英国国家经济和社会研究所-加入英国的促生产力政策（英）-2025_193页_2mb

Key Findings: Joining Up Pro-Productivity Policies in the UK

The UK faces a persistent productivity challenge, exacerbated by fragmented governance, regional inequalities, and an underperformance in key sectors. To address this, transformative and coordinated policies are required across fiscal frameworks, public investment, regional development, skills, digital technology, infrastructure, and innovation.

Common Threads Across Policies

• Priority of Transformation: Urgent reforms are needed to shift the dial on productivity.
• Coordination is Key: Siloed policies must be joined up across Whitehall departments, between UK and devolved administrations, and among local authorities.
• Increase Public Investment: Low levels of public investment (2.7% of GDP) inhibit productivity growth and leave regional gaps unaddressed.
• Leverage Agglomeration Economies: Infrastructure and housing policies should strategically enhance connectivity and urban density.
• Harness Technology: Digital tools, AI, and data analytics hold significant potential but require supportive governance and culture.

Crucial Policy Areas & Recommendations

1. Fiscal Framework & Public Investment

• Reform Fiscal Rules: Establish a minimum public investment target (4-5% of GDP) alongside consumption rules. Create a 'guardrail' to shield strategic spending from short-term budget cycles.
• Overhaul Appraisal: Mandate a National Development Bank to rigorously assess public investment performance, enabling targeted reforms and accountability.

2. Rewiring the Central State & Devolution

• Clarify Central Focus: Limit Treasury control over strategy, potentially creating a dedicated Prime Minister's Department for economic growth.
• Deepen Devolution: Grant Mayoral Combined Authorities greater fiscal autonomy and strategic powers to deliver place-based policies.

3. R&D, Innovation, and Place-Based Industrial Strategy

• Target National Priorities: Align R&D funding with strategic sectors (energy, defence) using R&D institutions and missions.
• Boost Lagging Regions: Fund regional innovation capacity explicitly, devolving powers to create transformative national institutions near economic hubs.

4. Skills, Workforce Development, and the Future of Work

• Invest in Higher Technical Skills: Correct longstanding mismatches, expanding vocational routes, life-long learning entitlements, apprenticeships, and ensuring skills match sector demand.
• Mission-Oriented Prioritization: Prioritize skill shortages, redefine training financial incentives, enable retraining across qualification tracks, and align skills with regional missions.

5. Digital Transformation and Public Services Productivity

• Treat Digitization as a Core Priority: Mandate digital fluency for leaders, integrate AI tools widely (procurement, fraud detection, service delivery), and sunset legacy systems.
• Measure User Satisfaction: Require digital transformation test results for appointees and tie user experience to leadership accountability.
• Invest Proactively: Fund digital roles and data capabilities throughout government to overcome chronic skills gaps.

6. Infrastructure, Housing, and Land Use Planning

• Build Physical Linkages: Increase motorway networks (especially Midlands to ports/trans-Pennine routes), improve train affordability/congestion, and establish tram networks like London's.
• Increase Household Densities: Promote high-density housing near employment, learning from global examples like Tokyo.
• Rebuild Connections: Ensure transport and housing planning supports seamless travel-to-work areas, facilitating labor market access and agglomeration benefits.

7. Public Services and Coping with BCD

• Embrace Broader Definition: Move beyond narrow productivity metrics to focus on economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in delivering public outcomes utilizing quality adjustments.
• Unlock Digital Potential: Leverage AI/computers to reduce waste, automate simple tasks, and target interventions using predictive analytics.
• Invest in Organizational Capability: Build skills-focused organizational capability, empower professionals, foster cross-governmental cultural acceptance of data/technology.
• Fund Skills/Adaptation: Explore replacing cuts with targeted reviews of services, using savings for demonstrable improvements, supported by robust funding/evaluation for innovation.

Conclusion

Addressing the UK's productivity challenge requires a holistic, mission-driven approach led by Number Ten. This necessitates: fiscal recalibration, a deficit commissioning state fostering places and capabilities, deeper devolution of real power, bold university reform seeding innovation, integrated multilingual digital government, and a long-term collaborative plan for connectivity and housing density. Speeding implementation is critical given the systemic nature of the required changes.