Sunak says the economy is doing better. Is he right?

Is Britain’s economy ‘turning a corner’? Rishi Sunak thinks so, but convincing his fellow MPs and the public is going to be difficult. At the ‘SME Connect’ conference in Warwickshire this morning, the Prime Minister spoke about the ‘tough couple of years’ the country has been through, insisting the UK economy is now heading ‘in the right direction.’

On several metrics, Sunak is right. January’s growth figures, coming in at 0.2 per cent, suggest the UK is likely to consign its technical recession to the end of last year. Forecasters expect April will return the inflation rate back to the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent, which should give it more room to start the steady process of cutting interest rates. This week’s economic updates may not fully show what’s to come (we’ll get February’s inflation data this Wednesday, and the Monetary Policy Committee’s latest deliberation on rates on Thursday), but once higher energy costs fall out of the data in April, much better news is expected.