The UK economy grew fractionally during the final three months of 2024, according to early official figures, which ease the immediate risk of a recession.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported a 0.1% rise in gross domestic product (GDP) during the fourth quarter, with only a recovery for growth in services and manufacturing during December coming to the rescue.

Economists had been largely expecting a contraction of 0.1% for the three month period following a zero growth reading for the previous three months to September.

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The risk of shallow recession is still there, however, because the margins between contraction and growth are so tight in the data that likely future revisions may tip the balance either way.

The wider ONS figures showed that across 2024 as a whole, total GDP grew by 0.9%.

But a closely-watched measure for living standards in the economy, GDP by head of population, showed a contraction for two consecutive quarters.

The figures maintain intense pressure on the government as it has made achieving economic growth its priority for the parliament.

Its term did not begin in a way that would bolster business and consumer confidence.

Analysis: Why relief over economy may be temporary

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and his chancellor were accused of an own goal last summer after warning of a tough budget ahead to bolster dire public finances.

While October’s measures were aimed at sparing pain from working people, companies argue that hikes to employer National Insurance contributions from April will knock investment, force job cuts, and impact pay rises.

Why relief over economy in Downing Street may be temporary

Ed Conway

Economics and data editor

@EdConwaySky

Yes there are all sorts of provisos. The UK economy is still flatlining. A 0.1% expansion, in one key measure, is about as close as you can get to zero.

Gross domestic product per head – a better measure of our living standards – is shrinking (indeed, it’s been shrinking for two quarters). And the UK remains far weaker than the leading G7 economy – the United States.

But even after taking all that into account, it’s hard not to conclude that the chancellor will be celebrating today’s GDP figures. After all, economists had expected the economy to shrink by 0.1% rather than growing. Thanks to a late spurt in growth in December, it actually grew.

Moreover, up until today’s figures, the profile of economic growth in the UK was frankly pretty dismal. There was zero cumulative growth since last year’s election. Now, thanks to that jump in December – an unexpected late Christmas gift for the chancellor – cumulative growth since the election is now up to 0.4%.

Of course, none of this changes the bigger economic picture. The UK economy is still stuck in a rut. The enormous growth in migration in recent years means that, once you take account of the growing population, there is considerably less income floating around for every family than there was a few years ago.

And vast swathes of the UK economy are in desperate trouble. Most notably, the industrial sectors that used to power much of the country’s growth, are contracting at a rapid rate. That is not just a UK problem – indeed, it’s shared with much of Europe. In Germany, the economy has contracted for two successive years. This deindustrialisation is one of the most significant issues facing the continent.

And that’s before one considers a few other awkward issues: the real impact of last October’s budget have yet to be felt in the economy. The Office for Budget Responsibility is widely expected to slash its growth forecasts next month, which could prompt the chancellor to further trim spending in the coming years.

Then there are other, even more profound challenges. What happens if and when the US imposes far-reaching tariffs on UK imports? How will the UK afford the dramatic increases in defence spending the White House is demanding? Now, more than ever before, it’s quite plausible that outside events cause outsize impacts on the UK economy.

In short, while today’s numbers will be a relief in Downing Street, it’s not altogether clear how long that sense of relief will last.

That backdrop is made more painful by the fact that inflation is on the increase again, with a slew of essential bills including those for water, energy and council tax all set to rise sharply in the spring too.

At the same time as the domestic difficulties, global growth is also being challenged by Donald Trump who had threatened at the time of his election victory that universal trade tariffs were imminent.

New projections from the Bank of England last week made for sobering reading, with inflation expectations for this year hitting 3.7% from the current 2.5%.

Growth, the forecast suggested, would come in at 0.75% for 2025.

In November, the Bank had expected a figure double that sum.

A lack of growth is a problem for chancellor Rachel Reeves as it typically hits potential tax receipts at a time when her budget rules over the public finances are already under strain.

