As the year draws to a close and we look forward to 2024, my reflections of 2023 give me cautious optimism for the upcoming year. For me, this year has felt like the first one this decade where the whole year has been relatively normal, without significant Covid impacts on our lives. It is easy to forget it was only in late March last year, that Gatwick South Terminal reopened after being closed for two years. While impacts from Covid still drag on our economy and on NHS waiting lists, we are continuing to move away from the worst impacts of the Covid pandemic.
2023 has been the year where we started with double-digit inflation and where we all felt the impacts of it. The figure had peaked in November last year (October’s figure) at a shockingly high 11.1% and January’s figure (announced in February) was 10.1%. The world has been grappling with high inflation, caused by the pandemic and Putin’s weaponisation of energy, but everyone being affected is no consolation when we feel worse off, with negative impacts of high inflation affecting everything.
It’s been over forty years since high inflation last ravaged our economy, meaning that until these last two years, millions of us hadn’t experienced it before. Now we all have, and seen the problems it causes, I hope everyone agrees that we need to see it through and finish the job in permanently getting inflation back down to a low and sustainable level.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was right to make halving inflation his top priority for the year and we’ve seen great progress. Just before Christmas, the latest figures were released which was November’s, that showed the rate of inflation down to 3.9% - the lowest since 2021.
In 2024 we should continue to see inflation reduce back to the 2% target, which will settle down the economic pressures it causes and the impacts on our cost of living, the latter also helped with the 2% National Insurance cut all workers receive from January. I wish you a happy and (hopefully) increasingly prosperous new year.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
27th December 2023
