UK must get over its 'obsession with recession', warns ONS chief economist Grice The media's 'obsession with recession' is preventing real debate over the performance of the UK economy, a the chief economist of the Office for National Statistics has said. Joe Grice criticised the 'unhelpful' concentration on whether or not the UK is in recession after ONS construction figures yesterday indicated that the double-dip might never have happened. Revised data for the construction industry showed it did not fare quite as badly in the first quarter of 2012 as previously believed - declining by 5 per cent rather than 5.4 per cent. That has heightened speculation that when the final figures are produced in June, they will show the reported recession from the last part of 2011 to the middle of 2012 - following on from the deep recession of 2008 to 2009 - did not technically occur. A recession is defined as two consecutive periods of negative growth and the change in gross domestic product in each of the first two quarters of the period was only a marginal fall of 0.1 per cent. Ironically, political debate until recently was dominated by speculation that the UK was set to slip into an unprecedented triple-dip recession - a prospect shattered by unexpectedly high growth of 0.3 per cent for the first quarter. Mr Grice said the ONS had to 'stay out of the politics' but appealed for a more sensible debate. 'As an Office we think the public debate has been quite counter-productive,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today. Building optimism: latest construction data has made economists question official growth data. 'We think it's much more important to look at what's been happening to the broad trends in the economy over a period of time. Over the last two or three years we have grown on average by around about 0.5 per cent a year, quite a bumpy path but clearly very different to what was happening before 2008. That all seems to us to be much more important and much more salient in terms of having a sensible debate than really whether one particular quarter is up a smidgen, down a smidgen. We stay out of the politics. But we think the public debate would benefit from spending more time looking at what's really happened to those trends over time than worrying about particular small changes in particular quarters.' Mr Grice insisted the ONS did not 'get the sums wrong', explaining that only around half the information necessary to give a definitive picture of quarterly GDP was available at the time initial figures were produced. The change in the construction figures did not necessarily mean the overall picture would now show there had been no double dip, he said, as it was only one factor in the calculation.