Can we trust the predictions for Britain’s economy?

A witch’s cauldron of uncertainty is making life very difficult for the number crunchers – and it could become more of a problem for the chancellor, writes James Moore

Rishi Sunak needs to respond with pragmatism before the next scheduled budgetary event in November (Reuters)

The best way to describe the latest official economic numbers? Grim. The first official estimate for May showed a month-on-month improvement in the performance of UK plc, but it came in at just 1.8 per cent over April, the first full month of lockdown, when it recorded a record slump of 20.3 per cent. The economy is now a staggering 24.5 per cent smaller than it was in February.

The regular Reuters poll of economists had called for an uplift of 5.5 per cent in May. As predications go, that now looks like hitting the corner flag rather than the goal when taking a penalty. These are not normal times, however, and so you have to have a certain sympathy for forecasters.

The UK economy is a complex beast with many different moving parts, including human behaviour, which is notoriously unpredictable. But it’s usually possible to make reasonably accurate predictions about the way it’s going to go, given the aid of the wealth of data out there, historic trends, modelling, etc.