Business conditions

New and updated

• Mandatory business closures due to coronavirus take effect

  Type:

  Legal timetable

  The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Business Closure) (England) Regulations 2020 set out which businesses must close to prevent spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).

• Businesses and unions react to UK 'lockdown'

  Date:

  24 March 2020

  Type:

  News

  A nationwide "lockdown" for everybody apart from key workers, announced by Boris Johnson last night, means that many employees will be working from home or unable to work at all from today.

• Business confidence: private sector

  Type:

  Indicators

  Updated to include the outlook on the services industry from the CBI Quarterly Service Sector Survey, February 2020.

• Productivity continues to be outpaced by wage growth

  Date:

  9 January 2020

  Type:

  News

  The Office for National Statistics has published the latest productivity figures for the UK showing that output per hour rose only 0.1% in the third quarter of last year, compared to the same period in 2018.

• Give workers more holiday to stimulate economic growth, report urges

  Date:

  12 August 2019

  Type:

  News

  Increasing minimum holiday entitlement and wages would help solve the UK's productivity crisis and stimulate economic growth, a think tank has suggested.

• Waning productivity costs staff £5,000 over past decade

  Date:

  8 July 2019

  Type:

  News

  Workers have lost out on just over £5,000 in wages because of poor productivity growth over the last decade, new figures show.

• Reliance on agency workers increases as confidence in economy drops

  Date:

  24 April 2019

  Type:

  News

  UK employers are increasingly likely to hire agency workers amid continuing falls in confidence in the economy, according to the research published today.

• Should we rethink our working hours to boost productivity?

  Date:

  17 April 2019

  Type:

  Commentary and analysis

  UK employees work on average two-and-a-half weeks longer than their EU counterparts over the course of a year, new analysis has found, but does it make it a more productive nation? Ashleigh Webber looks at the UK's long-hours culture and whether a four-day working week could ever take off.

• Sharp decline in UK employee confidence

  Date:

  18 March 2019

  Type:

  News

  Employee confidence in the UK business environment has slumped, according to global research company Gartner.

• UK needs national skills policy to address productivity failures

  Date:

  28 February 2019

  Type:

  News

  The UK needs to develop a national skills policy if it is to tackle its productivity problems, according to a report on workforce development.