̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - economy

Forcing UK creatives to ‘opt out’ of AI training risks stifling new talent, Cambridge experts warn

fpjl2 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 07:56:32 +0000

̽��ֱ��UK government should resist allowing AI companies to scrape all copyrighted works unless the holder has actively ‘opted out’, as it puts an unfair burden on up-and-coming creative talents who lack the skills and resources to meet legal requirements.

This is according to a new report from ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge experts in economics, policy and machine learning, who also argue the UK government should clearly state that only a human author can hold copyright – even when AI has been heavily involved.

A collaboration between three Cambridge initiatives – the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and ai@cam – the report argues that unregulated use of generative AI will not guarantee economic growth, and risks damaging the UK’s thriving creative sector.

If the UK adopts the proposed ‘rights reservation’ for AI data mining, rather than maintaining the legal foundation that automatically safeguards copyright, it will compromise the livelihoods of many in the sector, particularly those just starting out, say researchers.

They argue that it risks allowing artistic content produced in the UK to be scraped for endless reuse by offshore companies.

“Going the way of an opt-out model is telling Britain’s artists, musicians, and writers that tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations,” said Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“Ambitions to strengthen the creative sector, bolster the British economy and spark innovation using GenAI in the UK can be achieved – but we will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies.”

'Ingested' by technologies

Creative industries contribute around £124.6 billion or 5.7% to the UK’s economy, and have a deep connection to the tech industry. For example, the UK video games industry is the largest in Europe, and contributed £5.12 billion to the UK economy in 2019.

While AI could lead to a new generation of creative companies and products, the researchers say that little is currently known about how AI is being adopted within these industries, and where the skills gaps lie.

“ ̽��ֱ��Government ought to commission research that engages directly with creatives, understanding where and how AI is benefiting and harming them, and use it to inform policies for supporting the sector’s workforce,” said Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning and Chair of ai@cam.

“Uncertainty about copyright infringement is hindering the development of Generative AI for public benefit in the UK. For AI to be trusted and widely deployed, it should not make creative work more difficult.”

In the UK, copyright is vested in the creator automatically if it meets the legal criteria. Some AI companies have tried to exploit ‘fair dealing’ – a loophole based around use for research or reporting – but this is undermined by the commercial nature of most AI.

Now, some AI companies are brokering licensing agreements with publishers, and the report argues this is a potential way to ensure creative industries are compensated.

While rights of performers, from singers to actors, currently cover reproductions of live performances, AI uses composites harvested from across a performer’s oeuvre, so rights relating to specific performances are unlikely to apply, say researchers.

Further clauses in older contracts mean performers are having their work ‘ingested’ by technologies that didn’t exist when they signed on the dotted line.

̽��ֱ��researchers call on the government to fully adopt the Beijing Treaty on Audio Visual Performance, which the UK signed over a decade ago but is yet to implement, as it gives performers economic rights over all reproduction, distribution and rental.

" ̽��ֱ��current lack of clarity about the licensing and regulation of training data use is a lose-lose situation. Creative professionals aren't fairly compensated for their work being used to train AI models, while AI companies are hesitant to fully invest in the UK due to unclear legal frameworks,” said Prof Diane Coyle, the Bennett Professor of Public Policy.

“We propose mandatory transparency requirements for AI training data and standardised licensing agreements that properly value creative works. Without these guardrails, we risk undermining our valuable creative sector in the pursuit of uncertain benefits from AI."

'Spirit of copyright law'

̽��ֱ��Cambridge experts also look at questions of copyright for AI-generated work, and the extent to which ‘prompting’ AI can constitute ownership. They conclude that AI cannot itself hold copyright, and the UK government should develop guidelines on compensation for artists whose work and name feature in prompts instructing AI.

When it comes to the proposed ‘opt-out’ solution, the experts it is not “in the spirit of copyright law” and is difficult to enforce. Even if creators do opt out, it is not clear how that data will be identified, labelled, and compensated, or even erased.

