UK economy contracts by 0.2% as Omicron dents spending
Britain’s economy contracted by 0.2% in December as government restrictions to limit the spread of the Omicron variant dented consumer spending.
Shortages of goods in the shops in the run-up to Christmas and a record number of job vacancies also slowed the economy after a 0.9% increase in November.
City economists polled by Reuters expected a more severe drop of 0.6%.
In the final quarter of the year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said GDP growth slowed to 1% from a downwardly revised 1.1% in the three months to the end of September.
However, the sustained recovery since the spring of last year pushed GDP growth to 7.5% across the whole of 2021, marking the strongest annual of expansion since the second world war.
In 2020, during the first phase of the pandemic, the UK suffered one of the largest annual economic contractions of any major economy when GDP plunged by 9.4%.
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