The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United Kingdom rose just 0.1 per cent in the last quarter, less than expected, with hackers having managed to shut down the whole of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for a month blamed by the government for this stuttering progress.
A massive cyberattack on JLR, one of the UK’s final remaining volume car makers, which forced it to shut down its plants for nearly a month and miss out on building some 30,000 cars is being blamed for the UK economy growing less fast than hoped.
In September, fewer cars were being built in Britain than any other time since the end of the Second World War and the shutdown created a cascade failure that impacted dozens of other companies in the supply chain upstream from the car factory floor, with parts suppliers and service firms that rely on JLR contracts suddenly without work. It has been stated the JLR hack is the worst in British history so far.
GDP growth in the third quarter of 2025 was 0.1 per cent, half the 0.2 per cent the government had hoped for. The economic bad news comes just weeks before Britain’s left-wing chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to deliver the annual budget, of which the widespread consensus appears to be that Reeves will attempt to go for economic growth by taxing the country more harshly.
Blaming poor economic performance under her stewardship on the JLR hack, Reeves said on Thursday: “The numbers for this quarter clearly reflect what happened at Jaguar Land Rover: a massive cyber attack, the biggest cyber attack that this country has ever experienced.
“As a result, car manufacturing fell almost 30pc in September. Jaguar Land Rover is now back up and running in part because of the support this Government put in, both to help with the cyber attack itself and also to support the supply chain, so that that business has now begun car production again.”
Veteran British broadcaster and political commentator Andrew Neil reacted to the news to note the government had been foolish to repeatedly boast of its skill in managing the economy in recent months and observed “Just when you think the backdrop to Chancellor Reeves’s 2nd Budget couldn’t get any worse — it does”.
On the statistics that actually matter to ordinary Britons, Neil caustically added on GDP per capita, which speaks more how to the economy feels to individual workers: “GDP per capita growth is now zero, which is almost certainly an overestimate since official stats underestimate population growth. So much for lifting living standards.”
As noted by Brexit leader Nigel Farage at this time last year, on the key difference between the two GDP figures: “In six of the last eight quarters, where levels of legal migration were [at] record [levels] in the history of these islands, GDP per capita went down. Mass immigration is making us poorer. If you are a large employer, a big multinational, that is great. For everybody else, that is not working at any level.”
