Dr. Martina Lawless:

We looked a little at why more firms were investing less than we would expect, given the current strong performance of the economy and based on some survey data on how firms' profits were going and how their sales were growing. That was earlier this year. We found there seemed to be a fairly substantial gap between what we would expect firms to invest given the positive state of the economy and what they were actually investing. We did not have Brexit in there as a specific question. However, when we tried to drill down into it to see if it was being caused by problems with finance, uncertainty and so on, we largely found that uncertainty in a very general sense, or aversion to risk, seemed to be more important than some of the other factors we might expect such as raising finance in terms of having firms hold off on investment decisions.

We could not, however, link that specifically to concerns about Brexit.