Business conditions

New and updated

• Business confidence: private sector

  Type:

  Indicators

  Updated to include the outlook on the manufacturing industry from the CBI Quarterly Industrial Trends Survey, January 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.

• Retail workers face highest risk of redundancy

  Date:

  27 February 2019

  Type:

  News

  Retail workers are more likely to be made redundant and endure a significant period of unemployment than workers in any other sector, a report has found.

• Employer confidence in economy at three-year low

  Date:

  27 February 2019

  Type:

  News

  Employers' confidence in the UK economic prospects hit a three-year low last month, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's JobsOutlook research.