It may be seen as giving ‘carte blanche’ to foreign-owned and managed AI companies to benefit from British copyrighted works without a clear mechanism for creators to receive fair compensation.

“Asking copyright reform to solve structural problems with AI is not the solution,” said Dr Ann Kristin Glenster, Senior Policy Advisor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and lead author of the report.

“Our research shows that the business case has yet to be made for an opt-out regime that will promote growth and innovation of the UK creative industries.

“Devising policies that enable the UK creative industries to benefit from AI should be the Government’s priority if it wants to see growth of both its creative and tech industries,” Glenster said.

̽��ֱ��UK government’s proposed ‘rights reservation’ model for AI data mining tells British artists, musicians, and writers that “tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations” say leading academics.

We will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies

Gina Neff

Kal Visuals - Unsplash

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Coming AI-driven economy will sell your decisions before you take them, researchers warn

fpjl2 — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:57:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��near future could see AI assistants that forecast and influence our decision-making at an early stage, and sell these developing ‘intentions’ in real-time to companies that can meet the need – even before we have made up our minds.

This is according to AI ethicists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who say we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying movie tickets to voting for candidates. They call this the Intention Economy.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) argue that the explosion in generative AI, and our increasing familiarity with chatbots, opens a new frontier of ‘persuasive technologies’ – one hinted at in recent corporate announcements by tech giants.

‘Anthropomorphic’ AI agents, from chatbot assistants to digital tutors and girlfriends, will have access to vast quantities of intimate psychological and behavioural data, often gleaned via informal, conversational spoken dialogue.

This AI will combine knowledge of our online habits with an uncanny ability to attune to us in ways we find comforting – mimicking personalities and anticipating desired responses – to build levels of trust and understanding that allow for social manipulation on an industrial scale, say researchers.

“Tremendous resources are being expended to position AI assistants in every area of life, which should raise the question of whose interests and purposes these so-called assistants are designed to serve”, said LCFI Visiting Scholar Dr Yaqub Chaudhary.

“What people say when conversing, how they say it, and the type of inferences that can be made in real-time as a result, are far more intimate than just records of online interactions”

“We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes.”

Dr Jonnie Penn, an historian of technology from Cambridge’s LCFI, said: “For decades, attention has been the currency of the internet. Sharing your attention with social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram drove the online economy.”

“Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions.”

“We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.”

In a new Harvard Data Science Review paper, Penn and Chaudhary write that the intention economy will be the attention economy ‘plotted in time’: profiling how user attention and communicative style connects to patterns of behaviour and the choices we end up making.

“While some intentions are fleeting, classifying and targeting the intentions that persist will be extremely profitable for advertisers,” said Chaudhary.

In an intention economy, Large Language Models or LLMs could be used to target, at low cost, a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, online history, and even preferences for flattery and ingratiation, write the researchers.

This information-gathering would be linked with brokered bidding networks to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim, such as selling a cinema trip (“You mentioned feeling overworked, shall I book you that movie ticket we’d talked about?”).

This could include steering conversations in the service of particular platforms, advertisers, businesses, and even political organisations, argue Penn and Chaudhary.

While researchers say the intention economy is currently an ‘aspiration’ for the tech industry, they track early signs of this trend through published research and the hints dropped by several major tech players.

These include an open call for ‘data that expresses human intention… across any language, topic, and format’ in a 2023 OpenAI blogpost, while the director of product at Shopify – an OpenAI partner – spoke of chatbots coming in “to explicitly get the user’s intent” at a conference the same year.

Nvidia’s CEO has spoken publicly of using LLMs to figure out intention and desire, while Meta released ‘Intentonomy’ research, a dataset for human intent understanding, back in 2021.

In 2024, Apple’s new ‘App Intents’ developer framework for connecting apps to Siri (Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant), includes protocols to “predict actions someone might take in future” and “to suggest the app intent to someone in the future using predictions you [the developer] provide”.