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It emerged on Wednesday that the Treasury had ordered a leak inquiry following a Bloomberg report that updated Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts sent to ministers had downgraded UK growth expectations.

Ms Reeves said of the ONS data: “For too long, politicians have accepted an economy that has failed working people. I won’t.

“After 14 years of flatlining living standards, we are going further and faster through our Plan for Change to put more money in people’s pockets.

“That is why we are taking on the blockers to get Britain building again, investing in our roads, rail and energy infrastructure, and removing the barriers that get in the way of businesses who want to expand.”

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Shadow chancellor Mel Stride responded: “The chancellor promised the fastest-growing economy in the G7, but her budget is killing growth.

“Working people and businesses are already paying for her choices with ever-rocketing taxes, hundreds of thousands of job cuts and business confidence plummeting.

“It does not need to be this way.”

Marina Strange is 90 and lives alone. She had a heart attack last week, her third in two years. It took two hours for an ambulance to reach her. Marina was impressed.

“I was surprised the ambulance came within two hours. I thought that was very good,” she told Sky News.

Marina also has an untreatable tumour, so she’s gotten to know the hospital well over the last few years, and this is the service she’s come to expect.

Marina was one of 7,678 patients to arrive at the care of Royal Berkshire NHS Trust by ambulance so far this winter, where Sky News has spent the past few months speaking to patients, consultants and those responsible for running the hospital.

Far from being an extreme example, the hospital is performing close to or even outperforming the national average in most measures. The experiences we’ve seen are normal for NHS patients in 2025.

On 9 January we were scheduled to come and film with the respiratory ward. It was too busy for us to come in.

We spoke to Chief Executive Steve McManus about it:

“Our ward occupancy at the moment is running around 99% of our beds, so we are absolutely full,” he said.

“Almost half of [our respiratory unit] has been given over for patients with flu – and we’ve got a lot of very unwell patients at the moment. Each morning over the last few days we’ve been starting the day with another 20-30 patients in the emergency department waiting for beds, so the pressures are really significant.”

Flu and other viruses, like norovirus and now also COVID, tend to peak around the winter months when people spend more time indoors in close proximity to one another.

This year’s surge was particularly bad. It’s on the decline again now, but peaked in early January at a level almost twice as high as last winter.

Bed occupancy in Royal Berkshire has averaged 94.7% this winter.

Again, far from being an outlier, this is only slightly worse than the average across England of 93.6%. The recommended maximum to achieve efficient operations and transfer between emergency care and other hospital departments is 92%, so at least 8% of beds should be free at any one time.

That has only been achieved on ten days out of 60 this winter across England. All of those days were between 21 December and New Year’s Day, so for the entire rest of winter the service has been over capacity.

We came back to Royal Berkshire the next day – 10 January – and spoke to Dr Omar Mafousi, the clinical lead at the hospital. He explained how a lack of beds in the main hospital affects the emergency care his team can provide.

“We say every year it gets a little worse. This year has felt worse than any other year that I remember and I’ve been a consultant for 15 years in emergency medicine.

“We can’t [have patients in A&E long term]. We’ve only got 20 major cubicles but 25 waiting for a bed. Some are on chairs, some are in the waiting room, but we have no space to bring patients off an ambulance to see and examine them.”

“Almost every single bay is full, there’s just one free at the moment. There are patients waiting to be transferred to the wards, and while we’ve been here in the last couple of minutes two more patients have been brought in by ambulance. Things in the emergency department change very very quickly”.

Accident and emergency

We’d first spoken to Dr Mafousi in the emergency department on Wednesday 4 December. It was at the beginning of winter and the number of flu cases had yet to really spike.

At 1pm 191 patients had already come through. Dr Mafousi says these kind of numbers are the “new norm”.

“We probably see about 480-500 patients a day on busy days, sometimes over 500 on really busy days. That’s becoming more and more frequent.

