Hopes are rising that GM Europe will soon announce a 'reprieve' for its Ellesmere Port plant, after gaining support from the UK government on new model launches and supply chain efficiencies as well as concessions from workers on wages and flexible working.

GM Europe had earlier announced it was looking to cut up to 400,000 units of capacity a year from its European operations from 2014 (when its current deal with unions expires), with the firm suggesting that Ellesmere Port and Bochum in Germany were the most vulnerable.

That enabled the firm to kick off a fresh round of its well-honed divide-and-rule strategy, pitting plants and governments against each other in a bidding war to offer the most concessions to the firm. It's a typical feature of the auto industry, controlled as it is a in a top-down way by giant, mobile 'original equipment manufacturers' (OEMs) keen to screw down costs by playing off sites against each other.

The coalition government's £1.4 billion Regional growth Fund has been severely criticised in a damning report (read here) by the National Audit Office (NAO). The report states that the RGF has failed to achieve value for money, spending as much as £200,000 generating a single job. And of particular concern the NAO notes that the RGF could have created thousands more jobs if the government had applied tighter controls.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg had previously claimed the fund could generate up to half a million jobs. I'd still like to see the calculations behind his claim as that figure is wildly out-of-line with the NAO's estimates. While the RGF may create 328,000 jobs in total, these are of various durations and the NAO estimates that only 41,000 extra full-time equivalent jobs could be created over the next seven years as a result of the RGF, at an average cost of £33,000 per net additional job (which is "broadly similar" to past programmes with comparable objectives).

When the first quarter GDP numbers came in even I was surprised, even though I've been warning that we're on the edge of a double dip recession for months. I had expected poor manufacturing figures and awful construction figures for the early part of this year to be offset by stronger service sector growth, and that overall the UK would have done just enough to avoid slipping back into official recession. That didn't happen.

Of course, the first quarter GDP growth figures carry a big health warning as they cover only 40% of the data and are a first estimate. They may be revised back upwards, as indeed they were in late 2009, but for now at least, it's official; we're back into double dip for the first time since the 1970s.

Unemployment declined by 35,000 in the three months to February to 2.65 million, the first fall since May 2011. While that's of course good news, the number of people claiming unemployment benefit is still rising, with the total number of people in receipt of jobseeker's allowance standing at 1.61 million in March.

Nevertheless, some analysts see the recent slight fall in unemployment as the first sign that the economy has returned to modest growth. Let's hope they are right.

Youth unemployment also declined slightly, by 9,000 in the three months to February, leaving 1.03 million 16 to 24 year-olds looking for work. The unemployment rate for this age group is still over one-in-five, the worst in 25 years, and what's especially concerning is that there was another increase in the number of young people who are long-term unemployed.

In fact, over the last year, the number of young people claiming jobseeker's allowance for 12 months or more has tripled.

Last Sunday I chaired a debate at the Town Hall in Birmingham on what an elected mayor might do for the city, which can be seen here.

Over a hundred people attended and the discussion ranged from what business wanted from a mayor, through jobs, transport and education, and to how a mayor could help the inner city and other deprived areas in sharing in the wealth that the city generates.

Much of the discussion through the two panels was about power: what extra powers would a mayor have as compared with the current set up?

While some media reports last week whipped up talk of plant closures being announced by GM, we shouldn't have expected to hear any specific news about actual plant closures. Rather, it was the start of a process that involves three key elements as GM attempts to reduce its costs.

Those elements are: 1. capacity reduction (closing plants to you and me); 2. shifting production outside of western Europe; and 3. playing plants and workers off against each other to secure cost reductions even in those plants remaining open.

This is turning out to be one of the slowest recoveries on record. In a sense this should be no surprise. Recessions that originate in financial distress take much longer to work through the system and recovery is slower. That's in part why such a rapid pace of deficit reduction was always going to be damaging to growth, as I have repeatedly warned.

Indeed, while the UK may not (yet) have met the technical definition of double dip recession, basically there has been no at all growth in the UK economy since September 2010. Since then we have seen three quarters of falling output and just two quarters of economic expansion. The economy is at best flatlining, and this is a slower recovery than even that seen after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

As part of the reforms to higher education (HE) that will usher in undergraduate fees as high as £9000 a year, the coalition government promised - somewhat paradoxically - to encourage lower fees.

To try to do this, the government is redistributing some 20,000 undergrad places from universities to institutions that provide courses costing £7,500 or less a year.

Figures from the Higher Education Funding Council recently showed that some 9,643 places will be reallocated to other universities, with another 10,354 places reallocated away from universities to FE colleges.

There were mixed reports today on what is unfolding in GM Europe. One set of reports suggests that the outlines of a cost-cutting plan could be presented to GM Europe's board next Wednesday, while others suggest this is premature.

What seems clear is that GM Europe is looking to take out around a third of its 1.5 million units of capacity in Europe, and that may well involve the closure of two assembly plants - although CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke recently stated that he would honour a two-year old agreement not to shut any plans before the end of 2014.

He also stated that the firm's plants were operating at only 80 percent capacity (some would say even lower). Such spare capacity is a killer for the industry as it means a failure to achieve economies of scale in assembly, meaning higher costs.

I'm just back from taking part in a fascinating 'Our Economy' Midlands Today Debate on the region's economy, which goes out tomorrow at 11.05pm which has got me thinking about what I'd like to see in the budget later this week.

Despite much talk of the UK economy avoiding a double dip recession and having 'turned the corner', forecasts for the UK economy over the next few years still look pretty grim.

The (supposedly) independent Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that with current economic policies, economic output won't get back to the pre-recession level until 2014; that's six years of output being below the level reached in 2008. That makes the recovery much slower than that after the depression of the 1930s.