Charlie Mullins, owner of Pimlico Plumbers, comments, ‘Not only are we nowhere near opening the champagne, I haven’t even bought it from the shop. Any tiny rise in GDP and the small reduction in unemployment have to be countered by so many other factors that are still dragging the economy down.’

David Birne, an insolvency practitioner at accountancy firm HW Fisher, remarks, ‘For many companies the technical end of the recession will be the trigger that puts them out of business.

‘In the early nineties, far more companies folded after the recession had ended than during it and we expect the same to happen this time round.’

The pound slumped over a cent against the dollar following the release of the Office of National Statistics’ GDP estimate, which fell below economists’ expectations. Mark O’Sullivan, director of dealing at foreign exchange firm Currencies Direct, says the figure was a ‘major blow to both sterling and hopes that the UK economy was decisively out of a recession’.

However, the pound has since recovered and the Centre for Economic and Business Research has contested the government’s weak growth estimate. The think tank has suggested the UK economy expanded 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and grew 0.2 per cent in the third quarter compared to official estimates of minus 0.3 per cent.