Digital advances in the health and social care industry alone could add £33bn to UK GDP by 2040 if sufficient investments in technology are made, a major report says.
Th analysis, by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) think tank and Virgin Media Business, suggests that overall the UK economy could grow £232bn by 2040 if the right levels of tech investment are made in the right areas.
In addition to health and social care, the retail and professional services sectors could potentially add £37billion between them, the analysis states.
Researchers set out three crucial factors that would be needed to achieve the desired economic outcomes, www.thisismoney.co.uk reports.
They are a prolonged investment in connectivity, higher spending on ‘collaboration technologies,’ and better enterprise resource planning systems.
According to the report, these measures will enhance productivity and output across the private and public sectors, and help the country’s economy, which fell by its highest amount in over three centuries last year, to recover strongly from the coronavirus pandemic.
Making the necessary investments in the near term could also add £74billion to Britain’s economy by the middle of the decade and ‘ensure the UK is in a position of strength over the medium term’, the report claims.
Peter Kelly, managing director of Virgin Media Business, said that after the “toughest of years”, the UK has a £232bn opportunity ahead of it “which we must now grasp with both hands”.
He said: “By continuing to invest in new digital ways of working, we can seize this moment and help UK businesses to bounce back better.
“Moves to accelerate digital adoption are driving extraordinary outcomes across private and public sector organisations, helping them to revolutionise how they work, deliver for customers, and provide vital services for our communities.”
Covid-19 has accelerated three major digital transformations affecting employers and workers, declared the report, all of which will boost service quality, make firms more efficient and deliver gains for employees.
The first is flexible working, with higher numbers of people working remotely, and more operations being conducted virtually through tools like videoconferencing and virtualisation.
Digital services such as online grocery shopping shot up in popularity, while little-used utilities such as virtual courts and doctors’ appointments also took off.
Finally, data sets for analytics and artificial intelligence are becoming more developed.
Taken together, the report approximates that employees who take full advantage of these trends will improve their productivity by 12%.
“From flexible and remote working to virtual contact centres and cloud adoption, the pandemic has pressed the fast-forward button on many technological trends that had already started or were being planned for,’ it remarked.
“If investment in such technologies continues at the same pace, organisations and their sectors – and in turn, the whole UK economy – will be able to grow at an increased rate. This will deliver better outcomes for our industry workforces and benefit customers in the years and decades ahead.”
The research report is available here.