“Attendances are going up and up and up year-on-year and we are struggling. We are trying to cope as best we can and give patients the best care we can, but that’s not always possible.”

In 2010 NHS England set a standard of no more than 5% of patients waiting more than four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged.

That target hasn’t been met in a decade. Every winter since COVID it’s gotten higher than 20% – four times higher than the target.

In December it was 28.9%. At major A&Es (not speciality centres or minor injuries units), it was 44.7%, almost one in two.

Again Royal Berkshire is fairly normal – 5,293 of the 11,972 patients at the major A&E (44.2%) waited longer than four hours.

At the time we were there, 14 patients had been waiting over 15 hours.

“Without a doubt that is too long,” said Dr Mafousi. “That’s not what anyone wants. No one in this Trust wants that to happen.”

There used to be a bit of respite in summers, when more beds were free from winter virus patients and people could flow more quickly and easily through the system.

Waits in the middle of summer now are worse than even the most dangerous winter peaks of years gone by.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated that waits longer than four hours at A&E had contributed to 23,000 excess deaths in 2022.

Ambulance handover delays

A&E delays don’t just affect the patients who are at hospital, they also make it more difficult to treat new patients. Part of the reason it takes so long to get ambulances out to people like Marina when they have heart attacks is because of “handover delays”.

The NHS guidance allows a standard of 15 minutes from the ambulance’s time of arrival at A&E to having handed over care of the patient to A&E staff.

If A&Es are full, ambulances can’t offload their patients, so they aren’t available to get out to see new patients.

At Royal Berkshire this winter the average has been 25 minutes. That’s not far off double the time it should take, but again that’s better than average. In England as a whole it’s 40 minutes, up from 32 minutes over the same dates last year.

One in seven ambulance handovers now takes over an hour. That figure has more than trebled in just the last four years.

As well as meaning potentially worse care for the patient in the ambulance, handover delays ultimately contribute to delayed response times as well.

Ambulance calls are of course categorised by seriousness, with the most serious life-threatening cases put into Category 1 – usually for people that aren’t breathing.

People experiencing heart attacks, like Marina, should usually go into Category 2 – emergency cases. The target is that an ambulance should arrive for these patients within 18 minutes.

In December the average wait across England for these patients was over 47 mins, almost three times as long. That was slightly worse than last year, but in fact better than December 2022 and 2021. In 2022 it peaked at a scarcely believable 1 hour and 32 minute average.

In the last pre-pandemic year it was 27:57 in December and 20:55 in January – still over target but not to the same scale as now.

In total, more than 600,000 hours have been lost to ambulance handover delays this winter. The cost to the ambulance service of 600,000 hours of time is upwards of £100m.

Crumbling infrastructure

Part of the problem is capacity. Royal Berkshire opened in 1839 and parts of that original building are still in use to this day. Other parts can’t be used anymore because they’ve fallen in to disrepair.

One building hasn’t been in use for more than ten years. £2.5m has been spent to keep it from collapsing. £15m would need to be spent to make it useable. The Trust is now considering filling the building with concrete to make it safer.

A hospital that is running out of space and money has no alternative but to waste both.

Plans have been approved for a new hospital at a different site, to replace Royal Berkshire, as part of the previous government’s plan to deliver 40 new hospitals by 2030.

Labour have since branded those plans “uncosted and undeliverable”, and have said work can’t start at that site until 2037 at the earliest.

The estimated cost is already over £100m and could be four times higher by the time it’s ready.

But it’s not just the main hospital where space is short.

Colin Waters is another Royal Berkshire patient we spoke to. He’s been there ten days after a car ran him over, fracturing his leg and dislocating his ankle.

He’s stable now and doesn’t actually need to be on the acute ward anymore, but he still needs some care.

He’s due to be transferred to a community hospital where he can receive physiotherapy and start his rehabilitation, but no space has opened up.

