Dominic Keen: We’re working harder and longer for less money, but there is a way out

Dominic Keen is a Productivity Campaigner & Conservative Association Officer in Suffolk

You may have missed it, but a few weeks ago the Office of National Statistics released data showing that British business productivity is currently lower than it was in 2007.

In broad-brush terms, we’ve been working harder, longer, and for less money for nearly two decades now.

It’s a grim reality, but also one that provides a clear insight into the origins of the ongoing dissatisfaction amongst the electorate.  For Conservatives to find a pathway back to political relevance, we must establish a route back to building a national economy that is underpinned by steady annual productivity growth, as it was from the late-seventies until the mid-noughties.

The better news is that a once-in-a-generation opportunity exists to create the conditions to transform British industry, moving it towards vastly more productive modes of operation.

Just as British Conservatives led the world in adopting free-market economics forty years ago, today we must wholeheartedly embrace the new wave of intelligent autonomous machines that are now becoming sufficiently capable to positively disrupt many of the sectors of the economy, but particularly those categories of goods and services that continue to remain heavily dependent on low-cost labour.

Our economic policy must establish an environment where the winds of creative destruction can blow freely without being shielded by backwards-looking regulatory regimes that serve to impede change.  It must empower entrepreneurs to refashion under-performing concerns and redirect Government’s science-and-innovation budget towards creating the tools and training needed to give them the greatest chance of success.

All of this will, of course, be threatening to some within the Conservative family.

However, without a bold vision to refashion Britain, the Party faces extinction and each of us will have to look towards a dismal future of ongoing relative decline.  If the country is able to pull-off a productivity pivot, younger Britons will be the primary beneficiaries, avoiding today’s underwhelming menu of dreary, poorly-paid service-sector job options, instead earning higher wages by overseeing, maintaining and providing the human face for fleets of sophisticated machines.  No-one really wants to spend twenty years at school then end up on the night shift.

The story for long-run public sector productivity is slightly better than that of the private sector but, nonetheless, the State remains somewhat less effective than it was before the Pandemic.

The opportunity for Government to provide better public services for less money can also only be achieved by the wholehearted embrace of artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies. Just as the war in Ukraine has made defence agencies around the world refocus spending towards low-cost unmanned platforms, other forms of public spending must soon follow suit.  Without a concerted programme to transform efficiency, there simply won’t be enough money to fix pot-holes, collect rubbish, provide adult social care, or any of the many other service categories that are close to collapse in modern Britain.

What’s more, if parallel productivity gains can be realised by both the private and public sectors in tandem, the prospect of more-profitable enterprises and better-contained Government spending will let the fleeting mirage of a budget surplus become visible for the first time in a quarter of a century.

Now is the time for Conservatives to ideologically come together to sell a compelling, transformational vision for the future of Britain.  Our political rivals are currently enjoying the vacuum left by the absence of any national purpose.  We must offer a coherent, credible pathway back to productive prosperity.

If we do so, the prospects for our Party will soon seem substantially less bleak.