UKH: Narrow focus on growth leads to poor social outcomes
Analysis from UKHospitality’s (UKH) new Social Productivity Index highlights that the most economically productive sectors deliver the least social value. By contrast, sectors such as hospitality, are most effective at delivering growth more evenly across the country, ensuring social and geographic accessibility.
The new index, which draws from ONS data, aims to demonstrate a new way to measure growth to the government by utilising other metrics to indicate the social value of growth rather than focusing purely on GPD. UKH believes that approaching growth in this fashion will help to meet one of the government’s key goals of getting more people back into the workplace.
The index highlights the strength of hospitality at delivering more socially beneficial growth, with the sector ranking first in terms of employing part-time workers, employing under-25s and access for non-graduates. Hospitality also ranks in the top five for geographic spread, gender balance and employment of non-white British team members.
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When taking these metrics as a whole hospitality ranks first on the index, while industries such as admin and support services, wholesale and retail perform highly too. The most economically productive sectors tend to perform poorly, with finance and insurance ranking 18th out of the 21 sectors analysed.
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKH, believes the government urgently needs a change of strategy to deliver the prosperity the country needs.
She said: “A tunnel vision approach to growth, which relentlessly pursues a narrow definition of economic growth alone, would risk creating a prosperity postcode lottery. It will only benefit small clusters around the country, mainly in the South East, and sectors that deliver real change felt by real people would be overlooked.
“Government policy, particularly the Industrial Strategy, needs to recognise sectors that deliver this social value to ensure national renewal can truly be delivered. The index lays bare that high economic productivity sectors are simply not able to perform this role and will not help people back into jobs.
“Hospitality can be the catalyst for both economic and social growth across the UK, not just in major economic hubs. The government should look to businesses like ours to achieve its mission of bringing about a more equitable and fair economy and society.”
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