Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, including the latest GDP report for September
- Latest: UK suffers worse slump than US, France or Germany
- UK GDP grew 15.5% in last quarter
- Record growth, after worst slump ever
- Economy still 9.7% smaller than before pandemic
- Growth slowed to 1.1% in September
- Introduction: It’s UK GDP Day
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has warned that there are still ‘hard times’ ahead, with growth likely to have kept slowing since September.
Responding to the GDP figures, he says:
“Today’s figures show that our economy was recovering over the Summer, but started to slow going into Autumn. The steps we’ve had to take since to halt the spread of the virus mean growth has likely slowed further since then.
“But there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic on the health side – including promising news on tests and vaccines. My economic priority continues to be jobs – that’s why we extended furlough through to March and I welcome the news today that nearly 20,000 new roles for young people have been created through our Kickstart scheme.
The Office for National Statistics also points out that the UK has suffered a much steeper Covid-19 slump this year than the US, and other major European economies.
It says:
The UK economy is still 9.7% lower in Quarter 3 2020 compared with the end of 2019.
This is more than twice as large as the cumulative drop in GDP observed in Italy, Germany and France and nearly three times the size of the cumulative drop of 3.5% in the US.
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