Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.

Happy Easter to all our members, we hope those of you heavily involved in MACH 2018 have a restful bank holiday before Build-up begins next week.

As you all are quite aware we’re now only one week away from the Show opening and we’d like to remind everyone to keep checking www.machexhibtion.com for all the latest news from the exhibition.

This week we have posted out the latest issue of MTA Update to all our members, if yours has yet to arrive, you can have a peak at the content in the story below and access the online digital version of the publication.

HR support is available to MTA Members from Croner who have provided some handy tips for employers to consider when undertaking a disciplinary investigation. More details can be found below.

The latest revisions to the UK’s GDP data has seen the growth rate for 2017 edged up slightly to +1.8%, but this is still lower than in 2016 (+1.9%) and there have also been some adjustments to the sectoral data, mainly to revise up the estimates for activity in the construction sector.  This week also saw the Bank of England’s Agents release their latest summary of business conditions – this included some encouraging pointers just ahead of MACH with reports of capacity constraints in key sectors such as suppliers of capital goods and automotive components and a number of firms saying that they were investing in automation to solve problems in recruitment.  There is, perhaps, less good news in the European Commission’s latest assessment of the economic sentiment across Europe with the main indicator falling for the 3^rd consecutive month, but we need to wait for the detailed output figures to see if this is reflected in the demand data.

Thanks for reading, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great Easter from everyone at the MTA.