Issues With Primary Urban Areas
Primary Urban Areas still suffer to a certain extent from containing multiple distinct settlements with large degrees of independence, but that happen to touch being treated as if they were a single city. A good example of this is within the Birmingham PUA, where Wolverhampton is largely independent of Birmingham and by some measures has a city-region of its own. Whilst Birmingham dominates the south and east of the area, and Wolverhampton dominates the north and west, the area of conurbation between the two cities (the Black Country) displays a complex pattern of interdependence both within the area and to the two cities, making statistical separation of the area extremely difficult. This inclusion of Wolverhampton demonstrates differences between PUAs and the Eurostat equivalent, where Wolverhampton has its own Larger Urban Zone.
When Primary Urban Areas are approximated to local authority areas rather than wards they can also contain rural areas or have parts of the Urban Area excluded from the relevant PUA. The Leeds PUA is an example of the former, where the City of Leeds local authority area that is contained within the PUA includes a wide rural area in addition to the urban cores; whilst the Manchester PUA does not contain Wilmslow which is a part of the Greater Manchester Urban Area but outside the local authorities that make up the approximated PUA.
Another issue with the PUA data is what constitutes a continuous urban area. The Greater Manchester PUA for example does NOT include the largely urban boroughs of Wigan, Bolton and Rochdale, all of which are linked strongly with the core city region - for example by transport (via Transport for Greater Manchester), shopping/leisure e.g. Trafford Centre, various sporting events, administrative history (Greater Manchester County Council and nightlife. In Bolton for example 33 percent of the working population who live there travel outside the borough to work - 26,190 of them within Greater Manchester. Similar issues exist around many of the core cities. PUA's should therefore be regarded as only one indicator of what constitutes an urban area.
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