Treasury blames falling GDP on end of Covid mass testing

In an urgent question, shadow treasury minister Pat McFadden asked economic secretary John Glen for a statement on the figures released by the Office for National Statistics that have shown a decrease in the UK’s GDP.

Glen referred to Coronavirus and the war in Ukraine as a “perfect storm” but identified the “wind down of national Covid testing” as “dragging on UK GDP data”.

McFadden rejected this reasoning, telling the House of Commons that this was a further consequence of “Boris Johnson’s backlog Britain”.