Slough tops rankings in Britain for productivity and efficiency at work

Slough has the highest productivity and the longest average working week nationwide – making it the most ‘economically effective’ town in Britain, data shows.

Flexible working company CoworkingCafe (which conducts market studies on the economy) used Government data from 2023-2025 to rank 15 of Britain’s ‘most efficient’ towns and cities.

The analysis looks at how well different areas are turning work into money – and Slough tops the national rankings, above Swindon, Wokingham and Edinburgh.

Data places four Berkshire towns in the top 15 – more than any other county – with Wokingham scoring third, Reading coming in at 11th and Bracknell at 13th.

The study looked at five points: average weekly hours, employment rate, labour productivity, job density and business density.

Here is how Slough did in each category compared to other Berkshire towns in the top 15.

Labour productivity

Labour productivity is measured by gross value added per hour (GVA/h) – how much money an hour of work from one employee provides, on average.

If GVA/h is high, it means workers are producing a lot of value each hour.

Slough tops the labour productivity measure at £68 GVA/h, likely due to its high concentration of national headquarters of global firms (O2, Mars, Ferrero), service firms, and major logistics operations linked to Slough Trading Estate and the Heathrow corridor.

Working hours and employment rate

The town has the longest average working week in the country, at close to 40 hours. Five top 15 reached about 39 hours and most others reached 38.

Slough also has a decent employment rate; this is the percentage of working-age people who have a job. If an area has 1,000 working-age people and 750 of them have jobs, the employment rate is 75 per cent.

However, this Slough's weakest marks compared to others; it has the lowest employment rate of the 15 top towns.

Its employment rate is 73 per cent, while 10 of the other towns in top spots score employment rates of more than 80 per cent.

Across the Berkshire towns, the employment rate for Wokingham is 76 per cent, Bracknell is 83 per cent and Reading is 82.

Job density

This compares the number of jobs in an area to the number of working-age people who live there.

If job density is set at exactly 1, that means there is one job for every resident. Less than 1 means there are fewer jobs than residents, meaning people are likely to commute out in order to work elsewhere.

More than 1 means there are more jobs than residents, meaning people from outside are likely to commute in so they can go to work there.

Slough scores high on job density at 0.88 – higher than Bracknell, though a touch lower than Wokingham and Reading, the latter of which has a job density above one (1.12).

Business density

This measures how many businesses there are relative to the size of the population (usually per 10,000 or 100,000 people).

A higher business density suggests a more active or diverse local economy, with more firms operating in the area.

Slough’s business density is higher than Reading's, at 599 businesses for every 10,000 working-age people versus 528 in Reading – though Wokingham’s is much higher still, at 729.

Overall, Britain’s ‘efficiency belt’ clusters in the South East, found CoworkingCafe; large towns are outperforming London on measures such as how hard people work and how active the local economy is.