Office for National Statistics

As the election campaign moves into its final stages there remains one ‘elephant in the room' which no politician really wants to talk about - the deficit and how after the election this will be tackled.

UK Government borrowing reached a new peak in 2009/10 but undershot the figure forecast in the Budget.

Britain's emergence from an 18-month recession was stronger than first thought, according to revised ONS data.

Inflation fell back to 3% in February after a sharp spike at the beginning of the year.

A key estimate of UK GDP suggests output increased in the three months ending in January, but indications of a more substantial recovery are still wide of the mark, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

Poverty among pensioners has fallen by nearly a third in eleven years, driven by increased uptake of private pensions, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The pound has lost ground against other currencies following the release of GDP figures showing the UK economy grew just 0.1% in the last quarter.

Public debt remains at a post-war record according to official figures released today, but the data also suggest the economy is stabilising, head of macroeconomics at PricewaterhouseCoopers(PwC) says.

UK GDP grew in the three months to November to edge the country out of recession, forecasts by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) suggest.

Better-than-expected unemployment figures and a rosier growth forecast from the Bank of England raised hopes yesterday that Britain was beginning to claw its way towards economic recovery.