Output and productivity

Businesses within the Peak District generate significant economic output. Growth comes from a diversity of different sectors across the Peak District, including productive wholesale, agricultural and tourism-based businesses.

Gross Value Added is increasing in national parks

The Peak District National Park generates between £616m and £758m total gross value added (GVA) annually (see Figure 5), depending on the measure used. Gross value added (GVA) is the total value generated by all producer units in a particular sector or area and is regarded as the most effective method of measuring the economic contribution of different sectors or economies.

Turnover, Employment, and County Productivity-based GVA Estimates, 2016

GVA Estimates (£m)	Peak District National Park	All England National Parks
Turnover-based GVA estimates	670	5,498
Employment-based GVA estimates	616	6,461
County Productivity-based GVA estimates	758	8,723

English national park economies collectively generated between 0.4% and 0.6% of total GVA in England in 2016, estimated to be between £5.5 billion and £8.7 billion in total. GVA is estimated to have increased by approximately 35% between 2012 and 2016. This is partly due to growth in national productivity, as well as growth in employment and business turnover in English national parks during that period.

Unfortunately, GVA data is not available for local areas, which means that there are no GVA estimates for the national parks. Therefore, GVA has to be estimated using different assumptions about GVA per business, per worker or per £1 of output, based on relevant data at the national and county level. And this formulates the three estimates in the table above.

It is important to note that this approach is an under-estimate of the true level of GVA, because some of the turnover in the national parks has been suppressed and is therefore excluded from these estimates. GVA estimates are further complicated for the Peak District by the number of counties (six) that make up the National Park, so the cutting of data to the National Park boundary is complex and relies on large assumptions and skewed geographic industry.

More information can be found in the Gross Value Added for England’s National Parks report ^[1]. Please note that GVA estimates have not been updated since 2016 for national parks.

Growth in turnover and output in the Peak District

The 3,190 business enterprises within the Peak District generated an estimated combined annual turnover of more than £1.7 billion in 2020. This equated to 11% of all English national park turnover (£16.1bn).

Average annual business turnover in the Peak District National Park is £524,995. This is significantly less than the English national park average of £644,204. However, the average annual turnover per employee in the Peak District (£104,085) is higher than the English national park average (£101,450). Business turnover has grown 5% between 2016 and 2020. Data is a snapshot of March in each year, data from March 2021 will be available in October 2021.

Total turnover of VAT and/or PAYE based enterprises 2016-2020

The largest growth is in the arts, entertainment, recreation industry. Wholesale businesses contributed the largest industry share of turnover in the Peak District with a turnover of £350m in 2020, 20% of the Peak District economy. When compared with the UK (14%) or National Parks England turnover (15%), it shows the importance of wholesale businesses to the Peak District economy.

Broad Industry Group Percentage Share of PDNP Turnover, 2019

Significant value was also generated by the production industry (£236m), contributing 14% of total Peak District turnover during 2020 despite a decrease in the sector since 2016.

A similarly high share of total turnover was also generated from agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses (£158m), and the accommodation and food services sector (£125m) turnover in 2020. The largest growth since 2016 was for the arts, entertainment, recreation industry with a 137% increase.

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1. National Parks England: https://www.nationalparksengland.org.uk/__data/./img/pdf_file/0015/29040/Gross-Value-Added-for-England-National-Parks-2017-Update.pdf ↩︎