The British economy posted solid growth in the three months through June thanks to strong government spending and a resilient labor market.

Gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced by an economy, rose 0.6 percent in the second quarter, the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics said on Thursday.

It’s the second consecutive quarter of robust growth, with only a marginal slowdown from 0.7 percent in the first quarter. It leaves GDP up 0.9 percent point from a year earlier.

The numbers round off a heavy week of economic data for the U.K., which suggest that the country has put its mini-recession in the second half of last year firmly behind it.

Notably, the statistics office said GDP per capita had risen for the second straight quarter — indicating that a steady long-term increase in population is not the only factor behind overall growth.

However, GDP per capita is still below its pre-pandemic peak, meaning that the average Briton is still worse off than five years ago.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said via X: “We are under no illusion as to the scale of the challenge we have inherited from the Conservatives after more than a decade of low growth.”

As good as it gets?

Many analysts think this reflects the best the numbers will get this year. Growth is widely expected to slow again; while inflation, which ran at 2 percent during spring, ticked up to 2.2 percent in figures released Wednesday and is likely to drift higher through December.

Longstanding constraints such as a shortage of skilled labor, infrastructure bottlenecks and the lingering disruptive effects of Brexit on the U.K.’s trade all continue to restrict performance.

“It’s hard to see the UK sustaining these kinds of figures into the second half of the year, although continued impetus from disposable incomes should generate a respectable, if more modest, growth rate of 0.3 percent in the third quarter,” ING analyst James Smith said in a note to clients.

“The challenge for government is to firmly lift the U.K.’s growth performance out of the doldrums,” wrote Institute of Directors chief economist Anna Leach. “There’re no quick fixes here: we’ll need the government to follow-through on its manifesto commitments to set and stick with long-term infrastructure investment plans.”

Leach criticized Reeves’ recent decision to cancel public sector investments in transport and AI, and urged her to “revisit” self-imposed fiscal debt rules to allow more government-financed investment.

Paul Donovan, chief economist with UBS Global Wealth Management, said in a morning note that the GDP performance was “a reasonable number,” adding that it might have been even stronger, had miserable weather in April and May not dampened consumer spending.

More broadly, Donovan noted, the figures may reflect that the U.K. has been quicker to adapt to structural change in the economy. Trends such as online spending and remote work are more advanced than in much of Europe.

Such changes, which complicate the task of compiling economic statistics, have contributed to the appearance of underperformance by the U.K. economy in recent years. Donovan argued that the country may be “doing better than tends to be initially reported in GDP.”