UK output growing at fastest pace for 12 years!

PRODUCTIVITY in Britain is growing at the fastest pace for more than a decade in a major boost to the economy, official figures showed yesterday.

In yet another sign that the UK continues to defy warnings of a sharp economic slowdown, the Office for National Statistics said output per hour rose by 1.7 per cent in final six months of 2017. That was the strongest half-year performance since 2005.

The figures came just a week after the ONS revealed that business investment and exports hit a record high last year.

Brexit campaigners said the UK economy ‘continues to confound the gloom-mongers’ and said a 1.6 per cent slide in industrial production in Germany in February could be ‘a sign of things to come’ in the eurozone, where unemployment is still around twice as high as in the UK.

The report showed British productivity still lags behind other big economies and is 16.3 per cent lower than the average in other G7 nations.

Howard Archer of the Ernst & Young Item Club, an economic forecasting group, said: ‘The UK has a lot of catching up to do on the productivity front.’

Britain’s economy lagged behind the eurozone last year, with output up 1.8 per cent while output in the single currency bloc rose 2.3 per cent.

But unemployment in Britain is at a 3-year low of .3 per cent compared with 8.5 per cent in the eurozone.

‘Confounds the gloom-mongers’