Glimmers of hope?
No-one can be in any doubt that there are significant problems to address in the UK economy. But there are glimmers of hope to be found.
As some of our fundamental facts illustrate, when compared internationally, the UK too often ends up being on the wrong end of extremes: from the regional productivity gap to intra-city transport to built up land per capita. This isn’t a good status quo, but it does mean that even just shifting our economy closer to the average of our international counterparts could enable big gains – we don’t have to do something no-one else is doing.
And we have strengths. In particular, the expert economists we met with mentioned strong links between universities and industry, the life sciences sector, clean technologies and world-leading services exports. A final choice for government to consider will be the extent to which we double down on our strengths or focus on improving productivity in broad-based bulk employers such as retail and distribution, given that these sectors have a bigger impact on our aggregate productivity. An effective ambitious industrial strategy would need to involve strategic decision-making about the areas and sectors in which we should invest not only money, but also time and energy.
The UK 2040 Options project will be taking some of these choices forward to consider policy options in more depth, before testing and interrogating them. For now, we’ll conclude on the optimistic note struck by one of our economists:
"The UK does have underlying strengths…we just need to work towards realising those strengths.”
Workshop participants
We sincerely thank our workshop participants for their time and contributions. Please note that not all participants will have agreed with all of the discussion points above.
- Andy Haldane, RSA [Chair]
- Andy Westwood, The Productivity Institute
- Anna Valero, LSE
- David Halpern, The Behavioural Insights Team
- Chris Pook, The Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre
- Emily Fry, Resolution Foundation
- Gemma Tetlow, Institute For Government
- Giles Wilkes, Flint Global and Institute for Government
- Joanna Key, The Treasury
- Ravi Gurumurthy, Nesta
- Shreya Nanda, The Social Market Foundation
Additional participants in the Delphi exercise
- Anthony Breach, Centre for Cities
- Aveek Bhattacharya, Social Market Foundation
- Dan Mawson, Department for Business and Trade
- Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge
- Jakob Schneebacher, Competition and Markets Authority
- Lord Jim O'Neill, Honorary Chair of Economics at Manchester University
- John Asthana Gibson, Social Market Foundation
- John Springford, Centre for European Reform
- Josh Martin, Bank of England
- Dame Kate Barker, Productivity Institute
- Kitty Ussher, Institute of Directors
- Liz Ditchburn, Honorary Professor, University of Glasgow
- Mike Brewer, Resolution Foundation
- Nida Broughton, The Behavioural Insights Team
- Sam Bowman, Works in Progress
- Sam Dumitriu, Britain Remade
- Tera Allas, McKinsey
