An analysis of the most pressing concerns based on insights from 1,000 UK business leaders.
Helen Yates, Editor of Global Thought leadership, talks to Christopher Breen from the Centre of Economic Business Research (CEBR). Christopher is the Head of Economic Insight at CEBR, and he’ll be sharing his views on the short- and medium-term outlook for the UK economy.
The conversation will explore what the impact of a new Government could be, and the key issues that business leaders should be considering when planning for the future.
Insights
Hello and welcome to the Navigating Risk podcast. My name is Helen Yates and I'm Gallagher's editor of Global Thought Leadership. Joining me today is Christopher Breen, Head of Economic Insight at the Centre for Economics and Business Research. I started by asking him about the general health of the UK economy and whether we're starting to see any green shoots emerge.
So, shall we start by looking at the immediate economic outlook for the UK? It would be interesting to get your thoughts on whether we're seeing any green shoots begin to emerge there.
Christopher Breen: I think there are green shoots, but I wouldn't expect a sudden blooming shall we say as you might have seen in your garden over the spring.
What we're expected to see and what we've seen so far is more of a slower rate of progress and this is quite interesting because real wages have grown quite steadily for the last six months or so.
In usual times you would expect to see kind of consumption and household spending pick up at a much faster pace than what we have seen. But I think what's quite interesting is if you delve into that and indeed, we do this with our income tracker that we that we produce, if you look at it by income quartiles, then you find that those on the lowest incomes actually still struggle to afford a typical basket of bills and essentials even accounting for the national living wage increase that we saw in April.
You can find out more about what’s next for the UK economy by listening to the full episode of our Navigating Risk podcast.
Keep an eye out for our next Navigating Risk discussion. In the next episode we will be focusing on the rich and complex cyber risk landscape that many businesses are facing providing a cyber snapshot for the C-suite and professionals in the UK with our guest Sam Cheshire, Head of Cyber at Gallagher.
Thanks for listening.