Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the (a) effectiveness and (b) adequacy of the way in which the ONS (i) collects and (ii) reports food prices.
The Consumer Prices Index and Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing inflation series are produced by the independent Office for National Statistics (ONS) in line with international best practice and the Office for Statistics Regulation assess that it meets the highest standard of quality providing it with National Statistics status.
This Government welcomes long-standing ONS plans to further improve the way it constructs inflation statistics, for example by incorporating scanner data into its price collections.