work for women were most restricted. The district where depression was least persistent before the war was Tees-side, the area round Middlesbrough, the Hartlepools, Stockton, and Darlington, which in 1938 contained 20.5 per cent of the insured population of the North-east Coast. The first need of the region is clearly a plan, or rather a series of national, industrial, and regional plans in which the North-east Coast would have its appropriate place.