The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence:
‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7 per cent increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11 per cent fall).’
This dry text conceals the revelation that GDP is 1.7 per cent higher than they had previously reckoned. This meant that by the time the Omicron variant hit, the UK economy was actually 0.6 per cent above its pre-Covid level – not 1.2 per cent below, as had been thought. So it turned out that we were not, as Chris Giles of the Financial Times put it, ‘a global outlier anymore’ in terms of economic recovery from lockdown.
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