“AI agents such as Meta’s CICERO are said to achieve human level play in the game Diplomacy, which is dependent on inferring and predicting intent, and using persuasive dialogue to advance one’s position,” said Chaudhary.

“These companies already sell our attention. To get the commercial edge, the logical next step is to use the technology they are clearly developing to forecast our intentions, and sell our desires before we have even fully comprehended what they are.”

Penn points out that these developments are not necessarily bad, but have the potential to be destructive. “Public awareness of what is coming is the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong path,” he said.

Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.

Public awareness of what is coming is the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong path

Jonnie Penn

Getty/d3sign

Young woman talking with AI voice virtual assistant on smartphone

Yes

UK needs AI legislation to create trust so companies can ‘plug AI into British economy’

fpjl2 — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 06:20:05 +0000

̽��ֱ��British government should offer tax breaks for businesses developing AI-powered products and services, or applying AI to their existing operations, to 'unlock the UK’s potential for augmented productivity', according to a new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge report.

Researchers argue that the UK currently lacks the computing capacity and capital required to build 'generative' machine learning models fast enough to compete with US companies such as Google, Microsoft or Open AI.

Instead, they call for a UK focus on leveraging these new AI systems for real-world applications – such as developing new diagnostic products and addressing the shortage of software engineers – which could provide a major boost to the British economy.

However, the researchers caution that without new legislation to ensure the UK has solid legal and ethical AI regulation, such plans could falter. British industries and the public may struggle to trust emerging AI platforms such as ChatGPT enough to invest time and money into skilling up.

̽��ֱ��policy report is a collaboration between Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and ai@cam: the ̽��ֱ��’s flagship initiative on artificial intelligence.

“Generative AI will change the nature of how things are produced, just as what occurred with factory assembly lines in the 1910s or globalised supply chains at the turn of the millennium,” said Dame Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy. “ ̽��ֱ��UK can become a global leader in actually plugging these AI technologies into the economy.”

Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, said: “A new Bill that fosters confidence in AI by legislating for data protection, intellectual property and product safety is vital groundwork for using this technology to increase UK productivity.”

Generative AI uses algorithms trained on giant datasets to output original high-quality text, images, audio, or video at ferocious speed and scale. ̽��ֱ��text-based ChatGPT dominated headlines this year. Other examples include Midjourney, which can conjure imagery in any different style in seconds.

Networked grids – or clusters – of computing hardware called Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are required to handle the vast quantities of data that hone these machine-learning models. For example, ChatGPT is estimated to cost $40 million a month in computing alone. In the spring of this year, the UK chancellor announced £100 million for a “Frontier AI Taskforce” to scope out the creation of home-grown AI to rival the likes of Google Bard.

However, the report points out that the supercomputer announced by the UK chancellor is unlikely to be online until 2026, while none of the big three US tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft or Google – have GPU clusters in the UK.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK has no companies big enough to invest meaningfully in foundation model development,” said report co-author Sam Gilbert. “State spending on technology is modest compared to China and the US, as we have seen in the UK chip industry.”

As such, the UK should use its strengths in fin-tech, cybersecurity and health-tech to build software – the apps, tools and interfaces – that harnesses AI for everyday use, says the report.

“Generative AI has been shown to speed up coding by some 55%, which could help with the UK’s chronic developer shortage,” said Gilbert. “In fact, this type of AI can even help non-programmers to build sophisticated software.”

Moreover, the UK has world-class research universities that could drive progress in tackling AI stumbling blocks: from the cooling of data centres to the detection of AI-generated misinformation.

At the moment, however, UK organisations lack incentives to comply with responsible AI. “ ̽��ֱ��UK’s current approach to regulating generative AI is based on a set of vague and voluntary principles that nod at security and transparency,” said report co-author Dr Ann Kristin Glenster.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK will only be able to realise the economic benefits of AI if the technology can be trusted, and that can only be ensured through meaningful legislation and regulation.”

