Inflation

Lord Sharkey Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I was until today a member of the committee that produced this report. I record my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for his wise and tolerant chairmanship, and also join him in thanking our clerk, our committee assistant and in particular the departing policy analyst, Ben McNamee.

Inflation may be—although I doubt it after listening to this debate—a simple concept. However, as this debate has demonstrated and as the committee very soon learned, measuring it is a far from simple exercise. Discussion of what these measures should be and of their relative merits can quite quickly become highly technical and apparently abstract, but what we agree inflation to be obviously has an enormous impact in the real world. That is why it is important to try to maintain some common-sense understanding of what is going on. Decisions made about how to measure inflation should be widely accessible to scrutiny and debate, not just confined to a priestly caste of economists, bankers and statisticians. Our report tried to help with that, and I will focus on just a couple of the major issues we discussed.

The first is whether the RPI is irretrievably flawed and should be abandoned, as the UKSA and the ONS had decided. As we have heard, the committee thought not. We acknowledged, as had the UKSA and the ONS, that the index was clearly flawed as a result of an untested and underplanned methodological change introduced by the ONS in 2010. I should say in passing that I was very surprised by the apparently casual way in which this change was implemented, and even more surprised that there was not an early attempt to rectify an obvious mistake. After all, the impact of the change was more or less immediately obvious. In December 2009, the RPI was about half a percentage point higher than the CPI, and in December 2010 it was nearly 0.9 percentage points higher. Nowadays, the RPI continues to run between 0.8 and one percentage point above the CPI.

This matters not only because it is the wrong number but because this wrong number has very significant real-world consequences. It has been a gift, as we have heard, to the holders of RPI index-linked bonds—a gift of around £1 billion in extra interest every year—and it has punished those people whose payments are linked to the RPI. Annual rail fare increases and the interest on student loans are examples of this.

You might reasonably have thought that it would be obvious that the mistake in calculating RPI should be fixed, but listening to the arguments for and against repairing the index was at times like listening to a theological dispute between medieval schoolmen. One of our colleagues, who is no longer in his place—the noble Lord, Lord Lamont—compared the whole thing unfavourably to listening to the arguments in the Council of Trent.

It seemed clear to us that some of the technical arguments, about the use of the Carli formula, for example, had been going on for a very long time and were unresolved—and perhaps even unresolvable. However, it seemed that the arguments in favour of repair carried significantly more weight than those against. This was in part because the arguments against seemed based very largely on a misreading by the ONS of its statutory duty and on its reluctance to take into account the widespread and continued use of the RPI.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, explained our collective view of the ongoing misinterpretation by the ONS of its statutory duties under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, and I will not repeat his arguments. However, I will say that the UKSA/ONS position on this strikes me as simultaneously cowardly and ludicrous. In essence, the ONS is saying that it will not ask the Bank for permission to repair the RPI because it thinks, correctly, that the Bank would have to ask the Chancellor and that he would say no. The Chancellor himself dealt with that when he gave evidence to us, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, recounted. We believe that the ONS has a legal duty to ask for authority to repair, and we strongly believe that, when asked, the Chancellor should agree.

The second major issue we focused on was whether there was a need for multiple indices to measure consumer price inflation. We thought not. Some witnesses, including the UKSA and the RSS, defended the practice. Others, including the Bank of England, saw the case for a single index. They felt that it was not obvious why two were needed and that having multiple indices caused confusion and was counterproductive. In addition, of course, the existence of two indices has allowed the Government to indulge in the rather disgraceful game of index shopping, using the lower CPI for payments out and the higher RPI for receipts in. This is, at the very least, inconsistent and incoherent, as well as obviously unfair and, unfortunately, widespread. I am glad to see that the Government have made some moves towards fairness and consistency and we encourage them to go further and faster. In fact, I urge the Government to move as quickly as possible towards the use of a single consumer price index. As we recommended in our report, we believe that the Government should eventually choose between a repaired RPI and the updated CPI.

As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, explained, there has been no formal response to our report, which was published six months ago. The National Statistician, who retired yesterday, without a proper successor in place, said in March that UKSA would respond in April—and it did, on 30 April, as did the Treasury on the same day. They both said that this was an important issue which required further consideration—in the same words—and that they would respond,

“as soon as it is practicable to do so”.

Not “in due course”, “shortly” or “soon”, which are the usual qualifications, but an entirely unexplained new kind of delay: as soon as it is “practicable” to do so. Can I ask the Minister—well, perhaps not. I wanted to ask what this means. What is making a response impracticable? How long is this impracticability expected to last? We currently have no idea when we might expect the usual formal written response.

So, in the absence of a response, and while the UKSA and the Treasury are considering how to respond, could I ask the Minister a couple of questions? First, does the Minister agree that the ONS has a legal duty to request the repair of RPI? The Minister will know that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, talking of the proposal to repair RPI, told the committee:

“I am suggesting it is the role of the ONS to put forward that proposal”.


My second question, therefore, is: in light of this, what can be done to avoid this damaging and faintly ridiculous impasse caused by Sir David Norgrove’s assertion that he can read the Chancellor’s mind?