I suspect that, other than what we are actually working on and how much of it we are doing, we all have personal markers on general levels of economic activity from time to time. Volumes of traffic, occupancy of trains, numbers of builders’ skips in use, queues in shops, how many aeroplanes are flying over the A14 in the early mornings and car registration numbers have all formed part of my personal system of assessment over the years. For obvious reasons, a number of them don’t really work anymore, something that my journey to a deserted Liverpool Street on an uncrowded rush hour train paid eloquent witness to last Friday.

Whilst figures issued by government and bodies such as the Bank of England always were important (although the personal markers were also pretty accurate in general), they are now crucial to our understanding of what’s going on. In this week’s figures, we saw both encouragement about the impact of the post-lockdown recovery and further evidence of a mismatch which will cause problems if it isn’t resolved.

The encouragement came in the tax receipts and government borrowing figures for July. Tax receipts of £70bn were £7.9bn ahead of June and £9.4bn ahead of July 2020. Government spend was still pretty eye watering at £73.1bn, but that represented a fall of £4.1bn as against June, which in turn led to government borrowing for the month being a mere £10.4bn. That figure is around half of the borrowing figure for the previous July. Whilst we’re still increasing borrowing, the growth in economic activity and, for example, the shrinking of furlough payments, are easing us towards a position where the growth in government net debt perhaps has a foreseeable end.

The mismatch lies around unemployment, job vacancies and furlough. Unemployment is higher than in March 2020, even though somewhere between 1.1m and 1.6m people were on furlough at the beginning of August. Job vacancies are at record highs and the biggest issue that many businesses face is recruitment. The consequences of inability to recruit can be seen in businesses limiting their operating hours or curbing expansion plans with the highest profile example this week being the temporary closure of 45 restaurants by Nando’s as supply chain issues meant that they could not get hold of enough chicken to keep the whole chain going. The primary problem in their supply chain is a shortage of labour. The government does not seem to be acknowledging the conundrum at the moment, perhaps because to do so will bring the loss of skilled and other labour emanating from Brexit into discussion, which the current Prime Minister and Home Secretary will have an understandable political reluctance to allow to happen. If the mismatch isn’t addressed however, the risk is that shortages in shops, food inflation and impairment of economic recovery are all waiting in the wings.

The Prime Minister’s had a tough week. Having seen a promotional video for Mr Raab’s holiday hotel in Crete on the television news last night, I don’t blame him for a certain reluctance to drag himself away from it and back to the office, but the general expectation is that to do so at times of need goes with the job. The revelation that the making of a call to the Afghan government was delegated didn’t look good, but the news that it wasn’t made at all is somewhat worse. The Prime Minister had the rare experience of coming under attack yesterday not only from the opposition but also from a number of his own back benchers, with many of his critics being veterans of military action in Afghanistan. In this case, he hasn’t been able to escape the debate by shouting a slogan about the effectiveness of Covid vaccination, his usual tactic when under pressure from Keir Starmer about virtually anything, There is a significant human cost to what has happened and what is likely to happen in Afghanistan, and Mr Johnson will join a number of his predecessors from the 19th century onwards whose term of office was haunted by events there.

On a lighter note, we have seen a brief flurry of the silly season as well. Lowestoft has been in the news, not only because of Banksy’s visit there but because of a complaint against the owner of an ice cream van that his chimes were put on for 20 seconds at a time rather than the permitted 12. There has also been a story of the withdrawal of deckchairs for hire from beaches in Bournemouth and Poole which will cost the relevant local authorities around £200,000 in lost income. The reason? Fear that they will be used as weapons in mass brawls. I may be out of touch with what goes on there now, but my experience of Dorset’s beaches in general has often been to make me feel very young by reference to a large number of the people.

I hope that your weekend will not involve weaponised stripy deckchairs and that you enjoy it wherever you are.

Ian Waine leads Prettys’ Corporate Services Team and has advised on a large number of corporate recovery and corporate restructuring cases over the last 30 years. He can be contacted at 07979 498817 or iwaine@prettys.co.uk.