Business leaders are calling for calm amid growing concerns that a recession could hit in 2008.

As house prices fell for the third month in January and the global economy continued to react to fears of a recession in America, job losses hit Sussex last week.

Up to 650 people have been told they must move to Luton or face redundancy at the firm TUI Travel in Crawley.

The German company merged the popular Thomson and First Choice travel brands last September.

But it now plans to close its flagship First Choice House, in London Road, Crawley, in an attempt to streamline its operations and make £150 million in savings.

The news followed a difficult Christmas for shopkeepers but Mark Froud, chief executive at Sussex Enterprise, said talk of a recession in the UK was unfounded.

He said: "It's time to take a step back and have a realistic look at the current economic climate.

"With a forecast growth of around two per cent in the UK we are certainly not in the throes of a recession, rather an economic slowdown to a more sustainable level.

"A more sensible approach to spending won't harm the economy but consumers will have to face the prospect of managing their debt more carefully.

"However, there is no doubt the coming year will be a challenging one for businesses. Adopting a more measured approach that looks further ahead is more prudent."

It was a sentiment echoed by Tony Mernagh, executive director of Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership.

He said, however, that much of the country's economic progress could now depend on emerging markets, such as China and Brazil.

He said: "The technical definition of a recession is two quarters of negative growth. Even the most pessimistic forecasts for growth for this year and next year hover around 1.75 to two per cent - that's a long way short of negative growth.

"What we're almost certainly going to see is a readjustment and slowdown in many sectors. So the question is, having got used to a decade of continuous growth, are businesses ready to deal with a slowdown?

"Certainly I don't think we will end up with a recession."

One business and political adviser said there were signs that Britain was heading for recession but that it was likely to be the first in a new type of downturn, "the speed recession".

Allan Biggar, former chief executive of Burson-Marsteller Corporate and Financial, the world's biggest PR agency, said the Northern Rock crisis was indicative of the way communication was speeding up the economic climate.

He said: "I've spoken to many people in business and politics, and they all say pretty well the same thing: the cycle of traditional recession' is dead: from here on we're going to transfer at the click of a mouse from upturn to downturn.

"2007 was massively buoyant until the autumn, and then we suddenly hit credit crunch and downturn, and there's no doubt that communication and IT was a massive contributor.

"The instant Robert Peston broke the Northern Rock story on the BBC, the UK economy started to experience a slowdown - because of the speed of communication."

House prices fell for the third month in a row during January, according to the latest survey from Nationwide Building Society. It said prices fell by 0.1 per cent during the month, taking the average cost of a home to £180,473.

Most recent housing surveys have suggested the market is slowing as prices are hit by higher interest rates and tighter lending criteria.

Robert Bryant-Pearson, chief executive of Allied Surveyors, said: "The live now, pay later' culture of remortgaging to pay off credit card debt, coupled with competition between lenders and apparently never-ending increases in house prices, was bound to mean the merry-go-round would stop sooner or later."