Lord Birt – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Birt on 2014-06-09.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the time taken for the United Kingdom economy to return to recovery in comparison to other leading countries; and what they consider to be the reasons for the differences in those timescales.

Lord Deighton

UK GDP fell 7.2% between the first quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of 2009. Of the G7 economies Japan was the only one that had a deeper recession, and the depth of UK recession was almost twice that of the US.

Thanks to the government’s long term economic plan, since the trough of the recession the UK has grown faster than France, Italy, Spain and the euro area as a whole. In the year to the first quarter of 2014 the UK grew faster than any other G7 economy, the deficit has fallen by over a third as a share of GDP since 2009-10 and there are more people in work than ever before. But the job is not yet done and the biggest risk now to the recovery would be abandoning the plan that is delivering a brighter economic future.