Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Young of Cookham on 30 April (HL6934), when the Office for National Statistics expects to be able to produce regional price indices, including for Northern Ireland.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the Authority to reply.

Letter from John Pullinger CB, National Statistician, to Lord Maginnis of Drumglas , dated 3 May 2018.

Dear Lord Maginnis,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking, further to the Written Answer by Lord Young of Cookham on 30 April (HL6934), when the Office for National Statistics expects to be able to produce regional price indices, including for Northern Ireland (HL7465).

The Office for National Statisitcs (ONS) commissioned the University of Southampton to produce a feasibility study into producing price indices for all the Government Office Regions, including Northern Ireland, using current price and expenditure data. The results of this research were published in November 2017[1]. Following this publication, we have further commissioned University of Southampton to continue the study. While still underway, initial findings of the study suggest that we will be unable to produce reliable regional price indices without a significant increase in the price sample for this area, which would be costly. We expect the study to be completed by December 2018.

We are actively pursuing access to retailers' transactional databases as part of our work exploring alternative data sources for consumer price statistics under the Digital Economy Act’s framework to access data for statistical purposes. At such a time as we receive access to these data we will have a sufficiently detailed data source to explore more reliable regional consumer price statistics; however, our timescales are dependent on when retailers might provide us with such data.

Yours sincerely,

John Pullinger

[1] Feasibility study into producing CPIH consistent inflation rates for UK regions