YOU might expect last week’s announcement that the UK is officially out of recession would have sparked wild celebrations at the North East Chamber of Commerce.

And surely the fact the quarterly growth rate was the fastest for five years would have prompted us to crack open the champagne.

In fact, I was fairly ambivalent about the news of one per cent growth, just as I was about the estimates of significant contraction in the first two quarters, Because the notion something has radically changed over the past three months, that changes the underlying conditions for business, is a little bit far-fetched.

Then, NECC members were working hard and delivering growth in their businesses against a backdrop of challenging trading conditions.

Now it feels remarkably similar. So why do the GDP estimates suggest there has been a sudden uplift?

Partly it’s a statistical quirk caused by the extra Jubilee Bank Holiday in quarter two.

That made output then look artificially depressed, which means the growth in quarter three will consequently appear a bit bigger.

Partly it is down to the Olympic effect, more significant in London for obvious reasons, though it should give a longer-lasting fillip to businesses in all parts of Britain.

But I can’t help feeling that the quarterly estimates continue to be a bit erratic. The figures over the past couple of years have bounced up and down. The Bank of England’s famous fan charts suggest even they are a little sceptical that growth has been as low in the early part of this year as the Office for National Statistics suggests.

Our surveys of North-East firms show what feels like a more realistic picture – broadly speaking, businesses are growing but not yet fast enough to make it feel like a robust recovery or to overcome what’s happening in the public sector.

That’s not to say last week’s estimate does not matter. Lots of people are interested in these figures and if it leaves them feeling a bit more confident about the UK economy, that can only be a good thing.

But just as we refused to hold a wake for the economy in quarter two, we will skip the party for quarter three – because business as usual never really went away.