GDP is up 1% – give or take 0.7%

So it’s official: the UK economy grew by 1 per cent in the third quarter of 2012, according to the ONS’s preliminary estimate. That’s significantly better than the consensus forecasts. As all the politicking and pontificating begins, there are a few caveats worth keeping in mind:-

1. It’s just an estimate. As I showed yesterday, the margin of error in the ONS’s preliminary estimates is +/– 0.7 percentage points. That means Q3 growth could really turn out to have been anything from 0.3 per cent to 1.7 per cent. Still, we can be confident that the economy did return to growth in the quarter, ending the double-dip recession — though this may have been thanks to some one-off factors, which brings us to…

2. The Diamond Jubilee. The extra bank holiday in June was estimated to depress Q2 growth by around 0.5 points, and so artificially inflates this quarter’s figure by 0.5