This week saw the good news that everyone in the UK was waiting for. GDP figures for Q3 of this year showed that with 1% growth, the British economy had finally left the longest double-dip recession since the 1950’s. But many have been asking; “were we ever in recession at all?”

To be fair, I have been stating that in our industry, there doesn’t seem to have been a recessionary effect. In fact, many, including myself, have been reporting that we have been having much better years than expected! The problem with the GDP figure is that is is now vastly out of date. When GDP was first introduced, it was based on old fashioned methods of spending and household items. Now, the way a household spends and what it spends on is much different, and GDP hasn’t been updated to account for this. Plus, GDP figures are also made up by a lot of estimation work, not totally accurate tools for measuring.

The other thing to consider is that our economy is dominated by some very big sectors, like construction, manufacturing and finance for example. If one of these big sectors suffers a major decline where the rest of the economy is doing relatively OK in comparison, it has an overall negative effect on the total GDP figure. In this case it is construction which is having that effect. So while our industry for example is stable and doing OK, the GDP figures paint a distorted picture.

 

So even though the “official” figures state that the UK was in a double-dip recession, the anecdotal evidence and the word on the street says otherwise. It is still tough out there, we have to remember this. Just because we’re not in recession doesn’t mean to say we’re entering another boom. That is certainly not the case. On the same day as Britain came out of recession, Ford announced 1400 job cuts and two factory closures. Bad news for the UK car sector. We are seeing it in our industry with the troubles at Uniglaze and other company acquisitions that have taken place previousl
y.Lets keep positive. Our industry has done well to weather the worst of the storm and hopefully we won’t be seeing a period of such turbulence again in the future.