Through detailed consideration of the Glasgow case, this paper shows that the UK official 'travel to work areas' (TTWAs) misrepresent the geographical pattern of unemployment. After a brief consideration of the origins of the TTWA system, it criticises the use of the local 'workforce', rather than residents, as the denominator in the unemployment rate, and of 'self-containment' rather than internal cohesion as the dominant criterion in selecting boundaries. It shows how these procedures cause large concentrations of unemployment to disappear almost entirely from view, and that where there is an imbalance between commuting inflows and outflows, as is often the case, the TTWA unemployment rate will be under- or over-estimated, often by substantial amounts. TTWAs also fail to reflect the restricted commuting fields of most workers. The paper argues that the way ahead lies in identifying local concentrations of unemployment using a resident-based denominator, and mapping their effective commuting fields to establish where employment growth would need to occur in order to benefit them
