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The Bank of England has once again been proven wrong as the UK economy beat the Bank’s forecast for the first three months of the year.

Quarterly real gross domestic product (GDP) rose 0.1% between January and March, according to the Office for National Statistics.

This matched the consensus expectation among economists for growth of 0.1 percent, but beat the Bank of England’s forecast of 0 percent for the first quarter.

But on a monthly basis, GDP in March fell 0.3 percent. This was a much bigger drop than the consensus forecast of 0pc growth.

The quarterly growth rate came forward in January, when GDP increased by 0.5%. In February, growth was flat.

The data for March reveal the impact of the successive strikes in the public sector.

Darren Morgan, ONS’s director of economic statistics, said: “For the full quarter, growth was driven by IT and construction, partially offset by declines in healthcare, education and public administration, with these sectors hit by strikes.”

Without the impact of the strikes, quarterly GDP growth in the first three months of the year would have been 0.2%, the Bank said on Thursday.

Construction production increased by 0.7% in the first three months of the year, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of positive growth.

Growth from January to March was driven by repair and maintenance, which grew by 4.9%.

It comes after the Bank of England improved its outlook for growth in the UK economy by a record amount on Thursday, raising interest rates to their highest level since 2008.

The rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee forecast the economy to be 2.25% bigger in three years than it forecast in February, the biggest growth improvement in its history.

The Bank forecast an expansion of 0.2% for the first and second quarters just six months after predicting that the economy would not grow at all in 2023.

It also revised up its full-year forecast for 2023 to 0.25 percent growth, compared with a prediction of a 0.3 percent contraction in February.

The data shows growth in the first quarter of 2023 comes after the UK economy narrowly avoided recession at the end of 2022.

The economy stagnated in the last three months of last year, having contracted by 0.3% between July and September.