Yesterday (September 30th) marked the final day of the Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. First announced in March 2020 and set to end in May of last year, the furlough scheme had been extended several times in the hopes it would prevent a spike in unemployment that would have otherwise been expected given the sharp

On Sunday, Germans will vote for a new Bundestag which will subsequently elect a new Chancellor. After 16 years, it is undoubtedly the end of an era, certainly for me as a German. The last time Germany had a Chancellor that was not Angela Merkel, I was still not allowed to drive a car or

Read the full report here. Executive Summary: Organisations supported by the Community Justice Fund help 483,000 clients a year The average net benefit to Treasury for each client helped is £8,000, while the average cost of advice provision is just £510 per person. This equates to a net benefit to the public purse of £4billion

This week saw the announcement of the Government’s plans for long-awaited reform to the social care system, an issue that has plagued Prime Ministers for decades. The reforms, which come into force from October 2023, involve a cap of £86,000 on the care costs paid by individuals across their lifetime, and tapered care cost support for

We normally allocate the country reports for Cebr’s World Economic League Table in turn. I traditionally get the first country on the list which is Afghanistan. And so I’ve been writing a macro report on its economy each year for the past four years. Over this period, the prospects for the economy have gradually deteriorated.

The latest SMMT data on car production show that in July, UK manufacturers assembled less than 54,000 new cars. This is the worst July figure since 1956 and a 37.4% year-on-year decline [1]. Up until March this year, car production had seen reasonable month-on-month growth rates and seemed to be recovering from its 2020 woes

The last 18 months have seen a drastic uptick in redundancies, furloughed workers and economic inactivity – and although the labour market is on the mend, not everyone participates in the recovery equally.  Many elderly people have dropped out of the labour force which could pose a greater problem to the economic recovery than is

My former CBI colleague Andrew Sentence recently described central banks’ typical attitude to emerging inflation as initial denial that there is a problem, then suggesting it was ‘just a blip’, then admitting that there are inflationary pressures but that ‘they are only temporary’, before finally realising that inflation had in fact taken off, requiring urgent

With most Covid-related restrictions lifted and the ‘pingdemic’ set to ease drastically on 16th August, as fully vaccinated individuals avoid having to isolate following contact with someone that tests positive, one of the final remaining frontiers in the fight for normality is international travel. The current rules for international travel generally depend on the colour

In the last month, China’s highly successful private tutoring companies and many of its top tech companies, including entertainment giant Tencent, online retailer AliBaba and ride hailing app Didi, have all fallen foul of new Chinese government regulations and faced sharp share price falls. Meanwhile the second-largest Chinese property company Evergrande, which has now broken

With Covid-19 cases exploding in recent weeks, so has the number of self-isolation ‘pings’ received by unsuspecting individuals via the NHS COVID-19 app, asking them to isolate for 10 days. This has led to a headache for business owners, many of whom are only now getting their operations back to normal after months of restrictions.

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson promised to ‘level up across Britain’ and ‘answer the plea of the forgotten people and the left-behind towns’. In doing so, he pledged to ‘unleash the productive power’ of every corner of the country and made clear that boosting economic performance would be a priority of

It is clear that the Universal Credit (UC) uplift of £20 per week has improved the living standards of the UK’s worst-off households since it was implemented in March 2020, helping many to stay above the poverty line. Cebr’s Income Tracker research – conducted with ASDA – confirms this, showing that the increased value of social

In more ordinary times, economic trajectories are shaped by technological advances, demographic trends and policymakers’ use of fiscal or monetary levers. Over the past 16 months, by far the most influential driver of the UK’s economic performance has been the public health restrictions implemented in order to control the spread of Covid-19. The government has

Download the full report here. Cebr has undertaken research to quantify the economic impact associated with Heathrow Airport. Headline results are summarised below. In 2019, the value of trade going through Heathrow Airport stood at approximately £188bn. Cebr forecast that by 2025 this will grow to over £204bn, representing 21.2% and 32.0% of UK trade of goods and non-EU trade of