Business News Round Up (22/03/2021)
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A year of Covid lockdowns cost UK economy £251bn
A year of Covid-19 lockdowns has cost the UK economy £251bn – the equivalent of the entire annual output of the south-east of England or nearly twice that of Scotland, according to a new report. Analysis by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found that while the whole of the country had suffered huge damage from restrictions on activity since the first national lockdown began, some poorer regions had suffered the most. The consultancy said the north-south gap would widen unless the government took steps to ensure that the less well-off parts of the UK did not disproportionately bear the economic losses caused by the pandemic. Sam Miley, a CEBR economist, said the report compared his organisation’s pre-Covid-19 forecasts for the UK with the level of output 12 months after Boris Johnson told Britons that they had to stay at home. Gross value added (GVA) – which measures the value of the goods and services produced by the economy, minus the costs of inputs and raw materials needed to deliver them – was more than £250bn lower than it would otherwise have been, Miley said.
Global demand for UK technology drives recovery in February
The number of UK sectors reporting output growth doubled in February, led by a strong performance from technology firms, according to the latest Bank of Scotland UK Recovery Tracker. Working with IHS Markit data, the monthly analysis showed that the output of six of the 14 UK sectors monitored rose in February – up from three in January – with technology equipment manufacturers (58.2) recording the strongest growth. Tech manufacturers – which include producers of specialist parts in smart devices, motor vehicles, computers, and industrial machinery – cited higher international demand for components. As a result, it was the only UK sector monitored by the tracker to register a rise in new export orders during February. Firms within the sector also cited new orders from global technology companies diversifying their supply chains and investing in research and development to improve resilience following Covid-19. The output growth of food and drink manufacturers (53.7), the second-best performing sector during February, was driven by continuing strong demand from domestic retailers, while the healthcare (52.6) sector benefitted from demand for goods and services that support the UK’s vaccine programme.
https://www.insider.co.uk/news/global-demand-uk-technology-drives-23759707
Tech job listings in the UK declined by 57% in 2020
The number of technology job listings in the UK declined by 57% during the past year, with fewer than 55,000 open roles advertised, according to the latest UK Tech Talent Tracker from Accenture. Despite this, demand for skills in cutting-edge technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics saw a resurgence in many cities across the country. The tracker, which analysed LinkedIn’s Professional Network data, found that the overall decline was driven by a reduced number of job listings for data analytics and cyber security professionals, which fell 53% and 54%, respectively. With nearly 35,000 roles advertised, cloud computing was the most in-demand technology skill in the UK over the past year. This reflects the fact that, due to the pandemic, a greater number of companies looked to cloud services to support their remote workforces and transform their businesses.
https://londonlovesbusiness.com/tech-job-listings-in-the-uk-declined-by-57-in-2020/
Full scale of Britain’s job crisis uncovered in new Centre for Cities research
New Centre for Cities’ research in partnership with HSBC UK reveals that Britain’s jobs crisis is bigger than realised, as the economy will need to create almost ten million new private sector jobs just to reverse the damage done by the pandemic. Analysis of Britain’s ‘jobs miracle’ from 2013 to 2019 – when the national economy created 2.7 million net new jobs – finds that 19.3 million private sector jobs were created during this period and 16.6 million were lost. This meant that seven new private sector jobs were needed to create one viable job. If this pattern repeats post-Covid then 9.4 million new private sector jobs will be needed to get the 1.3 million people who lost their jobs during the pandemic working again. After the financial crisis, big cities created the vast majority of new jobs and are expected to do so again post-Covid. London created one in four of all new private sector jobs (790,300) – equal to 17 Scarborough’s, or 25 Hartlepool’s. Other big cities also played an outsized role: in Manchester, 152,100 new jobs were created; in Birmingham the number was 99,100; and in Glasgow 40,800.