As expected the OBR cut their forecast of borrowing in the year to March 2021. They have lopped £39bn off the total compared to the November forecast and may still find their figure a bit high with only one month left to go. In contrast they have raised their borrowing forecast for 2021-22, partly to reflect the extension of measures announced in the budget to cushion some of the effects of continuing lock downs and social distancing policies. They wisely stress the difficulties of forecasting given the big impact lock down policies have on jobs and business. They rightly draw attention to the fall in debt interest thanks to low interest rates and the purchase of state debt by the state owned Bank of England. It seems to me premature to form a view of what might be needed to control the deficit in a few years time when it is so clear that the deficit is massively swelled by the impact of anti pandemic spending and some loss of tax revenue from less output and income. As their figures confirm it will take a vigorous recovery to get the deficit down, but only a good recovery can straighten out the public finances.
So the budget needs to be judged by how big an impact will it have on that recovery? My questions include
- When will the Freeports be up and running? Will the areas demarked be substantial? How generous will the tax and tariff reductions be? I strongly support a Freeport led recovery but to be effective they need to be available soon, to be given good incentives and cover substantial areas. There are some proposals in the Red Book with issues still to settle.
- How will the supercharged investment allowances work? What is the net effect on a potential inward investor of the improved allowance against the higher CT rate stated to come in in 2023?
- What more will the government do to back the self employed and small business, as they will be crucial to recovery given their flexibility and enterprise?
- What plans does the government have to address the issue of productivity performance, which affects the longer term growth rate?
I will develop these and related themes tomorrow as part of the budget debate.
March 3, 2021
Have you no interest whatsoever in how to address the collapse in exports to the EU , the loss of equivalence draining life o0ut of the City or any help for businesses struggling with the mountain of red tape you have inflicted on them ?
You are right that without a steep v shaped recovering we are sunk but if you cannot bear to look at the damage you have caused how do we fix it ? As for Freeports we had them before and they dwindled as within the EU they were pointless . The best we can get is what we had already but more expensively – how does that achieve anything “real” ?
March 3, 2021
JR, suggest you read article by Andrew Montford in con woman yesterday, very disturbing attitude towards business, shareholders and making directors criminally liable for carbon reporting of company. Is there anything left in your party that is conservative or conservative towards business?
March 3, 2021
+1
March 4, 2021
Sunak announced how he and Patel would change visa applications to help the Fake Tory mass immigration policy. Why not properly educate our children?
Where was the tax rises for big tech-Amazon, google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc?
March 4, 2021
The other interesting thing about that article was the coverage of the ‘de-toxification’ of the Tory brand by CMD. Or to put it another way, getting rid of the Right Wing of the Party.
March 4, 2021
Mark,
I am not sure it is the right wing, but anything conservative. How could this govt write “pregnant people” into legislation. It claims to be led by science, only women are pregnant! Look at all the green nonsense in the budget yesterday. Fake Tories going full whacko!
Fake Tories responsible Worse economic record in history for everything, debt, deficit, recession, taxation and then decide to announce to destroy industry by inconsistent energy supply some of which determined by EU which is out to deliberately to cause our country harm!
Corbyn’s economics looking thrifty and prudent by comparison.
Blaming an inanimate virus for their unnecessary catastrophic decisions.
March 4, 2021
‘Right-wingism’ in The Tory Party is SELF-INDULGENCE (same for Corbynism in Labour). It’s also immature bravado.
The country is messed up for reasons far greater than politics. When politicians turn too right-wing (or too left-wing), they’re trying to ‘sort out’ the larger problems of the country through politics, when so many of these problems can only be sorted through Education / Good Media / The Arts (and even then not all problems will be sorted or nearly sorted).
Also, voters get turned off by parties when they become too extreme.
March 4, 2021
‘The country is messed up ‘
– And not just the UK but the whole of the West: France, Canada, USA, Germany, Sweden, Spain … The problem is far deeper than politics.
March 4, 2021
@Hope; Why should those with direct control (or indirect, as is the case with voting shares) of a company be immune from, or above, the law?
The only people who appear to have left modern conservatism behind are those who think as you do, yours is a thinking that has not existed for decades, perhaps well over 100 years.
March 4, 2021
Jerry, drivel once more. Utter garbage nor do you possess knowledge of people 100 years ago.
March 4, 2021
Hope, drivel once more. Utter garbage, ho-hum!
