Report: Digital Job Growth in UK Hits Lowest Level in Decade

Great Britain’s digital sector is reportedly seeing its slowest job growth in a decade.

As Bloomberg News reported Thursday (July 11), this has led the incoming Labour government to promise to revitalize the industry as it seeks to fuel growth.

The number of digital jobs climbed by just 0.3% last year — the lowest figure since a 0.1% decrease in 2012, Bloomberg said, citing data from the Office for National Statistics.

The data showed that digital sector workers — which includes jobs like programmers and tech consultants — saw their hourly pay increase by just over 1% between 2022 and 2023, which translates to a pay decrease in real terms.

All the same, the U.K.’s new Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, has pledged to revive the sector.

“The UK has a vibrant digital economy, but its potential has not been fully explored,” Kyle, in the job for less than a week after Labour’s victory in last week’s general election, told Bloomberg in a statement. “This government is determined to change that.”

The U.K. served as the median country in PYMNTS Intelligence’s recent “How the World Does Digital” report, which showed about 95.9% of residents had access to high-speed broadband in 2022, and nearly everyone had access to at least 4G cellular networks by 2022 and 68% had access to 5G in 2022.

Nearly all adults had smartphones, while, as of 2021, 95.5% of U.K. adults had debit cards and 62.1% had credit cards, the report found.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week that new U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised an era of “national renewal,” which could mean changes to financial services and digital innovations such as open banking.

The Labour Party’s platform says Great Britain will become “a global standard-setter for the use of AI in FS [financial services], delivering the next phase of Open Banking,” while “defining a roadmap for Open Finance, embracing securities tokenization and a central bank digital currency, and establishing a regulatory sandbox for financial products to reach underserved communities.”

As PYMNTS wrote, the “ambition’s there, but the challenges are plentiful.” Data from the “How the World Does Digital” report show that mobile monthly “activity days” came to roughly 14 days for mobile banking, and 10 days overall for online banking.

But open banking data, from Open Banking Limited (OBL) — the implementation entity in the U.K. — shows that by the start of this year, the proportion of digitally active consumers using open banking in the U.K. rose to 13%, or 1 in 7. Payment penetration was higher at 8.2% when compared to “data” penetration at a bit more than 7%.