There is a secret to being the new broom in a company that has been struggling: dissociate yourself from past failures as fast as you can.

In that respect, Steve Rowe has got off to the best possible start as the chief executive of Marks & Spencer. His comment that the performance of the key clothing division had been “unsatisfactory” is the sort of breezy honesty that works well when it is your first day in the job. Particularly when it has the merit of being true.

The hard numbers support the anecdotal evidence from once loyal M&S customers who now shop elsewhere: the product range has been uninspired and overpriced. One quarterly increase in clothing sales in the past five years tells its own story.

The performance of the clothing and homewares division was once again poor in the three-month period to the end of March, but the City was expecting the fall to be bigger than 2.7%, especially after the recent gloom from Next boss Lord Wolfson. Margins were up because M&S has avoided blanket discounting, and the analysts liked that.

So where does that leave the new boss at M&S? Clothing has been the retailer’s achilles heel for the past decade as sales either grew at the expense of profit margins or vice versa. Rowe needs to be able to conjure both while restoring M&S to a place in the hearts of the once faithful.

Rowe is keeping his powder dry for next month’s full-year results when he promised to reveal more of his ideas to reinvigorate the business.

There were some early signs of common sense though, such as cutting the price of 300 of the new spring lines – an admission they were out of whack with high street rivals.

The idea appears to be to woo customers with the lure of more keenlypriced clothes in the hope that they will be impressed by the improvement in the quality of what is on offer.

Rowe has made a good start. But it is only a start – it is not hard to knock a couple of pounds off a pair of leggings. M&S has been pledging to improve its clothing range for years and it hasn’t happened. The hard work starts now.

The UK’s productivity slump goes on – and on

Eight years have passed since the economy plunged into recession and during that time there has not been any improvement in the UK’s productivity. Workers produced less in the final three months of 2015 than they did in the first quarter of 2008. In the fourth quarter of 2015, productivity dropped by 1.2% on the previous three months.

Never in modern times has productivity been so weak for so long. Trend growth in productivity in the years leading up to the crisis was in the region of 2% a year. And since productivity is the driving force behind improvements in real incomes, that meant living standards increased by 2% a year also.

The Office for National Statistics says productivity is now 14% below where it would have been had that pre-crisis trend continued.

Broken down by sector, there have been some notably poor performances. Finance and insurance, where productivity growth averaged 4% a year in the decade and a half leading up to the crisis has averaged -1% a year in the eight years since. Manufacturing productivity growth has dropped from 3.1% a year to 0.4% a year; in the IT sector it has fallen from 4.3% to 1.3%.

Some of the productivity problem is sector specific. The City, for example, generates less revenue and employs more people in back-office jobs. The offshore sector has been affected by the decline in oil and gas production from the North Sea.

But economy-wide factors have also been at play. There has been insufficient investment and a continued failure to spend enough on R&D or, put simply, poorlytrained and badlyled workers are operating with bits of kit that should have been upgraded some time ago.

French joint-venture points the way

The French president, François Hollande, has not had a lot of good news lately but he has been cheered by the decision of the Swiss firm MSC Cruises to build four liners in a French shipyard at Saint-Nazaire.

The yard nearly closed in 2012 but was saved when the French government took a one-third stake in a joint-venture with the South Korean group STX. It now has orders that will secure its future well into the next decade. A lesson for David Cameron here, perhaps?