Stop being so dismissive of historical facts, after all we know what the policies the Tory party used to believe because they wrote their ideals down in documents called manifestos, or in govt papers etc. It will be noted that you dodged, by way of personal abuse, the question I asked -as usual…
March 3, 2021
@Newmania; Perhaps our host has no interest in the lies of the anti Brexit Europhiles?! Clue, international trade is suffering globally due to the pandemic, delays within both the shipping industry and warehousing are causing a shortage of shipping containers and that is causing more delays (and shipping cost increases), a perfect vortex of a storm that has nothing what to ever to do with Brexit.
March 3, 2021
True.
Well said Jerry.
March 3, 2021
Further, Jerry
We were delayed by four years by Remainers… just in time for CV-19 to come along.
March 4, 2021
‘We were delayed by four years by Remainers’
– If Brexit is about blaming people (48% of the population) then it’s already a failure (for people are more important than politics / sovereignty). Plus Big Projects (like in Business) always have to have contingency plans. Otherwise it’s nothing more than people playing at something (for whatever reason: boredom, mainly perhaps).
Leadership is about getting people on board with a positive vision for the future. Sovereignty could be a GREAT SUCCESS (in theory / in the long-term – or a massive failure) as long as we have a great, positive vision that UNITES people instead of blaming people (and we really need a strong leader with a strong business-like plan how we’re going to pay for it!).
Life is too short. If people aren’t willing to get others on board in a good-natured, positive fashion, then what’s the point of Sovereignty? Might as well go and live in some desert island or become a sheep farmer in Yorkshire Dales or a hermit – far from the CRAZY Madding Crowd.
March 4, 2021
Not to mention border closures all massive challenges to traditional in silo linear supply chains. The pandemic has shown that companies need to develop broader partner arrangements to work around specific bottlenecks.
March 3, 2021
Only around 13 per cent of businesses actually trade directly with the EU. For the other 87 per cent (roughly equivalent to over five million companies), Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU will have little direct bearing.
March 3, 2021
Correct – but you never hear that figure in the media
March 4, 2021
John seems, if anything, to want to compound that damage.
He mentions productivity – where the Continent often does better than the UK – but wants to scrap the minimal protections of the WTD, when overwork and poor morale are often cited as central reasons for the UK’s mediocre performance.
Enthusiasm is a rather better motivator for employees than fear, but I suppose that it depends on what you want, doesn’t it?
March 3, 2021
On balance an encouraging budget, but with a few ommissions. Nothing on how we counter the EU assult on the City of London’s financial institutions. Nothing about how a Brexit free trade deal came festooned in so much red tape and physical paper work that is rendering it impotent. What happened to electronic exchange. No indication of how the strangulation of NI trade is to be rapidly reversed. Nor any mention of how our fishing industry, under threat from black ops by the EU, can be assisted in finding new markets. For me there would appear to be many areas that need urgently addressing.
When it came to the opposition, apart from criticising a lack of money for their pet causes, it seemed to me very distanced from reality.
March 3, 2021
agricola,
With regard to omissions, perhaps cynically, I believe Sunak will not be too worried as that is all stuff for which Johnson can carry the can.
Sunak’s image will be safe in the media. There is nothing punitive that will impact on him. He is a rich man anyway with a wealthy wife. So he may be looking towards the Davos set, as well as his next job in government.
The Telegraph has a piece today about how he presents himself, wearing hoodies as well as suits that disguise the fact that he is short in stature.
We had the same thing with Gordon Brown for a long time – the image of the prudent Scot denied his turn as PM. That was before the gold sell off and the destruction of the pension funds.
March 3, 2021
All of those things you describe – the masses of extra bureaucracy, the disaster for the fishing industry, the disruption to life in Northern Ireland, the EU assault on the City – are Brexit. This has always been what Brexit meant. We did spend five years telling you. You didn’t listen.
Incidentally, assuming you have been in Spain since January – your time will soon be up. You can now only stay 90 days, because you axed free movement, which means you need to return to the UK on March 31st. You can’t then return to Spain until July. Or – let me guess – these rules which will apply to everyone else because of your leave vote won’t apply to you for some reason. There’s a word for that.
March 3, 2021
Actually I never thought the EU would try to stir up ancient enmities in NI as they are doing. Nor did I think they would launch a mini trade war in financial services, which will surely damage the EU more than it does the U.K., as protectionism always does. But it’s quite an eye-opener. All this, the vaccine fiasco and of course the never ending effect of the euro doomsday machine mean there is now no chance of the U.K. ever voting for rejoin.
