‘London’s economy is smaller and the number of jobs are less’ thanks to Brexit, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said on the Today programme this morning. Is he right? No. Adjusted for inflation, the capital’s economic output was 16 per cent greater in 2024 than in 2015, the year before the vote to leave, according to ONS figures published last month. There were 6.44 million jobs in London in June this year, against 5.76 million in June 2016 – some 675,000 more.
Khan recently said that we don’t need to rerun arguments about Brexit
But Khan probably had something slightly different in mind: he often quotes figures saying London’s economy is £30 billion a year smaller and has 290,000 fewer jobs than it would otherwise have had – a qualifier he failed to give this morning. Those numbers are from research he commissioned from Cambridge Econometrics – but they don’t describe a shrinking economy. Rather, they describe the difference between two modelled scenarios, one with Brexit and one without, each of which have Britain’s (and London’s) economy growing. That report has been criticised for suggesting that without the vote for Brexit, Britain would have grown faster than the United States (and far faster than other major European economies) since 2015, for blaming any shortfall in investment compared with a pre-Brexit projection entirely on Brexit and for making negative assumptions on trade.
Khan recently said that we don’t need to rerun arguments about Brexit because ‘the debate is settled’ and ‘the damage is there for all to see’. But if his case is that strong, it shouldn’t need stretching – and what’s there to see in the official figures is a London economy that’s bigger than before the Brexit vote.
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