London's Economy Today - Issue 193 - September 2018

The overview

• Significant uncertainty remains with six months to go to Brexit
• UK inflation picks up but so does monthly economic growth
• London’s ranking as a global financial centre falls to second place

Economic indicators

• Decline in TfL passenger journeys with a total of 252.0m passenger journeys registered between 22 July and 18 August, 35.2m less than the previous period accounting for odd days.
• House prices expectations in London fall further in August with most surveyors continuing to have negative expectations for the next three months. The RICS index was -39 in August, down from -33 in July. London remains the region with the most negative expectations for house prices.
• Consumer confidence in London turned positive with the consumer confidence index at 5 in August, up from -1 in July. This represents the first positive index score for London since October 2017. The GfK index of consumer confidence reflects people’s views on their financial position and the general economy over the past year and in the next 12 months. A score above zero suggests positive opinions; a score below zero indicates negative sentiment.

London’s Economy Today supplement: Performance of past employment projections

• GLA Economics has produced long-run employment projections for London since 2002. Their main purpose is to inform planning to provide capacity to accommodate the longer-term needs of the London economy. This supplement looks at how our past projections have performed and how this compares to projections from other respected organisations.
• This work has highlighted some of the difficulties in producing long-term employment projections, which include the uncertainties around the relationship between employment, productivity and output, which form part of our projections methodology, and the problems caused by revisions to the back series.
• However, despite these difficulties, examining the performance of our past projections gives us confidence in our methodology. Our projections perform reasonably well, especially in the longer-term, and when compared to external forecasters.

London’s Economy Today data on the Datastore

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