London still UK’s most productive area – but output growth down

London still UK’s most productive area – but output growth down

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Newest official figures affirm nation’s reliance on its capital metropolis, whereas additionally exhibiting that it is not rising its energy because it as soon as was

London continues to be far probably the most economically productive a part of the UK, with output per hour labored a large 28.5 per cent above the UK nationwide common, whereas the performances of Scotland, Wales, Northern Eire and each different English area besides the South East fall under it, in accordance with new knowledge from the Workplace for Nationwide Statistics.

Nonetheless, in what is likely to be a warning signal to the nationwide authorities after it selected to not spend money on any new transport infrastructure tasks within the capital in final week’s Spending Assessment, the identical figures present that London was alone in exhibiting a fall in productiveness development throughout the identical interval, albeit a really small one.

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Sir Sadiq Khan has criticised Chancellor Rachel Reeves for her remedy of London, telling the BBC she made “a colossal mistake in pitting London in opposition to the remainder of the nation”, describing its as “ugly” and saying her failure to fund the proposed extension of the Docklands Mild Railway south of the Thames to Thamesmead will make it tougher to hit Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s formidable homebuilding targets.

The brand new ONS figures are for 2023, and canopy the the penultimate of 14 years of Conservative-led nationwide authorities, throughout which London was excluded from a spread of presidency funding programmes, an strategy derided by its opponents as “levelling down” the capital, which produces virtually 1 / 4 of all UK financial output and generates a fiscal surplus – tax revenues which are spent in different components of the UK – value tens of billion kilos a yr.

London’s output per job was additionally far increased than anyplace else’s at 35.5 per cent above the Uk common. The ONS commentary on the brand new knowledge notes that it reveals London sustaining its “relative energy, a unbroken development since data started in 1998.” Even so, productiveness development in London has broadly flatlined because the world monetary disaster of 2008.

The brand new figures present that whereas London’s output per hour labored shrank by 1.1 per cent in contrast with 2019, the ultimate full yr earlier than the pandemic, its has risen in all places else, significantly within the North West, by 9.9 per cent, Northern Eire, by 7.3 per cent, and Yorkshire and the Humber, by 6.1 per cent.

Which means that London’s contribution to “productiveness change” has been one among minus 0.3 per cent whereas everyh else’s has gone up, led by the north west’s plus ).9 per cent.

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In February, the London Development Plan, an in depth doc compiled by Metropolis Corridor and the cross-party London Councils group representing the entire capital’s native authorities, set the objectives of accelerating London’s productiveness by a price of two per cent per yr over the following decade, giving a projected £107 billion increase to the capital’s economic system and producing an extra £27 billion in taxes for the Treasury.

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