London's Economy Today - Issue 237 - May 2022

The overview

• Rising prices and higher taxes are squeezing household budgets
• New private rents in London are also increasing rapidly
• Business numbers are falling if more slowly in London

Economic indicators

• Passenger journeys on London public transport increased going into Spring with 202.5 million passenger journeys registered between 6 March 2022 and 30 March 2022, 9.7 million journeys more than in the previous period (6 February 2022 – 5 March 2022). In the latest period, 75.8 million of all journeys were underground journeys and 126.7 million were bus journeys. Underground journeys increased, while bus journeys fell marginally.
• The sentiment of London’s PMI new business activity index decreased but remained positive with the PMI new business index in London moving from 62.7 in March to 56.6 in April. An index reading above 50.0 indicates an increase in new orders on average across firms from the previous month.
• Net expectations for house prices for the next three months remained positive if worsening according to surveyors with the net balance of house prices expectations at 24 in April, lower than the balance of 31 in March. The net balance index measures the proportion of property surveyors reporting a rise in prices minus those reporting a decline.

London's Economy Today supplement: Economic inactivity trends in London - Are Londoners aged 50 and over leaving the London labour market?

• Labour force participation is a measure of the number of available or economically active workers in the labour market. A related term is the economic inactivity rate, which refers to the share of those aged 16 to 64 who are not in employment and are not seeking work and/or are unable to start work within the next two weeks. It includes people who have retired, people with caring responsibilities, students, and the long-term sick.
• Labour force participation has increased strongly in the UK and London over the past decade. But since the onset of the pandemic the inactivity rate has risen sharply in the UK. In initial stages of the pandemic, this trend was less clear at the London level. However, more recent estimates from the ONS Labour Force Survey show a rise in the share of Londoners who are economically inactive over the last year.
• London’s headline inactivity rate remains below the UK average, but there are now signs that inactivity may be on the rise, particularly among Londoners aged 50-64. There is considerable uncertainty around these short-term trends, however. Continued tracking of inactivity rates across different groups of Londoners will be important as the capital emerges from the pandemic, particularly as the cost-of-living crisis intensifies.

London’s Economy Today data on the Datastore

• The main economic indicators for London are available to download from the Datastore.