Along with new AI laws, the report suggests a series of tax incentives, such as an enhanced Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, to increase the supply of capital to AI start-ups, as well as tax credits for all businesses including generative AI in their operations. Challenge prizes could be launched to identify bottom-up uses of generative AI from within organisations.

Legislating for AI safety and transparency will allow British industry and education to put resources into AI development with confidence, argue researchers.

̽��ֱ��UK can become a global leader in actually plugging these AI technologies into the economy

Diane Coyle

Getty/BlackJack3D

Data Tunnel

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Would you prefer a four-day working week?

fpjl2 — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 06:53:22 +0000

Working a four-day week boosts employee wellbeing while preserving productivity, according to research on a major six-month trial in the UK.

Cambridge Biomedical Campus celebrates 60 years with £2bn boost to UK economy

cjb250 — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 10:07:30 +0000

̽��ֱ��key findings of the report are:

̽��ֱ��campus supported an aggregate economic footprint of £2.2 billion worth of Gross Value Added to the UK economy and that as well as being the largest employment site in Cambridge, over 15,000 additional roles are supported across the regional supply chain and local businesses.
For every 10 jobs directly generated by organisations on the CBC, a further 2.7 jobs are supported within Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire; one in every six jobs in the local authority areas are either directly or indirectly supported by the campus.
Employment on site is growing much faster than the rest of the UK and that £721m is spent by employees across the regional economy.

Looking at the wider economic picture, the research highlights that in 2021 the site reported a collaborative operating income of £1.9 billion, as well as contributing £291million to the Exchequer through tax revenues.

In addition to the new report, a series of events are planned to celebrate the success of the campus spanning 60 years and to tell more stories about the globally significant research that goes on.

Dr Kristin-Anne Rutter, Executive Director at Cambridge Biomedical Campus, said: “ ̽��ֱ��economic impact report for the first time demonstrates the importance of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus to the region, and to the thousands of people who work here and rely on the organisations, whether it’s as a patient or someone working on the site. ̽��ֱ��success we have on the site is not just limited to improved healthcare and treatments for patients – we generate jobs and income for businesses across Cambridge and the East of England. We do this through collaboration, with research, industry and the NHS working together to drive innovation which is then shared.

“ ̽��ֱ��report is an important milestone, so too is our 60th anniversary and throughout September we’ll be highlighting some of the amazing developments and ideas which have happened since Addenbrookes hospital and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology arrived on the Hills Road site. We’ll be sharing how the campus has grown and how science is taken from laboratories into hospitals, to diagnose and treat patients with world-leading innovative healthcare.”

Alongside the major economic impact of CBC, the research that takes place on the campus has very real and direct healthcare benefits, fuelled by innovation and discoveries that sit at the very forefront of life sciences technology and knowhow.

A new economic impact report details the financial contributions of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC), which celebrates its 60th anniversary this autumn. ̽��ֱ��independent report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) for the first time calculates the economic benefits of CBC also highlights the health and research benefits for the region.

̽��ֱ��success we have on the site is not just limited to improved healthcare and treatments for patients – we generate jobs and income for businesses across Cambridge and the East of England

Kristin-Anne Rutter

Aerial shot of Cambridge Biomedical Campus

Life-saving treatments

Below are some of the case studies of how patients have been given, or are set to benefit from life-saving treatments, discovered and developed at CBC but with the potential to literally change the lives of people across the world.

Cytosponge: A ‘sponge on a string’ test to detect oesophageal cancer

Around 9,100 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer each year in the UK. A big challenge with this type of cancer is that many people don’t realise there’s a problem until they start to have trouble swallowing. Often, these symptoms aren’t recognisable until a later stage in the disease.

But there may be an opportunity to detect the disease earlier. Some people develop a condition – called Barrett’s oesophagus – prior to developing into cancer. Barrett’s oesophagus is much more common than oesophageal cancer, and although it will only become cancer in a handful of cases, it presents an opportunity for doctors to spot a problem early and intervene before cancer develops. But the typical test for Barrett’s oesophagus, endoscopy, is both invasive and expensive.

