Britain's economy grew 0.4 percent in the second quarter, and the inventories line inside it carries £3,262m of adjustment sitting on a £1,382m fall in real stocks

Table 2 of Thursday's release is where the quarter gets interesting.

The Office for National Statistics puts the change in inventories in Quarter 2 2026 at £1,880m in chained volume terms. Of that, £2,762m is an alignment adjustment and £500m is a balancing adjustment. Both come out. The figure is then negative £1,382m, and the bulletin says so in words as well as in the table: excluding the alignment adjustments, early estimates show chained volume inventories fell by £1,382m in the quarter, mainly because of a reduction in manufacturing inventories.

Alignment adjustments are not a novelty, and the statistics office prints them itself so that anyone using the numbers can see them. They exist because output, expenditure and income are estimated from different sources and do not agree, and the adjustment is what closes the gap between the three measures of the same economy. The ONS notes that these adjustments typically carry a target limit of plus or minus £3,000m in any quarter, and that larger ones are sometimes needed where the sources are difficult to balance. At £2,762m it sits near that limit.

The quarter before runs the other way

In Quarter 1 2026 the same table has the signs reversed. The reported change in inventories was £1,680m, the alignment adjustment was negative £1,921m and the balancing adjustment was negative £1,000m, which leaves £4,601m once both are removed.

So the underlying series moved from £4,601m to negative £1,382m across two quarters while the reported series barely moved at all, from £1,680m to £1,880m.

The same device sits on the income side of the accounts. Gross operating surplus of corporations was £170,760m in Quarter 2, of which £366m was alignment, and the growth rate the ONS reports, 1.9 percent, is calculated on the £170,394m that remains.

The headline underneath it

Real GDP rose 0.4 percent in Quarter 2, following 0.6 percent in Quarter 1, and is 1.2 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago. Services output rose 0.5 percent, construction rose 0.3 percent and production showed no growth. 15 of the 20 subsectors grew. On the monthly series published alongside, June grew 0.3 percent, May was flat after being revised down from 0.1 percent, and April's fall of 0.1 percent was left unrevised.

Gross fixed capital formation rose 1.2 percent and household final consumption rose 0.3 percent, and the release names those two as the main causes of the quarter's expenditure growth. Business investment rose 1.7 percent.

There are no revisions to previously published GDP data anywhere in this release. They arrive on 20 August, in the Blue Book article covering 1997 to 2024, and on 30 September in the quarterly national accounts.