March 3, 2021
And we spent four years telling you we’d voted to Leave but Remainers repeatedly said we didn’t mean it and kept us stuck in the cat flap so long that a black swan arrives in the form of the worst pandemic in one hundred years.
You make a decision you stick with it.
You mark your X on a ballot box you honour the result and get it done – otherwise this sort of thing happens.
March 3, 2021
Tax threshold frozen…..
Milk the serfs
March 3, 2021
Sunak:- “I am not going to increase the rate of Income Tax, VAT or National Insurance.” I will just freeze the threshold to increase your tax by the back door. Note the Manifesto promise was worded so we could rat on voters without technically breaking the promise!
March 3, 2021
Not by raising how much income tax (.20p) in the £ for income over £12,570, but by reducing your taxable income via the tax code, has resulted in those on a low income, but earn above £12,570, ending up paying more tax. This is particularly true of pensioners on a low income.
In a cynical attempt to prove how magnanimous they have, under protest, kept the triple lock. However if you dare to work to supplement your income and earn more £12,570 we will reduce your tax code, so that the full benefit of triple lock is removed.
From people who claim ‘expenses’ up to 9 times more than what they expect a pensioner to live for a year!
March 4, 2021
Yes, blatant lies plus of course ‘an increase in corporation tax ‘would be a tax on jobs. Whoops. An increase in corporation tax isn’t a tax on jobs. Plus the usual rubbish about apprenticeships, management training, a national investment bank etc
Corbyn would have been proud. The question is how do MPs like our host finally decide that their party has moved so far away from their own principles that they cannot support it. The clue is in the word principle. Never I guess.
March 4, 2021
Sunak says he is just being honest. Yeah right!
March 4, 2021
Sunak also said – we will of course honour the promised increase to the personal allowance threshold this year. Why “of course” the Tories have still have not given us the £1 million IHT threshold promised by Osborne many years back, still just £325k so no one expects promises to be kept by Tories. Freezing thresholds clearly pushes more people into 40% income taxes and increases the % of tax they actually pay so is another broken manifesto promise (in effect).
I am with Allister Heath today in the Telegraph today.
Tories have trashed Thatcherism and embraced Europe’s politics of decline. Sunak’s Budget showed that Conservatives now think growth materialises like Manna from Heaven
He rightly concludes:- This was an avoidably bad Budget that will haunt the Tories for years to come.
March 4, 2021
A new driving licence type of points based system for self employed people’s late filing of tax returns. Another stick to beat the self employed of top of IR35, making tax digital, the courts attacks on the GIG economy and all the other endless red tape and inconveniences.
March 4, 2021
If you keep proper straight books, its pretty easy to file on time. Paying the tax due is another matter at the moment. These days computer programmes make accounting so easy compared with when I started out with written books and hand calculating employees tax etc. The other day I found some old books which I kept and the complexity with all that and VAT as well is mind boggling.
March 4, 2021
+1LL,
but they did break their manifesto. In the usual underhand way tried to raise tax without anyone noticing. It is not technical it is real money taken from us for Johnson to waste. They could make cuts to bloated public sector like councils, quangos, overseas aid, welfare etc.
March 4, 2021
Hope, But there are reports he has made cuts such as – “The IFS suggested that Rishi Sunak’s long-term plans involved spending cuts that were so harsh as to be unrealistic.” Guardian. “The budget involved cuts worth around £4bn a year in spending after next year,” Paul Johnson, the IFS Director said.
Departments such as “justice and local government, faced real-terms cuts in 2022-23”. On ‘Welfare’ “The Institute for Fiscal Studies has criticised Rishi Sunak’s plans for an abrupt end to the £20 a week increase in universal credit, calling the decision not to phase out the uplift “remarkable”.
March 3, 2021
Borrowing continues apace. The serfs to be milked are the next generation.
March 4, 2021
That’s always been the case. Only in this century did we finish paying for WW2 and fairly recently, I think for the Napoleonic wars. Do you think the coming generations won’t be able to bear it the way our generation did?What’s the alternative? Put the taxes on now to repay over the next ten years and bankrupt industry and collapse the economy?
March 4, 2021
I’m 81 and didn’t know until 2020 that I had been paying for WW2 so ignorance was bliss – I suspect that will be the same for the coming generations too.
March 4, 2021
the next generation (too)
March 4, 2021
Taxation is not the main form of exploitation of the ordinary people by far.
