UK manufacturing output fell in March at its sharpest rate in six months as a drop in car production led a broad-based retreat after a strong start to the year.

The surprise decline suggests the economy may be set for a broad-based slowdown, with manufacturing unable to compensate for a rapidly weakening consumer sector.
“It is another soft economic reading for March and suggests the slowing in the economy is gaining traction,” said George Buckley, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank.
The Office for National Statistics said manufacturing output fell 0.5 per cent in March. This was the weakest since last September and compared with analysts’ forecasts of an unchanged reading.
The wider measure of industrial production also fell by 0.5 per cent, its sharpest monthly fall in more than a year. Other things being equal, the figures would shave 0.02 percentage points off the preliminary estimate of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter.
The drop in manufacturing output in March followed several months of surprisingly strong figures and it is too early to say that the trend has turned. Nevertheless, surveys of manufacturing are already painting a softer picture and the economic newsflow from other parts of the economy has turned decidedly gloomy.
The service sector grew in April at its weakest rate in five years while house prices, according to the country’s biggest morgage lender fell at their fastest annual rate in 15 years.
Second-tier data released earlier provided little cheer. A survey by the Nationwide building society showed consumer morale had fallen to its lowest level since records began four years ago while a report by REC/KPMG showed permanent job placements fell in April for the second time in three months.
Meanwhile, British press reports said thousands of manufacturing jobs would be lost due to the worsening economic outlook. A study of 460 companies showed a mixed regional picture, with companies in Wales going against the national trend by expressing confidence in their prospects. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) estimates that around 18,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector, mainly in the southeast and London, would be lost in the second quarter of the year.