Enter the Cytosponge.Cytosponge-TFF3 test is a ‘sponge on a string’ device coupled with a laboratory test called TFF3 developed by scientists funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Cancer Research UK – a simple, quick and affordable test for Barrett’s oesophagus that can be done in a GP surgery.

Ethanol breath biopsy clinical trial for early lung cancer detection

A new clinical trial has launched at Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge which is using ethanol (an alcohol) detected in exhaled breath as a potential tool to diagnose lung cancer earlier. ̽��ֱ��EVOLUTION trial is recruiting patients who definitely have lung cancer and healthy volunteers who definitely do not.
A liquid solution containing a metabolic probe is administered intravenously, travels around the body and when it reacts with a lung tumour causes the release of ethanol. After a set amount of time, patients breathe at regular intervals into a special mask which collects the ethanol which is then analysed in the laboratory. ̽��ֱ��eVOC probe (Exogenous Volatile Organic Compound) has been developed by Cambridge company Owlstone Medical, who have collaborated with Royal Papworth Hospital’s thoracic oncology research team for previous breath biopsy studies.

Changing the future of ovarian cancer

Each year, about 7,500 women in the UK are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and around 5,000 will have the most aggressive form of the disease. ̽��ֱ��cure rate for women with ovarian cancer is very low, despite new medicines coming into the clinic. Only 43% of women in England survive five years beyond their ovarian cancer diagnosis, compared with more than 80% of people for more common cancers, such as breast (85%) and prostate (87%). This is because the disease is often diagnosed late, treatment options are limited, and many women develop resistance to current therapies. Research by Professors James Brenton and Evis Sala, at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, aims to address this.

Life-changing artificial pancreas

An artificial pancreas developed by Cambridge researchers is helping protect very young children with type 1 diabetes at a particularly vulnerable time of their lives.

̽��ֱ��artificial pancreas uses an algorithm - CamAPS FX – to determine the amount of insulin administered by a device worn by the child. It is available through a number of NHS trusts across the UK, including Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the team hope it will soon be available even more widely.

Adapted from a press release by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Health Partners

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge takes major role in initiative to help solve UK ‘productivity puzzle’

fpjl2 — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 05:37:06 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is one of the partners in a major new £32.4m Productivity Institute, announced today by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is the largest economic and social research investment ever in the UK.

Productivity – the way ideas and labour are transformed into products and services that benefit society – has been lacklustre in the UK over recent decades, with limited growth stalled further by the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

To address the urgent challenge, the new Institute will bring together institutions and researchers from across the country to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to a post-pandemic future full of technological and environmental upheaval.

Professor Diane Coyle, co-director of the ̽��ֱ��’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy will be one of the new Institute’s Directors and leading one of its eight major research themes. She will be heading up the strand on Knowledge Capital: the ideas that drive productivity and progress.

Professor Anna Vignoles from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education will helm another of the main research strands, on Human Capital: the cultivation of people’s skills and abilities. Both lead academics will be supported by a host of other Cambridge researchers from a variety of departments, including POLIS, Psychology, Economics, and the Institute for Manufacturing.

̽��ֱ��Productivity Institute will be headquartered at the ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester, and, along with Cambridge, other members of the leading consortium include the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and Warwick. ̽��ֱ��new Institute is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (part of UK Research and Innovation).

“Productivity is economic jargon for something fundamentally important,” said Professor Coyle. “This is the question of what will enable people’s lives everywhere to improve sustainably over time, ensuring new technologies, along with business and policy choices, bring widespread benefits.”

“Productivity is key to the creation of decent work and the provision of high quality education and healthcare. Its growth offers people sustainable improvements in their standard of living,” she said.

̽��ֱ��Knowledge Capital theme, led by Coyle, will investigate the way that ideas and know-how – “intangible assets” not easily defined or measured – permeate our society and the economy.

