Business leaders are more pessimistic in the second half of the year than they were at the time of the Brexit referendum about the future of the economy over the next 12 months, according to a new survey.
Small and mid-cap companies are less than optimistic about business prospects over the coming year, with mean employment and turnover expectations for the year ahead both falling.
They predict a tougher climate for raising public equity with confidence levels in prospects for raising new public equity at a record low.
The latest quarterly small and mid-cap sentiment index by YouGov and the Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 painted a pessimistic outlook for the UK economy.
QCA's quarterly confidence metric for the UK economy scored 37.4 for the second half of 2023, down from 50.2 in the first half. A reading of 100 is very optimistic and 50 is neutral.
This was a lower confidence score than at the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016 when the metric was about 56.3.
At the time that the UK left the European Union, which coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, the confidence score in the UK economy among small to mid-cap business leaders plummeted to a nadir of 26.2, before rising back up to a peak of 68.6 in the first half of 2021.
Confidence sank again in the second half of last year to a score of 33.1, before becoming neutral in the first half and sinking once more this half to 37.4 despite signs that high inflation levels are finally dropping off.