It is EMPLOYMENT, on onerous, precarious, and unjust terms.
Why do you keep voting for a party which has this as a central objective?
March 4, 2021
and to have all workers mortgaged so that instant follow the jobs is impossible.
Tie them down, thus ensuring long term trapped workforce.
March 3, 2021
So Sunak announced increases stamp duty by up to £15K per house (for later this year) but actually announced that he was cutting stamp duty! He really thought we would not notice?
He announce very large increases corporation tax. Increases in Income Tax, Inheritance Tax, the 55% pension tax & Capital Gains Tax by freezing and even reducing tax allowances.
The Office for Budget Responsibility say the tax rises announced in this budget will lift the tax burden to the highest level since Roy Jenkins was chancellor in the late 1960s.
Still ministers are complaining about low productivity. Why do we have low productivity? Well we have a huge dead weight of the state round our necks, absurd levels of taxation, a dire NHS, poor schools, an absurd expensive energy agenda, daft & restrictive employment and planning laws, a government at war with the gig economy and self employed, the insane war against C02 (please someone tell Sunak C02 plant & tree food is not dirty please.
Why not make the whole of a UK a Freeport, if they are a good plan for one place why not everywhere? Why should one place have an unfair advantage in the tax system. It just forces businesses to move around, wastes money & inconveniences and distracts the businesses in the process.
Very little sensible the super deductions perhaps have not seen the detail yet. The man is a deluded green crap and red tape pushing Socialist. Even more tax complexity too!
March 4, 2021
He is a stooge for the foreign outsourcing movement.
March 4, 2021
Lots of very dim journalists on Radio and TV seem to think the super deductions scheme will allow you to deduct 130% of the cost of investments from your CT bill. Hardly just 19% of 130% of the cost. And this only for 2 years. Better than nothing but very not much better.
March 3, 2021
Good questions.In principle I like the idea of the 130%Capital Allowance as a way of stimulating investment .We badly need this to create growth and improve our productivity . We badly need growth to generate tax revenues to pay off the deficit as well as improving our standard of living
However, taking Sir JR’s very valid points about forecasting ,the OBR’s predictions of 1.7,1.6 and 1.7% growth in the three years following the bounce-back are hardly earth shattering and no better than the pre-pandemic growth rates ?
March 3, 2021
Dear Sir John,
For me, as an advocate of Brexit, the most depressing line in the Red Book is the forecast that the current account balance of payments deficit will rise from 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2019 and 3.7 per cent in the plague year to 5.4 per cent in 2025 (with higher figures in between). If this proves to be true then Brexit will have been an economic failure in its first five years. Instead of braking the vicious circle of spending ever more than we earn and leaking ever more of our output into interest dividends and rents paid abroad, we shall have accelerated it.
March 3, 2021
The Green Revolution will hammer the economy and we be will spending more on foreign electricity because of a deficit in reliable base load; electricity companies will continue to treat industry as a soft touch unlike in Germany. As described by JR, the Business Secretary has been to tell GM they should turn their engine plant into a battery plant with all the transmission parts that an engine plant doesn’t make: the ignorance of Arts graduates about science or engineering is mind-boggling.
The Tory Party is open for business which to them means selling off our most successful businesses. This will have an increasing effect on the current account, as will spending money on overpriced and under performing foreign military hardware. It’s about time the Tory party thought about living in the real world of today.
March 3, 2021
Clearly the Chancellor had to put some sort of programme together given the protocol of doing something on certain dates, but I have to say I think trying to forecast anything at the moment given where we are is really pie in the sky, and as for trying to forecast for the next 5 years, thought that just daft at the moment.
Bit of a give and take budget really, Freeports and the supercharged tax allowance probably the two biggest items, as there was no way furlough and other support programmes were going to finish until later in the year given some businesses were still going to remain closed under government orders.
Thought Starmers response was absolutely dire, clearly he is living in a different World to anyone else. Likewise his performance at Prime Ministers Question Time.
March 3, 2021
Off topic
I see that the new Census form asks many more questions than I remember before.
Viewed it on line, but will wait for the postal version and return that one, only filling in the answers which appertain to a Census, others will simply have a line put through them.
Happy to give names and details of who lives in our house as I have in previous years, but quite what sort of heating we have, what type of formal qualifications, apprenticeship details, and how they all describe their religion, gender etc, is for the birds I am afraid..
