Jon Whiteman | Source | Partner, Head of Industrials at CIL Management Consultants

In mid-March, everything changed overnight. Between January and March in the UK, deal activity was at very high levels following another period of uncertainty linked to the general election. Now, the market is at 20% of the previous deal activity, and we are expecting suppressed volumes for some time. If it was early-stage vendor due diligence (VDD), we did progress on doing the market analysis work – these deals take time in any case, and the thinking was that if this was all sorted by July, then deals would just resume. Everybody is now conscious that timings will most likely slip further.