Automation and AI have been hailed as technological solutions that could deliver step-changes in UK productivity, but how are these disrupting technologies playing out in the UK economy? It is important to better understand the geography and scope of how new technologies are impacting labour markets, and what the fiscal and labour law environment does to support growth.
Acting as background briefs to this session were two major new studies.
The first, from Cambridge Professor of Law, Simon Deakin, has analysed how changes to labour laws across the world from 1970 to the present day have interacted with economic indicators. Do stronger protections for workers harm growth, or help them to become more productive?
The second, released as part of IFOW's Pissarides Review - funded by the Nuffield Foundation - is the UK's first 'Disruption Index', an innovative analytical tool that offers a nuanced perspective on the multifaceted nature of technological transformation across the regions of the country. If we are to tailor intelligent responses to the changes precipitated by the complex interplay between technology adoption and work – whether through regulation, policy or investment, or otherwise – we ideally need a measure of the scale of these changes, and their geographic distribution. This is what the DI seeks to do.
Co-chairs Lord Jim Knight and Matt Warman MP were joined by an expert panel, including:
Anna Leach, Deputy Chief Economist at the CBI
Professor Simon Deakin, Professor of Law at Cambridge University
Professor Philip McCann, Chair of Urban and Regional Economics at Alliance Manchester Business School
Dr Daniel Susskind, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University
Anna Thomas, co-founder & co-director of IFOW
Dr Bertha Rohenkohl, Researcher at IFOW
Speaker Bios:
Lord Jim Knight (co-chair) is a Labour life peer and former Minister of State for Employment and Minister for Schools. He represented South Dorset as an MP from 2001-2010. His focus as a peer has been on digital technology and education.
Jim was Chief Education and External Officer at TES Global Ltd, the news, training, jobs and resource-sharing service in education. He is also a visiting Professor at the Knowledge Lab of the UCL Institute of Education and a founder of XRapid, enabling the diagnosis of malaria and asbestos fibres using iPhones. He has led work scrutinising the Online Safety Bill, and will be chairing “Beyond Ofsted” - an inquiry into the future of school inspection that will report in November.
Matt Warman MP (co-chair) is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Boston and Skegness and is a former Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In 2022 he was tasked by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to conduct a future of work review.
Matt worked for The Daily Telegraph from 1999 until 2015 where he led coverage of Facebook, Google and Apple as well as interviewing key figures from the technology sector.
He was a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee and co-chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Broadband and Digital Communication. In 2019 he became a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital Infrastructure.
Anna Thomas is the co-founder and Director of the Institute for the Future of Work. She was formerly a barrister from Devereux Chambers, specialising in employment law and appointed as Counsel to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Prior to setting up the Institute for the Future of Work, Anna was Head of Policy for the Future of Work Commission. Anna is also Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research, the RSA and IEO, and is on the Advisory Board of Digital Futures at Work (Digit).
Anna Leach is Deputy Chief Economist at the Confederation of British Industry, where she heads the economic intelligence team which produces and analyses the CBI’s economic surveys and provides the CBI’s macroeconomic forecast. Anna previously worked in the Government Economic Service (GES) in various roles at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), where she worked on UK local area labour markets and international labour markets, and at the Treasury, where she worked on business sector analysis and macroeconomic communications.
Simon Deakin is a Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in labour law, private law, company law and EU law, and he contributes regularly to the fields of law and economics, law and development, and empirical legal studies. He is a co-lead for research theme 1: The Impact of Digitalisation on Work on Employment at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre. He is Director of the Centre for Business Research and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He has carried out empirical legal research in numerous countries including Japan, China, Russia, India and South Africa. He is currently researching the implications for law of machine learning.
Professor Philip McCann is Chair of Urban and Regional Economics at Alliance Manchester Business School. He specialises in spatial economics and economic geography. Internationally, Philip was previously Special Adviser to two EU Commissioners for Regional Policy, Johannes Hahn (2010-2013) and Corina Creţu (2015-2016) and regularly works with international organisations such as the OECD, United Cities and Local Government, the European Investment Bank, the European Commission and government bodies in various countries.
Dr Bertha Rohenkohl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Future of Work. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sheffield, and researches various topics of inequality, social mobility and labour economics. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics, a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Economics (University of Sheffield) and an Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.
Dr Daniel Susskind explores the impact of technology, and particularly AI, on work and society. He is a Research Professor in Economics at King’s College London, a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and an Associate Member of the Economics Department at Oxford University. He is the co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions (2015) and the author of A World Without Work (2020), and his new book, Growth: A Reckoning, will be published in April 2024.