“BRAINY” cities and areas like York and the East Riding are faring better in the recession than cities or towns with a high proportion of people with low or no qualifications.

That is the conclusion of a study by The Work Foundation, an independent research organisation.

Its report, Recession And Recovery, concludes that workforce skills largely determine how well cities are performing in the recession, and that most of the worst hotspots are “repeat casualties” from previous recessions.

The report says: “High-skills, cities, places with highly qualified populations such as Cambridge, York and Oxford have fared better than areas with a high proportion of residents with no or low qualifications, such as Stoke or Rochdale, which have been much harder hit.”

A table of every town and city in Britain shows that York has 34.7 per cent of its working population with an NVQ 4 certificate or higher. In the year to May this year, unemployment claims rose 1.5 per cent.

The East Riding is also listed as a high-skills area, with 27 per cent having high qualifications. There the number of unemployment claimants rose by 1.7 per cent.

By comparison, in Kingston-upon-Hull, where 21 per cent of the working age population have no qualifications at all, unemployment claims rose by three per cent.

Will Hutton, executive vice chairman of the Work Foundation, warned: “Unless the Government acts to give cities the powers they need, areas with low or no skills face a struggling cycle of decline long beyond the recession, making it much harder to bounce back in the future.”

The report also points out that manufacturing saw a 6.7 per cent contraction in employment in the year to March, with consumers and employers holding off buying “big ticket” items like new cars.

Areas such as Corby and Swindon, with histories of high levels of manufacturing, were hit hard, with unemployment soaring.

Cities dependant on jobs in the finance and business services sector – which has declined nationally by 2.8 per cent over the past year – have tended to see higher rises in unemployment compared to other sectors.

But London and the south-east bucked that trend, because job losses in financial services tended to be located outside the capital. Lloyds Banking Group, for instance, recently announced that two call centres in Chester and Speke were to close with the loss of 84 jobs.