March 4, 2021
You think the government would say if you fill your census in online we will donate £5 or whatever to the NHS, Laptops for Schools, Social Security fund, tick your choice.
March 3, 2021
James Forsyth in the Spectator just now.
It might seem a strange thing to say about a Chancellor who is presiding over an annual deficit of £355 billion, but Rishi Sunak is a fiscal conservative. This is what explains his decision to hike corporation tax to 25p in 2023. He thinks that this move is necessary to begin to put the public finances on a sounder footing.
Well hardy:-
A fiscal conservative is an economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility advocating low taxes, reduced government spending and minimal government debt, deregulation, free trade, privatization and tax cuts. Fiscal conservatism follows the same philosophical outlook of classical liberalism.
Sunak is nothing of the sort, he has not even cancelled HS2 yet, he is running an absurd vastly expensive war on C02 plant food, a mad expensive intermittent energy agenda, wastes about £15 billion PA on largely worthless degrees, likes a virtual state monopoly education system (other than for him), thinks health care should be a virtual monopoly & free & at the point of rationing. He also likes silly gimmicks like eat out to help out and business training grants. Not remotely a fiscal conservative or a classical liberal just another deluded PPE Oxon. graduate. Essentially another tax borrow and piss down the drain socialist.
March 3, 2021
Nothing about ending the Northern Ireland problem or the strangulation of our exports. I know Frost is dealing with Brussels but I’m sure the chancellor could have put some speed bumps in the EU way.
March 3, 2021
Nothing we can do to change the NI Protocol it has been signed off and filed away besides Biden is there in the US instead of Trump and if we want a deal with them then we have to behave ourselves and be mindful of the Irish dimension. Then there is the question of passporting when looking for Financials and insurance services for business into EU. Seems to me every way we are screwed
March 4, 2021
Ian, do you know which goods can’t be ‘sold’ from the UK to Northern Ireland at the moment? Is there a list somewhere, that would be useful wouldn’t it then people could make judgements better about what we buy from the EU until we have a level playing field.
For example; I read seeds, well how many seeds do we import from the EU into the UK? We were told by Boris we had signed a Trade and Co-operation agreement, is there a list of what items are excluded from that TCA can you direct me to it? Where do we import flowers and plants in soil from for Mother’s Day – the UK public needs to get smarter in supporting our own excluded and first we need to know who exactly is excluded.
March 3, 2021
The first rule a politician has to learn is how to deliberately mislead your audience into thinking something good has happened, when in fact, something only slightly less worse has actually happened. Hence JR’s headline above.
Today’s new DMO Remit shows the gross financing forecast has been reduced from £518 billion to £485 billion for 20/21. Which will only be significant to those of the neoliberal austerity ideology.
Rishi came up with some supply side tricks for investing in this that and the other; but, very little that would encourage the demand side to stop worrying about the future; stop saving into a redundancy protection fund and start spending. Companies don’t invest in new output unless convinced there will be herds of customers trying to get hold of their products and services. This budget doesn’t aid that.
The Freeports plan raised a chuckle. The UK used to have seven Freeports but Osborne did away with them in 2012. The EU has dozens of them but also wants to do away with them. Freeports make Tax Havens look like Charities.
March 3, 2021
Good to know there is the likely to be a general election in 2023. This will be the test of Brexit and my guess is it will be shown to be a failure.
Next election will be about the Brexit fall out, I hope there is a coalition that takes Britain into the EU Customs Union, and we get open borders once again.
March 3, 2021
Fascinating stuff. Who cares what you think? You have a single vote like everyone else.
March 5, 2021
I for one – more so than I ever would be in your 100% predictable nonsense.
March 3, 2021
Another alarming forecast, Sir John , is that house prices will rise at 3 or 4 times more than GDP per capita by 2025. Will boosting demand with mortgage guarantees help to make houses more affordable? Will building new houses qualify for a big chunk of the Infrastructure Fund or the Green Fund?
March 3, 2021
Sunak is so daft & deluded that he did not even cancel IR35. This will be hugely damaging. Does this bonkers government want everyone to work in parasitic jobs (law, accounting, HR, compliance, health and safely consultancy, tax consultancy, motorist muggers, bureaucrats, tax collectors …………………all essentially living off the backs of the circa 20% of workers who do actually do something constructive, useful and of some value?