There have been an average of over 200 patients a day across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire who are “fit to be discharged” but still occupying a hospital bed because no safe alternative care setting is available. It peaked on 25 January at over 300 patients.

Across the country it peaked on 1 February. There were a total of 13,894 patients remaining in hospital who no longer needed to be there. In many cases, like Colin’s, they will not be receiving the specialist care they actually need at that time.

All of those full beds contribute to patients not being able to flow through the system from A&E, which adds to the ambulance handover delays. But they also mean that people have to wait longer to book in operations they need.

The waiting list for routine operations currently stands at 7.5m – or more than one in eight people in the country. 221,889 people on that list have been waiting for treatment for over a year.

That number is 120 times higher than before the pandemic.

Among Royal Berkshire’s patients alone, there are more than 60,000 on the list and almost 3,000 of them have been waiting over a year.

The ailments people need operating on to fix don’t go away while the wait goes on. They affect quality of life at a minimum, and in many cases will require ongoing care from other NHS services, or could reach the level where it becomes an emergency that adds to the pressure on the ambulance service or A&E.

Simon Shurey, another patient we spoke to, is a classic example of someone with a multitude of complex and competing healthcare needs that affect him daily, but also occasionally extend to requiring emergency care.

He’s had asthma all his life. Five years ago he was diagnosed with COPD, a lung condition that makes breathing difficult. And six months ago he was put into a coma after developing sepsis following a kidney infection.

He says he’s waited up to two days for a ward bed on previous visits.

When we spoke to him on 19 December, he had been in hospital for five days, having been rushed in by an ambulance because of flu.

He had to be kept in a side room to stop his infection spreading to other patients. Like Marina, he’s also grateful to healthcare workers sensitive to the pressures on them, despite the multitude of health concerns he’s facing.

“Every time you come in – and I use the hospital a fair bit lately, sadly – it’s getting worse for them. There seems to be so much pressure on them.”

Health anxiety

One of the reasons for the increased pressure on healthcare workers in recent years – in addition to increased medical issues – is because people are more concerned and aware of their health, in a way in which they weren’t before the pandemic.

Dr Amrit Sharma runs four GP surgeries near Royal Berkshire. He says that since COVID there has been an increase in health anxiety, and people presenting with physical symptoms that extend from mental health issues.

“The level of appointments have changed significantly. That’s got to be around anxiety. That’s what we see every day. People are more fearful and anxious about their health.

“Some awareness [of personal health] is needed to catch things like cancers, but our concern is that we’re seeing young people coming in with self-limiting illnesses, or symptoms that are physical but related to mental health conditions, like chest pains or palpitations or breathing problems.”

More than a million people who tried to reach their GP in December couldn’t get through, despite there being more appointments than ever before.

There were 40m appointments in December 2024, compared with less than 30m in 2018.

Health anxiety is something that Dr Mafousi says also contributes to more pressure and longer waits in emergency care.

“I see people who don’t need to be here, I see people who need to be here but have come here a bit late, I’ve seen people who are just concerned, I see people sent by their friends because their friends are concerned, there’s a combination of all this.

“There’s a lot of anxiety after Covid and we’ve seen that. Young people with chest pain which they’ve had for a few minutes and are concerned they’ve had a heart attack. There’s a lot of little things which before would have been nothing but now are something.”

Whether it’s increased anxiety or increased illness, the demand on the NHS is at unprecedented levels and it simply isn’t able to cope. Targets are being missed in pretty much every department, and the ultimate result of missed targets is worse health or an increased chance of death for patients all over the country.

There are hundreds of other stories like Marina’s, Colin’s and Simon’s that could be told every day from all parts of the country.

We’ve spent time in just one hospital. And it’s a hospital that is performing in a fairly typical way, for England in 2025. Thousands of patients are seeking treatment every day in hospitals that are performing worse than this.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

The man who killed Conservative MP Sir David Amess was released from the Prevent anti-terror programme “too quickly”, a review has found.

