Britain’s productivity problem isn't as bad as we thought

The Office for National Statistics has changed how it measures productivity – economic output per hour worked – and it turns out we’ve been doing rather better than we realised. In particular, the government’s official statisticians now reckon the rate of growth in the decade following the global financial crisis, from 2009-2019, was 1.3% each year, on average, rather than the 0.7% they had previously thought.Alas, this doesn’t mean the UK economic output was any hi