If the Chancellor is to avoid hailing a false dawn when growth does return, he needs to get beyond talk of ‘recovery’ in the abstract and look at the conditions that helped raise living standards during previous decades of growth

It is fairly widely assumed that the outcome of the next election will pivot on the strength – or otherwise – of Britain’s economic recovery. James Plunkett from the Resolution Foundation considers the kind of recovery that we should be seeking, noting that as things stand there is little reason to believe that a return to growth would mean anything other than a return to wage stagnation and rising personal debt that we saw from 2003 to 2008.