Britain mired in longest, deepest postwar recession

The ONS said the economy shrank by 0.2% in the third quarter and, following fresh estimates of Britain's performance earlier in the downturn, by 6.03% since early 2008.

Officials said the current slump was now worse than that of the early 1980s when the decimation of manufacturing resulted in a 6% decline between 1979 and 1981.

The ONS said a better than originally estimated performance by the battered construction sector – which had its biggest quarterly rise in output in more than six years – meant that the economy contracted by less than the 0.3% pencilled in by statisticians last month. That in turn had been an improvement on the fall of 0.4% revealed by the ONS's flash estimate of third-quarter growth in October.

Some City analysts had been hoping for an even bigger revision today that would have left the economy at a virtual standstill during the early autumn.

But the ONS said the pick-up in construction had been offset by evidence that services and manufacturing had performed slightly worse than originally believed.

Britain remains the only G20 nation in recession after the longest and most severe downturn since modern records began in 1955.