Consumer and business confidence falls post referendum

During the first three weeks of June consumer confidence stood at 111.9 but slumped to 104.3 in the days following the referendum.

YouGov conduced two waves of research among decision makers in organisations of all sizes and found that business confidence similarly dropped – from 112.6 ahead of the vote to 105.0 after it.

It also found that the uncertainty around Brexit was resulting in growing business gloom. Before the referendum 16% of decision-makers surveyed by YouGov were pessimistic about their business prospects but that rose to 26% after the referendum.

Expectations of domestic sales, exports and investments over the next year were also badly affected.  Its index tracking expectations for domestic sales fell by almost 14 points in a week (from 118.8 to 104.9 ), hopes for exports declined by 15 points (from 115.3 to 99.8 ) and investment dropped off by almost eight points (from 108.0 to 100.1 ).