Ross Clark

It was the weather wot did it, wot stopped us spending in the shops. Yet again, the favourite old excuse has been trotted out by retailers trying to explain where their sales have vanished. Retail sales volumes in September, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports this morning, plunged by 0.9 per cent in September, with a quarterly fall of 0.8 per cent. Apparently the hot weather in September is to thank for delaying us going down to the high street to try on all the exciting autumn collections (although why we didn’t do this later in the month when temperatures fell they don’t explain). There is, of course, an obvious alternative explanation: that consumers are being dragged down by high inflation and high interest rates.

Not for the first time, a widely-predicted – and for many frustrated buyers, hoped-for – house price crash has failed to materialise. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index (ONS HPI) shows average prices up 0.3 per cent in the month of August and up 0.2 per cent since August 2022. This is at odds with the Halifax House Price Index, which put house prices in September at 4.7 per cent lower than a year earlier. But it is a more complete data set based on all sales across the UK. The Halifax index, by contrast, is based on mortgage approvals by the Halifax bank – and there is no guarantee that all the mortgage approvals actually went through to completion.

So, the doomsters have been proved wrong again – not least the Bank of England, which a year ago forecast recession throughout 2023. GDP figures released by the Office of National Statistics this morning show that the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in August, partially reversing a sharp contraction of 0.6 per cent in July.  Across the three months to August – which is a rather better guide to what is happening than the volatile monthly figures – show growth of 0.3 per cent. It is not possible now – by the usual definition of two consecutive quarters of negative growth – for Britain to suffer a recession in 2023, and neither does it seem all that likely that we will be experiencing one in six months’ time. But no-one should get too excited.

The biggest hinderance for the Conservatives is that they have nothing to offer young voters. The Labour party, however, just might. It seems that Keir Starmer will announce in his conference speech a plan to return to the idea of post-war new town corporations, which were able to compulsory-purchase land at agricultural value. It could – just possibly – mean a sharp fall in the price of new housing, massively expanding the number of first time buyers.  The great shame is that the Conservatives couldn’t bring themselves to introduce a similar policy You don’t have to be a socialist to feel aggrieved at your inability to afford a home, something that you parents and grandparents took for granted. What have the Conservatives done to help you?

To no-one’s surprise, house prices fell again last month. Average prices were down by 0.4 per cent in September, according to Halifax, with the typical property now worth £278,600 compared with the peak of £293,500 in June 2022. Much of this, inevitably, has to do with high interest rates. For three decades until last year the housing market was pumped up by a downwards trend in interest rates, which increased the amount that buyers could borrow. Now that has come to an end, buying power is contracting. There is unlikely to be any rapid recovery. If rates remain high – and gradually it is dawning on markets that this is likely to be the case for far longer than previously expected – then we could be in a housing bear market for years to come.

You can almost sense the agonising among hardcore remainers, the howls of anguish. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Instead of still struggling to reach its pre-pandemic high it seems that the UK economy in fact surpassed 2019 levels two years ago.  Previously, the ONS had estimated the economy in the last quarter of 2021 to be 1.2 per cent smaller than pre-pandemic. It now calculates that in fact it was 0.6 per cent larger. The ONS says its initial forecasts were compromised by the difficulties of calculating GDP during the pandemic. Is there a bias which has led to the damage to the UK from Brexit being over-estimated?

When the Commons nodded through Britain’s legally-binding net zero target in 2019 all MPs had to go on was the Climate Change Committee’s estimate that the whole process would cost £1 trillion. MPs failed to probe this figure and the government didn’t even try to calculate one. Indeed, when the Treasury attempted to come up with its own figure in 2021 it gave up, saying it couldn’t be done because there are too many unknowables. Net zero will require technologies, such as hydrogen production via electrolysis of water, which are still in an early stage of development and have not yet been scaled up. Now the think tank Civitas has weighed in with its own analysis. And its conclusion?