Failure to recover to pre-financial crisis levels has seen 16% gap open up between UK and fellow members

Britain’s poor productivity performance before, during and after the financial crisis of a decade ago has left a gap of 16% with the other six members of the G7 group of industrial nations.

International comparisons published by the Office for National Statistics show that output per hour worked continued to lag well behind the US, Germany and France in 2015 – the last year for which data is available.

The ONS said that every member of the G7 – which also includes Japan, Italy and Canada – had seen productivity suffer since the deep slump of the late 2000s, but the impact had been twice as severe in the UK.

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Output per hour worked in Britain was 15.2% lower in 2015 than it would have been had the pre-recession trend continued, the ONS said. In the rest of the G7, the slowdown had been limited on average to 7.5%.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the UK gradually narrowed its productivity gap with the rest of the G7, but that improvement faltered in the years immediately preceding the financial crisis and it has continued to widen since. Despite the UK’s robust growth during 2015, the gap with the rest of the G7 widened from 15.8% to 15.9%.



Britain’s output per hour worked is now 22.2% lower than that of the US, 22.7% lower than in France and 26.7% lower than in Germany. Italy has shown no productivity growth since the turn of the millennium but still leads the UK by more than 10%.

The only G7 countries with weaker productivity than the UK are Japan and Canada, the ONS said.

A separate ONS release showed that output per hour grew by 0.4% in the final three months of 2016, up from 0.2% in the third quarter, the fourth successive increase.

Steve Hill, the external engagement director at the Open University, said: “We know that higher and degree apprenticeships will give people from all walks of life access to greater opportunity, more choice and help shape the UK to become a nation of highly skilled workers. The UK’s productivity keeps falling behind other developed countries, and this is unlikely to improve unless firms invest properly in training – the apprenticeship levy is an opportunity to do this.”

