If the Conservative party are to win the next election, they will need not just a serious implosion within the Labour party, but also for the UK economy to pick up in a way where they can take the credit. Longer term, the UK remains mired in the same issues that it has had for some time now, limited productivity increases, an ever increasing national debt (we last ran a budget surplus over 15 years ago) and ultimately most importantly, GDP per capita falling.
In what could become a landmark speech for Financial Services, Ursula von der Leyen has thrown down the gauntlet in a bid to create a new stock exchange to rival any in the world. Her plan, to unify the bourses of Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Madrid and Milan into one, would result in an exchange which would be the largest in Europe by some distance (including London) and be able to compete directly with New York, or anywhere else.
Whisper it quietly, but some of those benefits of leaving the EU are actually starting to materialize. For those in Life Sciences, new regulations taking effect have meant that the MHRA can now fast-track applications, where as a result, approvals can happen in certain instances, within 14 days.
As the dust settles on the decision to cancel HS2, while the political fallout may prove high across the regions, the economic consequences are still unclear. By the same token, what is clear is the fact that over the past five years, the trend of regionalisation has taken effect and increasingly, businesses are expanding teams away from the capital. In 2023 this trend has seen a high point, in the sense that 64% of all vacancies in the private sector can now be found outside the capital, up from 56% pre-pandemic.
To say the war in Ukraine has caused the dysfunction in the UK’s energy strategy to be exposed is an understatement. Renewable energies, whilst in unit cost terms are coming down, don’t generate sufficient power all year round to be viable. What this had meant is the UK would be generating a surplus over summer, whilst buying power from the continent over the winter. Up until the Ukraine war, that had worked and had meant the long-term storage facilities at rough had been shut down for example, as power had always been available from the continent.