“We want to understand better the links between productivity and things that are important but hard to pin down, whether that’s how businesses adopt new technologies and ideas or the role of social networks in determining how well different areas perform,” said Coyle.

Professor Vignoles will lead a team considering the importance of individuals’ wellbeing and productivity, which will include Cambridge psychologist Dr Simone Schnall. It remains an open question as to whether greater wellbeing can increase the productivity of individuals, and what the implications of this might be for both national policy and firms’ strategies.

“Increasing productivity is a pressing priority for the UK and understanding whether policies to improve individuals’ wellbeing are also likely to improve their productivity is crucial,” Professor Vignoles said.

̽��ֱ��fulcrum for Cambridge’s involvement in the new Productivity Institute will be the ̽��ֱ��’s recently established Bennett Institute for Public Policy, where Professor Coyle is based.

Since its launch in 2018, the Bennett Institute has been concentrating on the “challenges posed by the productivity puzzle” in the UK, says the Institute’s Director Professor Michael Kenny, with a focus on ensuring notions of “place” are brought to the fore.

“We are delighted to be contributing to this major new initiative,” said Kenny. “Under the leadership of Professor Coyle, we have been working to understand the many different factors and dynamics which explain the well-springs of, and obstacles to, productivity growth.”

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “I am thrilled that the ̽��ֱ�� will be playing a pivotal role in the new Productivity Institute.”

“ ̽��ֱ��knowledge generated by universities such as ours is a fuel for productivity, and will be fundamental to the resilience of the United Kingdom, and the opportunities afforded its citizens, in a post-pandemic world.”

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said: “Improving productivity is central to driving forward our long-term economic recovery and ensuring that we level up wages and living standards across every part of the UK."

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is to be a key partner in a new national effort to boost British productivity, bringing together expertise to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to its post-pandemic future.

Productivity is key to the creation of decent work and the provision of high quality education and healthcare

Diane Coyle

Yes

Opening schools – and keeping them open – should be prioritised by Government, report says

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 06:46:43 +0000

̽��ֱ��report, Balancing the risks of pupils returning to school, highlights the potential impact on the 13 year-groups of students affected by lockdown. It estimates that, without action, from the mid-2030s and for the 50 years thereafter, around a quarter of the entire workforce will have lower skills.

This could reduce their earning potential by 3% a year and consequently lower the overall economic growth rate. ̽��ֱ��long-term economic consequences aside, the immediate negative impact on children’s mental and physical health, as well as their safety, will be considerable.

̽��ֱ��report has been produced by the Royal Society’s multi-disciplinary Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE) group. ̽��ֱ��lead authors are Professor Anna Vignoles, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Professor Simon Burgess, ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol.

Their assessment looks at the difficulties of balancing the significant costs to pupils and parents of school closures against the need to minimise the risks of COVID-19 infection to children, teachers and the wider community.

It concludes that the risk of infection from restarting schools is not high, relative to many other activities, although the authors recognise that the evidence on this still limited. ̽��ֱ��experience of most other countries which have already taken this step supports this view, the authors say, and by contrast the evidence for the negative impact of closing schools is considerable and robust.

̽��ֱ��report also observes that when infection rates rise in some locations, schools may need to close, but such decisions should be determined by objective criteria and made on a school-by-school, or local area basis.

̽��ֱ��report calls on the Government to:

Suppress the virus in the wider community, as a priority, to reduce the risk of transmission in schools once at full capacity, and to minimise future disruption to learning.
Have objective, transparent, criteria for local decision-making about closing and reopening schools, with clear leadership for that decision-making process.
Provide realistic guidance and substantial extra resources to ensure that schools can minimise chains of transmission (parental guidance on when to keep their child at home applying the precautionary principle; rigorous hygiene; physical distancing and reduced mixing; extra teachers; PPE – including face coverings for teachers, older children and those with underlying health issues; management of staff rooms; regular testing; and prioritisation for vaccines for teachers).
Implement effective surveillance, with a test-trace-isolate system that enables a rapid response to outbreaks, and which allows schools to re-open quickly if they have to close.
Establish effective, clear and unified communication with school leaders, teachers and parents to manage opening and closing of schools in response to local conditions.

