Five reasons why long-term productivity growth has flatlined in the UK .






One business issue that keeps resurfacing here in the UK is that of productivity. The big question is ‘why has it flatlined here since 2008?’ I noticed that, yet again, the Bank of England has predicted 0% productivity growth for this year in the UK.


I have much experience of living and working in other cultures. I am half Dutch and lived there for a time. I have also lived and worked in Colombia, Venezuela, India, Spain and most recently, in the USA from 2005-2015. Therefore, I would argue that I’m uniquely able to give a good explanation as to what’s going on here.


Besides, I have worked as a contractor in the UK for the past two years. So I have quite a bit of experience job hunting in the UK. I have also bought and sold houses in both the US and the UK.

1. Business transactions take too long to carry out here in the UK. For example, when we bought and sold our house in Boston, it took less than a month. In the UK, it takes far longer.

2. Business people can’t make decisions. When I was job hunting in the USA, generally it was a fast, efficient process. In the UK, often it is not.


I’ve noticed a troubling hiring trend here; Company A posts a job. Then many people are interviewed over many months and many stages, with the final result; Company A hires no one!  

This happens regularly in the UK. Imagine the damage to UK productivity of just this one issue alone on a country-wide scale?

3. Training and education. A lot of British businesspeople can’t write accurate, grammatical English. They can’t do basic maths. 


Lack of education has got to be a key reason for our poor productivity. We need better education – more executive coaching and business education, both online and traditional. 


And the general level of primary education needs to improve here. Spelling, grammar, maths, you name it. Some knowledge of foreign affairs, news and even a foreign language might be good too.


4. Investment has got to come a close second. If you want to be a productivity ninja, you do need the tools. I worked at one company as a contractor where I was managing a six-figure marketing budget, but the company gave me a faulty computer that crashed the entire time. 

Talk about an unproductive false Economy! All the evidence points to us not spending enough on equipment, from essential productivity apps to tools like DocuSign or Microsoft teams, to speed up business interactions. 


5. We in the UK have a fatal weakness for conventional wisdom. I’m paraphrasing Dominic Cummings here. But undoubtedly one of the reasons his Brexit campaign was able to defeat the much better funded and institutionally backed remain campaign was because his team was creative and unorthodox and the other side was neither.




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