Prior to working within the HE education sector I had a number of jobs and roles one of which involved working on IT tenders for government departments.

Often these tenders had to be in by the end of play Friday or first thing Monday morning and at the time I was working Monday-Thursday but when needed I came in Friday or Saturday to complete the tender.

At that time the cost of such an unscheduled activity (transport, lunch) could easily be saddled by myself as the employee even when it often resulted in no immediate monetary gain or more often than not no personal momentary gain at all. I think most people do this kind of thing, turn up early to work or work a Saturday so as to develop a project. Being able to do so though was entirely dependent on the immediate availability of money, for my own personal speculative use (speculative as to say no gain may be necessarily derived from its expenditure). The lack of availability of these sort of funds to the individual is a likely first causality of the ongoing cost of living crisis and is exasperated by the associated focus of rising costs on non elective expenditure, housing, transport to work, food and water.

Consequently I wonder if the UK productivity problem, is an extension of the cost living crisis in that it denies the individual the ability to offer personal speculation as a facilitating measure to the economic system.