̽��ֱ��report also explores the impact on inequality. Anna Vignoles, Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education and a Fellow of Jesus College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Shutting down schools has impacted all children but the worst effects will be felt by those from lower socio-economic groups and with other vulnerabilities, such as a pre-existing mental health condition. Children from low-income households in particular are more likely to lack the resources – space, equipment, home support – to engage fully with remote schooling. Those with pre-existing conditions are more likely to experience a worsening of their mental health. This has to be taken into account in how we come out of this pandemic.”

Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics, ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol, said: “We know how damaging it is for children to miss out on school. ̽��ֱ��amount of school already missed due to the pandemic could impact on their earning potential by around 3% a year throughout their lives and impact on productivity in the UK for decades. While it is still early days, there has been little evidence of surges in infection rates in countries that have opened up schools, including countries where they have fully reopened. While we have to do all that we can to reduce the risk of transmission, we need to get our children back to school.”

One of the challenges highlighted in the report is the lack of data. It calls for a system, including surveillance studies, to be put in place to increase understanding of the risks and provide decision-makers with the local and timely data they need to monitor neighbourhood and school infection rates and to respond accordingly. There is also a call for a programme of anonymous assessment of education achievement and pupil mental health across all age ranges in a sample of schools in mid-September, to gauge the extent and nature of the learning loss and the impact on pupil wellbeing.

Keeping schools open from September should be a Government priority as it manages the COVID-19 pandemic, while closures could have severe social and economic effects that endure for decades, according to a new report.

Children from low-income households in particular are more likely to lack the resources – space, equipment, home support – to engage fully with remote schooling

Anna Vignoles

Martin Vorel

A child writes in his workbook in a school classroom.

Yes

Mend the gap: solving the UK’s productivity puzzle

sjr81 — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 13:02:25 +0000

̽��ֱ��UK is the world’s sixth largest economy. But would it surprise you to learn that outside of London, the South East and a handful of major cities, many areas of the UK are just as poor as swathes of Eastern Europe?

̽��ֱ��disparity between different regions of the UK is stark, and not only in terms of living standards and educational attainment – but, crucially, also in the productivity of its workforce.

̽��ֱ��productivity gap is one of the most serious and vexing economic problems facing the government of the day, and Brexit is adding uncertainty to the mix.

Close the productivity gap between the most and least successful regions of the UK, and the GDP of UK PLC will invariably rise. Allow it to remain at current, stagnant levels – or, even worse, let the gap widen – and it’s not only our place in the world rankings that suffers, but also the UK’s economy, infrastructure, educational standards and health, as well as other indicators of social cohesion, such as child poverty and rising crime rates.

Put simply, productivity fires the engine of our economy – and we all need to mind the gap.

̽��ֱ��UK’s ‘productivity puzzle’ is what concerns Dr Maria Abreu from the Department of Land Economy. She’s working with colleagues from universities around the UK as part of the Productivity Insights Network funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Sheffield. ̽��ֱ��group of economists, geographers, management experts and other scientists are taking a place-based approach to a problem HM government is desperate to solve.

Last year, the government published a 256-page Industrial Strategy that placed the productivity gap at its centre and is looking to the Network to provide policy recommendations, explains Abreu.

“There’s a narrative that the UK is a very rich country, but many regions of the UK outside the capital are poor,” she says. “We have a few of the richest regions in Europe and some of the poorest. It’s a delusion to say we’re rich.

“All the growth in the economy is centred on London, the South East and a few other cities. But growth is low or negative in the rest of the UK, and overall that means there is nearly no growth whatsoever. We are standing still.”

Compared with other OECD countries, the UK has had low productivity performance since the 1970s.