Sir David was stabbed to death by Islamic State (ISIS) supporter Ali Harbi Ali during a constituency surgery at a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea in October 2021.

The killer, who was given a whole-life sentence, had become radicalised by ISIS propaganda and had been referred to the anti-terror programme Prevent before the attack.

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His case had been closed five years before, after just one meeting for coffee at a McDonald’s to deal with his interpretation of “haram” (forbidden under Islamic law), as well as texts and calls with an “intervention provider”.

Despite Prevent policy and guidance at the time being “mostly followed”, his case was “exited too quickly”, security minister Dan Jarvis told the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Following the publication of a review into Prevent’s handling of Southport child killer Axel Rudakubana earlier this month, Mr Jarvis said a Prevent learning review into Sir David’s killing would be released this week in a commitment to transparency over the anti-terror programme.

Matt Juke, head of counter-terrorism policing, said it is clear the management and handling of Ali’s case by Prevent “should have been better” and it is “critical” the review is acted on “so that other families are spared the pain felt by the loved ones of Sir David”.

The review found:

• Ali was referred to Prevent in 2014 by his school after teachers said his demeanour, appearance and behaviour changed from a previously “engaging student with a bright future” with aspirations to be a doctor to failing his A-levels and wanting to move to a “more Islamic state because he could no longer live among unbelievers”

• Prevent quickly took his case on and he was referred to Channel, part of the programme that aims to prevent involvement in extremism

• He was “exited from Prevent too quickly”, Mr Jarvis said, just five months later “after his terrorism risk was assessed as low”

• A review by police 12 months after he was released from Prevent “also found no terrorism concerns” and the case was closed. This was not uploaded for eight more months due to an “IT issue”

• People released from Prevent are meant to have a review at six and 12 months

• The assessment of Ali’s vulnerabilities “was problematic and outdated” as it did not follow the proper procedure, which led to “questionable decision-making and sub-optimal handling of the case”

• Ali’s symptoms were prioritised over addressing the underlying causes of his vulnerabilities – and support provided did not tackle those issues

• Record keeping of decisions, actions and rationale was “problematic, disjointed and lacked clarity”

• The rationale for certain decisions was “not explicit”

• Ali’s school was not involved in discussions to help determine risk and provide appropriate support – they were only called once to be told the “matter was being dealt with”

• A miscommunication led to only one intervention session being provided, instead of two.

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The review found most of the failures in Ali’s case would not be repeated today as the guidance and requirements are much clearer.

It said referrers, in Ali’s case his school, are kept informed and engaged, and different departments and agencies – not just police – have clear roles.

Which records need to be kept is now clear and guidance for detecting underlying vulnerabilities has changed and would have made a difference, the review added.

It said a Prevent “intervention provider” met Ali at a McDonald’s to deal with his understanding of “haram” (forbidden under Islamic law).

No risk assessment was made but they suggested one more meeting, however a breakdown in communication between the police and the provider meant there were no more meetings.

Training for providers is “substantially different” now and the review says this would not be repeated today, with the provider in question saying the process is “a completely different one today”.

However, the review said there are still problems – not just in Ali’s case – with the Vulnerability Assessment Form, an “incredibly complex document that is vital to Channel” and the progression of a case.

It also found a more recent decision by the College of Police to only hold Prevent case data for five years “may prove to be problematic” and if Ali’s case material had been deleted under that ruling “it would have been nigh on impossible to conduct this review”.

Sir David’s daughter, Katie Amess, 39, last week welcomed the announcement to publish a review into Ali’s case but said every victim failed by Prevent deserves an inquiry, not just the Southport victims.

“We potentially wouldn’t be in the same situation today with repeat failings of Prevent had somebody had just listened to me back when it [her father’s killing] happened and launched a full public inquiry,” she told LBC.

Ms Amess said she believes if the Southport attack had not happened, the review into Prevent’s handling of her father’s killer would never have been released into the public domain.