Today’s figures confirm what the forecasters and the Bank of England have already predicted: the British economy is shrinking. GDP contracted by 0.2 per cent between July and September, as spiralling prices and energy bills impacted households and businesses.
We may not yet be in recession — considered to be two consecutive quarters of negative growth — but we are on the path to one. This makes the UK an outlier in global terms as the only G7 country to have seen GDP fall in this period and, more worryingly, for its economy to remain smaller than it was pre-pandemic.