̽��ֱ��gap with other countries closed significantly during the Labour governments of the late 1990s and 2000s: GDP per hour worked grew at an average rate of 2.1% until 2007 when the global financial crisis began.

Since then, however, productivity growth has been negative (-1.1% per year for 2007–9) or very low (0.4% per year from 2009–13), and the gap with other OECD countries has increased again despite employment rates remaining relatively strong, leading to the so-called productivity puzzle.

̽��ֱ��three-year ESRC project is divided into distinct themes, and Abreu is leading on researching how the skills of the UK labour force, developed from preschool to life-long adult learning, go hand in hand with the rise (or fall) of productivity – and how place is a crucial, determining factor in all of this.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that labour productivity in 2016 was significantly above the UK average in London (+33%) and the South East (+6%), but below average in all other regions and nations, and particularly low in the North East (-11%), the West Midlands (-13%), Yorkshire (-15%), and Wales and Northern Ireland (-17%).

“My group is looking at education and teaching standards, and what might be causing the regional disparities,” says Abreu. “We are also looking at graduate migration because we have some excellent northern universities, but those regions lose a lot of people after graduation.

“London and its surrounding areas are very successful in attracting graduates and highly skilled workers from around the UK, as well as migrant workers from abroad.

“ ̽��ֱ��capital’s productivity is enormous, but this means it is decoupling from the rest of the economy. We can link this directly to globalisation in the 1980s and the offshoring of certain industries. Most of the new jobs have been in hi-tech industries concentrated in only a few places.”

Abreu suggests the dismantling of the Regional Development Agencies and the move to LEPs (Learning Enterprise Zones) from 2010 has come at a huge cost to large areas of the UK that are no longer covered by a consistent development strategy.

She passionately believes that increasing education standards across the country is vital if the UK is ever to close its productivity gap. She also argues for proper development strategies for all regions of the UK – as well as investment in education.

̽��ֱ��extent to which parents are engaged with their children’s schooling also displays strong regional variations. Areas that are better off attract better teachers. ̽��ֱ��benefits and drawbacks of this regionalism become self-perpetuating and that affects everyone.

“These disparities in productivity, education and living standards affect us all,” says Abreu. “It matters if you have one region that far outpaces everywhere else. Regions get left behind, become very socially and politically unstable, and low productivity translates into low wages and deprivation. Families do badly at school and this entrenches poverty and poor social mobility, which impacts the rest of the country.”

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

When it comes to the output, education and wellbeing of the Great British workforce, our towns, cities and regions exist on a dramatically unequal footing. A new, wide-ranging research network hopes to find answers to a decades-old problem – the UK’s productivity gap.

There’s a narrative that the UK is a very rich country, but many regions of the UK outside the capital are poor.

Maria Abreu

Brandon Wong

Migrant workers and domestic labour

A study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2015 found that migrant workers brought benefits to UK employers that led to productivity boosts. What happens after Brexit?

Professor Catherine Barnard from the Faculty of Law believes that too much of the Brexit debate has been taken up with the discussion of trade – manufacturing amounts to only 15% of the economy – rather than the impact of the migrant workforce.

“We know there are sectors that are highly dependent on EU labour such as agriculture, which is often low-paid, seasonal work where the incentive to UK workers is not that great,” says Barnard. “We also know that 10% of the NHS, especially in London, is made up of migrant workers. At Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, it’s 27% at postdoctoral level.”

Barnard, working with Dr Amy Ludlow and Sarah Fraser-Butlin, has been looking at the issue of immigration and the labour force, funded by the ESRC. They have focused on the East of England, visiting schools in Spalding as well as attending town hall meetings in Holt and Sheringham. Barnard says: “You get a very different view of the world. When I have given evidence to parliament, I can talk about these towns and their experiences of Eastern European migration – which are very different to the experiences of a town like Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��reason people can’t get a hospital appointment or a school place is partly to do with migration, but it’s also because of the underfunding of public services. Local councils have lost 40% of their funding from central government since 2010.”

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