March 3, 2021
No reform of the leviathan that is Socialist client state constructed by Marxist Labour since 1997. Indeed the unfettered spending on this political construct just continues hyperbolically, without restraint and without a care from a Tory party that’s been in power since 2010
It’s quite simple. The Tory party doesn’t give a toss about the taxpayer or the man in the street. Their concern is party focused, end of.
And this budget is a budget by a Chancellor that hasn’t the balls to tell the nation as it is, the true state of play. Why the reticence? The political vested interest of the Tory party is the only thing that matters and Mr Redwood can indulge in as much rhetoric as he likes but he and we all know the truth. His party has impaled itself on the horns of a Socialist dilemma and the Sword of McCluskey hangs over it
The financial bill for Tory party spinelessness and moral bankruptcy has not yet arrived in the post but we are seeing other demands in other areas of life. We are paying the price in lost freedoms, attacks on identity and in the future tax raids to protect the Tory party from harm and their reluctance to confront the all powerful Marxist construct
March 3, 2021
+1
March 3, 2021
So..according to the Chairman of OBR the economy is to “rebound”to pre pandemic levels by mid 2022.
How does that fit in with Von der Leyen’s forecast ( they all love their forecasts don’t they?) of an “era of pandemics”.
Hope that doesn’t include us? EU better get jabbing!
March 3, 2021
A budget with only one aim to use the taxes of hard working Southerners to buy Red Wall votes. How long will this nonsense go on how long will we Southerners be sending our money North to fund the lifestyles of unhealthy Northerners? Time to care more about Wokingham than Workington don’t you think John.
March 3, 2021
Hear hear!
March 4, 2021
Rubbish.
Northerners work just as hard as southerners. Why do you say they are unhealthy ?
Northern money has been used to pay for all this infracstrucure in the south, so time for a little bit more to be done in the north.
March 3, 2021
This is all well and good, but when are they going to unlock the country?
We are now nearly a year into ‘three weeks to save the NHS’.
March 4, 2021
NHS is a lost cause, and Covid ie. pneumonia deaths, or COPD will be recorded to keep the pandemic and control forefront.
March 3, 2021
We weren’t told about the NI free port. Let us hope Lord Frost will pre empt the EU neutering it. And what a disappointment that we can’t arm NI with a really low corporation tax. Can something be done via the free port?
March 3, 2021
There will be no freeports because it will not suit the EU
FTI will not suddenly happen, in fact whatever there is there will fade away
The Government is not going to do anything to help small business including the inshore fishermen
As regards producitivity the Government has no plans
You asked for comment
March 4, 2021
The French don’t like us..the Germans are indifferent.. Biden is in the White House
seems to me budgeting and financials are the least…. …Blah
March 4, 2021
Your Q1 says a lot about the government. In office for over a year, and with – if I remember correctly – a Spad brought in to run with the project, yet here we are with little having been accomplished to date. I expect government to be able to multi-task and work ‘at pace’.
March 4, 2021
The Tories have trashed Thatcherism and embraced Europe’s politics of decline. Indeed. Highest taxes in 50 years.
March 4, 2021
As in the past inflation will help deal with the government’s debt problem while the tax payer takes the pain on both higher inflation and higher taxes.
March 4, 2021
Hardly an imaginative budget, it does not inspire confidence.
Why didn’t he reduce fuel duty, and why did he keep tax allowances unchanged? These could have helped us all.
Why did he put a break on investment with the increase in corporation tax?
All in all, a wasted opportunity.
March 4, 2021
The important rule about OBR forecasts is that they are ALWAYS wrong! After this budget it is even clearer that the supposedly Conservative party has morphed into Labour not-so-lite.
March 4, 2021
Q4 Productivity!
Google says “Subregional productivity in the UK. The article provides estimates for sub-regional labour productivity measured as gross value added (GVA) per hour worked and GVA per filled job.”
Just how is your government measuring productivity? How do you know what hours people are working to assess this, is it just on a sample of people because that is not very accurate? Is it on employee numbers -v- turnover or -v- profit? How do you know what hours are worked by each person on the payroll of each company to make these claims currently? How do you measure the gig economy -v- the PAYE? They don’t report their hours worked? How do you measure the NHS is it just on what they spend rather than what they provide? Are they measured against other healthcare providers in other Countries? How when charges for treatments aren’t calculated and you don’t know which hospitals are operating productively or not? How are councils measured for productivity?
If you are assessing SME’s for productivity do you intend to tell them if they are unproductive by your measures, if not how to do you expect things to change? How productive are the large companies in the UK? How productive is say British Gas?