West Midlands economy badly hit by Covid hangover as output slumps
Covid has left the economy of the West Midlands languishing behind the rest of the country, experts warned today.
The region's economy is10 per cent behind pre-pandemic levels and is by far the worst performing in the UK, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The data shows the region's output in the first quarter of this year was down 10.4 per cent on the level recorded in the last quarter of 2019.
By comparison London's GDP grew by 1.2 per cent – the biggest rise of any region.
It marks a blow to Boris Johnson's pledge to level up the country by shifting growth from the capital to regions including the West Midlands.
Wolverhampton South East MP Pat McFadden, Labour's Shadow Treasury Secretary, said the figures were a "brutal testimony to what has happened to economic growth in our region in the past few years".
He said: "A loss of economic wealth on this scale has a direct impact on people's prosperity and standard of living.
"It confirms the yawning gulf between the Government's rhetoric on levelling up and what's actually happening on the ground."
Paul Forrest, director at West Midlands Economic Forum, said the figures reflected the region's "particularly vulnerability to Covid".
He said they also reflected how the pandemic had "intensified" existing downward trends in key sectors in the West Midlands including the automotive and aerospace industries.
Mr Forrest said global energy shortages in the wake of the Ukraine conflict had hit West Midlands industry hard, as had the lack of an "effective trading relationship with the EU" since Brexit.
"The difficult global trading conditions, and the increasingly fraught domestic economic environment – not least the cost-of-living crisis compressing domestic demand – ensure 2022 will prove a particularly challenging year for the regional economy," he said.
"In the absence of a national industrial strategy, regional institutions would be needed to step into the breach."
The figures come after recent analysis by Blomberg found that since the end of 2019 the Black Country and Staffordshire had fallen further behind London in almost every key economic metric.
Earlier this year the Government published its delayed levelling up white paper, outlining its pledge to combat regional inequalities.
