Another day, another flurry of bad news on the fallout from October’s Budget. The BDO Monthly Business Trends indices – which pull together the results of all the main UK business surveys – show that confidence has fallen to the lowest level in almost two years, with output and employment down, and only inflation up.
Meanwhile, KPMG and REC have published their UK Report on Jobs, which reveals a sharp fall in permanent recruitment in November. It seems many firms are reassessing their ‘staffing needs’ amid reports of a growing number of redundancies.
It is a reminder that Labour’s first Budget was certainly grim. But just as the new government was rightly criticised this summer for banging on about the ‘worst set of circumstances since the Second World War’, are we now at risk of overplaying the effects of the Budget? Does all this gloom – and the assumption that Britain is resigned to another five years of stagnation – risk doing even more damage now?
For a start, it would be wrong to attribute all the weakness in business confidence to the Budget.