A figure of below 50 means that the service sector, which makes up three quarters of the the UK economy, is contracting. This follows the announcement yesterday that showed that manufacturing was also in decline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly CIPS pointed to the hotel and restuarant industries as being among the worst effected. This would be borne out by a large surge in profits at Domino's Pizza announced this week, where consumers are opting to have takeaways rather than venture out to restaurants in a bid to economise. So there are winners and losers in the economy.
Sevice sector jobs have been on the decline for about the last half year now.
