IT’S official. Britain has gone into recession – but York council leader Andrew Waller said today that the city is in a strong position to weather the economic storm.

New figures revealed this morning that the UK is officially in recession after the economy saw its worst output performance since 1980 in the final three months of 2008.

The economy shrank by 1.5 per cent in the fourth quarter - worse than the declines seen in the recession of the early 1990s and the biggest fall in more than 28 years, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Today's estimated fall in quarter-on-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) comes after a 0.6 per cent decline in the previous three months - a "technical" recession, as defined by two successive quarters of negative output.

Coun Waller said after hearing the news: “It’s no surprise. The York-born Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable has been speaking about the warning signals for two years.

“But York is in a strong position. It offers good education and training.”

And he claimed that while some sectors of the city’s economy, such as house-building, were struggling badly, other sectors were performing as strongly as they were a year ago – for example businesses involved in exports, which were benefiting from the weak pound.

He said it was essential to maintain the capacity of the construction industry, and that was one reason why he was keen to press ahead with the project to build a new council HQ. “That will generate hundreds of jobs,” he said.