City of London Economic Research

Creative professionals in the Square Mile

 

By Dr Edward Jones Research Officer at the City of London Corporation

 

Creative professionals might make up a small proportion of the City’s workforce but they are a crucial component of the wider business draw of the Square Mile. Whilst accounting for 7% of City professionals, creative talent provides crucial services to other businesses, helping to foster innovation and support competitiveness. Digital breakthroughs lead to innovation, and advertising and marketing expertise aids business communication, meaning that creative skills help City businesses push the boundaries and remain competitive. So its unsurprising that the largest employers of creative talent in the City are those which complement the wider business ecosystem – digital agencies, publishers, advertisers and architects.

More than half of the creative jobs in the City (18,405 workers) are in tech businesses. These jobs in IT, software and computer services have seen phenomenal growth in recent years, increasing 80% since 2010. This outpaces the growth of this sector in London (54%) and in Great Britain as a whole (48%). Their location in the Square Mile means they are close to the clients and competitors that keep them at the cutting edge. Digital tools and capabilities are rapidly transforming other services as fintech, insuretech, legal tech and regtech become part of the ecosystem’s landscape. This process requires the specialist knowledge of digital agencies, whose growth in recent years reflects the increasingly crucial role of tech to City businesses.

 

 

Both publishing (6,200 workers) and advertising and marketing (4,675 workers) also employ a lot of workers in the City, the latter having more than doubled its job count since 2010. The strength of these specialisms highlights the importance of communication and messaging to the knowledge based businesses in and around the Square Mile today.

The music, performing and visual arts sector is a small but fast-growing component of the City’s creative workforce. Home to world-leading cultural institutions such as the Barbican, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the London Symphony Orchestra, the cultural impact of City is also felt in the presence of artists and performers, who have increased in number by 145% between 2010 and 2016, albeit from a modest numerical base of 745 professionals.

 

Our recent City as a Place for People report showed that there is an increasing blurring between specialisms, with creative solutions and novel perspectives being readily adopted in fields such as finance, insurance and law. The creative work done in-house by IT, marketing or communications workers is not necessarily captured in official estimates like the Business Register and Employment Survey (used in this blog), which are based only on the business area of the employing firm. This means that creative professionals in the Square Mile might will likely make up much more than the official 7% of the workforce.

The Culture Mile initiative has focused interest in the creative ecology of the City. An exciting new research project has recently begun exploring creative enterprise in Culture Mile, getting to grips with the activities which characterise the area’s unique creative offer. The data analysis and in-depth case studies that this project will generate promises to shed further light on the appeal of a Square Mile location for creative businesses.

 

Professional services in the City - focus on legal, accounting & auditing and management consultancy

 

By Katharina Ehrhart, Research Officer at the City of London Corporation

 

Professional services are key to the City’s unique business ecosystem as employers, as clients and as business partners. While financial services include different forms of banking, insurance or asset management, the professional services sector refers to a wide variety of activities from architecture via real estate activities to photographic activities.

Almost one in five workers in the City are employed in just three industry subsectors of professional services which are particularly closely related to financial activities - sometimes referred to as ‘related professional services’. Together, accounting & auditing, legal services and management consultancy employ 90,000 jobs in the City across a total of 6,505 firms.

Looking in more detail at the City, legal services employ the biggest share of people, followed by management consultancy and accounting & auditing. Legal services also have the highest number of firms in the City, followed by auditing & accounting firms, while the number of management consultancy firms is much smaller.

 

 

 

The City’s legal sector is highly competitive and world leading in key areas including litigation, arbitration and dispute resolution. The City alone hosts 25,000 solicitors, and 3,000 barristers – that’s around 40% of solicitors and barristers in London. The combined number of legal services in the City is higher than in any other local authority in the country.

The City’s management consultancy sector employs 29,000 professionals. They provide firms with strategic advance on a range of issues, with 28% of fee income derived from Digital and Technology Consulting (MCA).

With 17,000 accounting and auditing professionals, the City employs the 2^nd highest share of accountants and auditors in the country.[1] Many of them work for the Big Four which have their head offices in the City, Southwark and Canary Wharf. The high-quality financial reporting the sector provides underpins business management and can help investors identify profitable investment opportunities (ICAEW).

These professional services are based in the City because they support financial services firms in providing legal and management advice as well as producing financial records, aiding the smooth running of operations.

This is reflected in the significant share of demand for services from professional services firms which comes from financial services firms: Financial services firms account for 17% of the total demand for legal services, 24% of the total demand for accounting services, and over 20% of demand for management consultancy (estimated). The data is from ONS input-output tables.

 

You can more about financial services’ demand for services from other sectors in Fiona Morrill’s blog on the “Chain Reaction”.

Professional services play a key role in the City’s ecosystem; they provide services which are key to each other as well as financial services operations and make up a substantial share of employment in the City. Firms and individuals come to the City because they can get not only access to financial services but also all the related advice in the same place.

 

Sources: BRES 2016 data, UK Business Counts 2017 data, ONS, Input-Output-Tables

[1] After Southwark (SIC 69201).