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Is the UK economy healthy? A count of the measures getting better or worse

🩺 Is the economy healthy? snapshot loading…

Not a snapshot of numbers you have already seen — the direction of travel. Where the economy sits between growing strongly and a deep recession, what that is doing to jobs, and how today compares with every downturn since 1955.
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i Whether the economy is growing tells you very little on its own. What it is doing to jobs, to what your pay buys and to how many vacancies there are is the part you can act on — and the direction over a few months matters far more than any single month's number.

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🩺 How we work out the state of the economy

"In recession" is a definition, not our opinion
A recession is two quarters in a row in which the economy shrinks — that is the rule everyone uses, and it is the rule we apply, to the ONS's own quarterly GDP figures. Run over the whole series back to 1955 it finds nine episodes, and they are the nine you would name: the mid fifties, 1961, 1973–74, 1975, 1980–81, 1990–91, 2008–09, 2020, and the short dip in late 2023. That agreement is the reason we are willing to use the word flatly rather than hedge it.
Why a count of measures, and not a score out of 100
A single "economic health score" would be easier to read and would be a number we invented: no statistics body stands behind it, and you could not check it. So instead each of the twelve measures is compared with itself a year earlier and marked better, worse or much the same, and the headline is simply how many fall in each pile. Every verdict shows the figure behind it, so if you disagree with one you can see exactly which number produced it.
"Much the same" is doing real work
Each measure has a band inside which a movement is treated as noise rather than a direction — a tenth of a point for a survey rate, one per cent for a monthly index. Without it a dial would flip between better and worse on a rounding difference, and the count would mean nothing.
The economy growing and jobs getting worse are not a contradiction
They happen together often, and both halves of this tile can be true at once. Output is measured quarterly and revised; the labour market turns first and is felt first. Watch particularly for the share of working-age people in a job falling while the number of people in work rises — that means the population grew faster than the jobs did, and it is why we lead on the rate.
Output per person is the one to watch
Total GDP can rise simply because there are more people. Output per person divides it by everyone in the country, and it is the line that tracks whether growth is reaching anybody. It is also the honest way to measure a recovery: after 2008 total output regained its old level years before output per person did.
How long recessions last is the part nobody quotes
The table under the chart shows, for every recession, how deep it went, how far unemployment rose afterwards, and how many quarters it took for output per person to get back to where it had been. That last column is the one worth reading: after 2008 it took the best part of eight years.
Two well-known indicators are missing, on purpose
The purchasing managers' index (S&P Global) and consumer confidence (GfK) would both belong here, and both are commercial data we are not entitled to republish. We would rather name that than quietly leave a gap: you can read them at their publishers.
What this is not
It is not a forecast, and there is no prediction anywhere in it — every rung is chosen from figures that have already been published, and each one is dated on the tile. It also does not say why anything moved. General information, not financial advice.

Sources: ONS quarterly national accounts, monthly GDP, Labour Force Survey, vacancy survey, claimant count, consumer price inflation, average weekly earnings, index of production, retail sales and business investment — Open Government Licence v3.0. The recession dating, the direction of travel and the count of measures are StreetOwl's own, by a fixed rule over those figures.

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