By David Milliken
LONDON, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Britain’s Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday that it plans to go ahead next month with changes to how it collects grocery price data, which may lead to a small reduction in the reported rate of consumer price inflation.
For several years, the ONS has been working on using supermarkets’ own data from checkouts – covering more than a billion items a month – instead of prices recorded manually from supermarket shelves or websites.
This data, which represents about half of British grocery sales, will now be incorporated into the official consumer price and retail price inflation numbers for February onwards, the ONS said.
“The price charged at the till, not the price shown on the shelf, will feed into our inflation statistics,” ONS Deputy Director for Prices Transformation Mike Hardie said.
“It will also allow us to better capture the impact of a wider range of promotions, such as store discount cards, on average price inflation,” he added.
Many British supermarkets reserve their biggest discounts for customers who sign up for free loyalty cards which allow retailers to track their spending habits.
If the new grocery scanner data had been used from January 2019 to June 2025, it would have lowered the average CPI rate by 0.03 percentage points and changed the published rate most months by at least 0.1 percentage points, the ONS said.
The impact of the change appears smaller for prices collected in the first half of 2025 compared with those gathered from 2022 to 2024, Hardie added.
The rising cost of living has been a major issue for British households since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent household energy bills soaring and added to rising food prices.
British inflation was 3.4% in December – the highest in the Group of Seven advanced economies – though the BoE expects it to return to near its 2% target in April or May this year.
As well as changes to how it collects grocery prices, the ONS said it would also add an extra collection day for prices of video games and overnight hotel stays from next month onward.
Big month-to-month swings in these prices – due to new video game releases and one-off events boosting hotel prices – has contributed to volatility in the headline inflation data.
(Reporting by David Milliken, editing by Andy Bruce and Andrew Heavens)
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