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.
Looking at this year by business quarter, we can see that there was a 6.8% increase in legal vacancies across commerce and industry in Q3 compared to Q2, which bodes well for the remainder of the year. Q4 is typically the busiest quarter of the year for vacancies overall, so we would expect to see that translate into vacancies for legal counsel. This is according to the latest UK Legal Labour Market Trends report by Search, and labour market data analysts Vacancysoft.
Comparing the South’s professional vacancies to the National total, while England and Wales as a whole are predicted to see a decrease, the South as a region could increase its market share, potentially reaching 29.8% in 2023 according to APSCo and labour market data analysts Vacancysoft.
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.
