Britain avoided slipping into its third recession in recent times during the first quarter of 2013, a rare bit of welcome economic news for the government, but it continues to struggle to deliver even modest sustainable growth, The Wall Street Journal reported. The U.K. government took a bold gamble on a program of government-spending cuts when it took office in 2010, but it has faced increasing criticism of its austerity program as the economy has stagnated.

Britain finds out on Thursday if its stagnant economy has slipped back into recession, a week after the International Monetary Fund urged Chancellor George Osborne to consider scaling back his austerity programme. Economists estimate that Britain's $2.4 trillion (1.5 trillion pounds) economy eked out growth of 0.1 percent in the first three months to March, according to a Reuters poll. That would avoid a second quarter of contraction - the definition of a recession - after it shrank by 0.3 percent in the last three months of 2012.

At least one of Britain's major banks should be broken up into smaller regional lenders, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sits on an influential banking reform committee, said on Monday, Reuters reported. Justin Welby, spiritual head of the Anglican Church, spoke in a personal capacity, but his comments offer insight into the thinking of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards which has the role of cleaning up Britain's banking culture.

Britain launched legal action against Brussels on Friday in an aggressive move to block an EU levy on financial transactions, which traders fear could have a devastating impact on the City of London, the Financial Times reported. George Osborne, the UK chancellor, said London would challenge the levy at the European Court of Justice on grounds that the tax to be implemented in 11 EU member states would be unfair to countries unwilling to take part.

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne suggested a vote for Scottish independence next year would imperil the use of the British pound as the new state’s money because political union is needed to operate a single currency, Bloomberg reported. The U.K. government on Tuesday, April 23, will publish a study on the implications for the currency of Scottish independence. Osborne made the comments today in a joint article with Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury.

Britain should issue licences to bankers to help stamp out the kind of scandals that have hit the City of London in recent years, the opposition Labour party proposed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Labour will seek to amend a banking reform bill in parliament to strengthen existing checks on people working in the financial services industry.

Bank credit is now more popular with big companies in Britain than at any point in the past five years, a survey showed on Tuesday, suggesting an easing in what many see as a major brake on the economy, Reuters reported. The Bank of England and politicians say a lack of bank lending, especially for smaller firms, is part of the reason for the country's very slow recovery from the financial crisis. That problem seems to be fading, at least for business heavyweights.

The U.K. economy narrowly avoided slipping into its first triple-dip recession after eking out fractional growth in the first quarter of the year, Britain's leading independent economic institute said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said its estimate of the U.K.'s gross domestic product shows the economy squeezed out growth of 0.1% in the first three months of the year.

Bank regulators need to develop much simpler rules to make it harder for large financial firms to game the supervisory system, Bank of England official Andrew Haldane said on Tuesday. "We need to do a radical pruning, simplifying of our regulatory apparatus (that) places much less emphasis on what are unreliable measures of risk," Haldane, the BoE's executive director for financial stability, told a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

In one of its last moves before being disbanded last week, Britain's Financial Services Authority did something few bank regulators have done since the financial crisis: They relaxed rules on some financial-services firms, The Wall Street Journal reported. The thrust of the new policy by the FSA and the Bank of England is to lower barriers to entry for new banks by reducing capital requirements and speeding up the approval process.