Could Britain avoid recession altogether?

The idea that we face a certain recession has been drummed into our heads for months. The Bank of England recently produced a graph showing recession lasting into 2024. Just yesterday, the International Monetary Fund repeated its assertion that Britain faces an especially gloomy 2023, with recession inevitable – while simultaneously upsetting the House of Commons Treasury select committee by refusing to testify before it. 

But could the unthinkable happen? Could Britain now avoid recession altogether? The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) first estimate for economic growth for November shows that GDP grew by 0.1 per cent – unexciting, but still remarkable given that many economists were expecting negative growth by now.

A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have already had one of those – the third quarter of 2022. But for the fourth quarter to also come out negative, the economy will have had to have shrunk quite markedly in December.