Economic Affairs Committee
Measuring Inflation
Fifth Report of Session 2017-19 - published 17 January 2019 - HL Paper 246
Summary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 1: Consumer price indices
Box 1: Statistical authorities in the UK
Inflation and price indices explained
Box 2: Changes to the inflation basket for 2018
The weighting of items in the inflation basket
Box 3: A method of calculating an average price change
A brief history of consumer price indices
Table 1: Formulas used in price indices, per cent of total index weight (2012)
Chapter 2: Criticism of the Retail Prices Index
Effect of the changes to clothing price collection
Figure 3: RPI’s estimate of the annual price change of women’s outerwear, 1987 to 2017 (%)
Response from the statistical authorities
Current position of the statistical authorities on RPI
Should RPI be a legacy measure?
Shortcomings of the Carli formula
Box 5: Illustrating upward bias in the Carli formula
The decision to make no further improvements to RPI
Box 6: Summary of the legal duties of the UK Statistics Authority when producing official statistics
Chapter 3: Towards a single measure of inflation
The need for multiple measures of inflation
Recent government practice of ‘inflation shopping’
Table 2: Government use of consumer price indices for uprating
Which is the best index for a single official measure?
CPI, CPIH and the treatment of owner-occupier housing costs
New issuances of CPI-linked gilts
Private sector bonds and pension schemes
Appendix 1: List of Members and declarations of interest
Appendix 4: Chained and direct Carli indices
Evidence is published online at https://www.parliament.uk/the-use-of-rpi and available for inspection at the Parliamentary Archives (020 7219 3074).
Q in footnotes refers to a question in oral evidence.