Growing more productive - what can be done to solve the UK's productivity puzzle?

Full video of this session:

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Automation and AI have been hailed as technological solutions that could deliver step-changes in UK productivity, but how are these disrupting technologies really playing out in the UK economy? It is important to understand better the geography and scope of how new technologies are impacting labour markets, and what the fiscal and labour law environment does to support growth.

Acting as background briefs to this session were two major new studies.

The first, from Cambridge Professor of Law, Simon Deakin, has analysed how changes to labour laws across the world from 1970 to the present day have interacted with economic indicators. Do stronger protections for workers harm growth, or help them to become more productive?

The second, released as part of IFOW's Pissarides Review - funded by the Nuffield Foundation - is the UK's first 'Disruption Index', an innovative analytical tool that offers a nuanced perspective on the multifaceted nature of technological transformation across the regions of the country. If we are to tailor intelligent responses to the changes precipitated by the complex interplay between technology adoption and work – whether through regulation, policy or investment, or otherwise – we ideally need a measure of the scale of these changes, and their geographic distribution. This is what the DI seeks to do.

Co-chair Matt Warman MP was be joined by an expert panel:

• Anna Leach, Deputy Chief Economist at the CBI
• Professor Simon Deakin, Professor of Law at Cambridge University
• Professor Philip McCann, Chair of Urban and Regional Economics at Alliance Manchester Business School
• Dr Daniel Susskind, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University
• Anna Thomas, co-founder & co-director of IFOW
• Dr Bertha Rohenkohl, Researcher at IFOW

Speaker Bios:

‍Matt Warman MP (co-chair) is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Boston and Skegness and is a former Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In 2022 he was tasked by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to conduct a future of work review.

Matt worked for The Daily Telegraph from 1999 until 2015 where he led coverage of Facebook, Google and Apple as well as interviewing key figures from the technology sector.

He was a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee and co-chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Broadband and Digital Communication. In 2019 he became a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital Infrastructure.

Anna Thomas is the co-founder and Director of the Institute for the Future of Work. She was formerly a barrister from Devereux Chambers, specialising in employment law and appointed as Counsel to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Prior to setting up the Institute for the Future of Work, Anna was Head of Policy for the Future of Work Commission. Anna is also Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research, the RSA and IEO, and is on the Advisory Board of Digital Futures at Work (Digit).

Anna Leach is Deputy Chief Economist at the Confederation of British Industry, where she heads the economic intelligence team which produces and analyses the CBI’s economic surveys and provides the CBI’s macroeconomic forecast. Anna previously worked in the Government Economic Service (GES) in various roles at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), where she worked on UK local area labour markets and international labour markets, and at the Treasury, where she worked on business sector analysis and macroeconomic communications.

Simon Deakin is a Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in labour law, private law, company law and EU law, and he contributes regularly to the fields of law and economics, law and development, and empirical legal studies. He is a co-lead for research theme 1: The Impact of Digitalisation on Work on Employment at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre. He is Director of the Centre for Business Research and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He has carried out empirical legal research in numerous countries including Japan, China, Russia, India and South Africa. He is currently researching the implications for law of machine learning.

Professor Philip McCann is Chair of Urban and Regional Economics at Alliance Manchester Business School. He specialises in spatial economics and economic geography. Internationally, Philip was previously Special Adviser to two EU Commissioners for Regional Policy, Johannes Hahn (2010-2013) and Corina Creţu (2015-2016) and regularly works with international organisations such as the OECD, United Cities and Local Government, the European Investment Bank, the European Commission and government bodies in various countries.

Dr Bertha Rohenkohl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Future of Work. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sheffield, and researches various topics of inequality, social mobility and labour economics. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics, a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Economics (University of Sheffield) and an Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.

Dr Daniel Susskind explores the impact of technology, and particularly AI, on work and society. He is a Research Professor in Economics at King’s College London, a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and an Associate Member of the Economics Department at Oxford University. He is the co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions (2015) and the author of A World Without Work (2020), and his new book, Growth: A Reckoning, will be published in April 2024.

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