London's Economic Outlook: Spring 2020

At the time of writing the UK economy is experiencing a historic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement and economic activity imposed by the Government on 23 March 2020 to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the country.

GLA Economics’ 36th London forecast is thus a scenario conditioned on both the Bank of England’s COVID-19 scenario published in May and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) April COVID-19 scenario and includes all relevant national statistics published up to the end of May 2020. This suggests that if this scenario occurred that:

• London’s real Gross Value Added (GVA) growth rate could be -16.8% this year due to the present COVID-19 crisis. This growth rate is then expected to rebound to 17.2% in 2021 before returning to more normal figures in 2022 (4.5%).
• In line with GVA, London is projected, in this scenario, to see an unprecedented fall in the number of workforce jobs in 2020 (-7.0% in annual terms) which will be slowly recovered through positive growth rates in 2021 (1.4%) and 2022 (4.9%).
• Similarly, London’s household income and expenditure are both projected to decrease notably in 2020 before starting to grow again in 2021 and 2022.

The data that sits behind the forecast is available to download from the London Datastore.