Howay the mangoes. After years, possibly decades, of injustice, the most popular fruit among Britons that is not already in the Office for National Statistics’ inflation basket finally will be. And it’s not a victory for the mango alone. As a result of this tweak by Newport’s stat-wranglers, the overall “representation of stone fruit” has been positively addressed, bringing peace to millions.
Cooing over updates to the ONS’s inflation basket — the items whose prices it observes to track inflation — has become something of an annual tradition in the UK. This year, virtual reality headsets and exercise mats got the nod, while DVD rentals and local newspaper adverts found themselves chopped.
Such shifts are inevitably characterised as capturing the consumer zeitgeist, reflecting the latest trends in fashion, food and other frivolities. Which, really, they don’t. The ONS’s technical manual on the compilation of the consumer prices index warns that items in the basket (which, with more than 750 items, is really more of a trolley) “should not be afforded significance beyond their purpose as representative items”.
“Indeed, within each product grouping there is usually a point at which the number, choice of items and the precise weights attached to them become a matter of judgement,” it continues.
Whose judgment? It’s never been entirely clear what heuristic the ONS deploys when reviewing the basket’s contents, turning the whole exercise into something of a casual vibe check (and a nice opportunity for some easy publicity).
Justifying the inclusion of VR headsets, the stats body claimed such products had “seen rapidly increasing expenditure in recent years”, pointing to “around £347mn” of reported sales in 2024, a number “expected to reach £520mn by 2029”. I asked the ONS where they got those very high numbers from and am still waiting for a reply.
It’s not the only area of inflation collection where questionable judgment exercises are taking place. Obviously, corralling the hundreds who observe prices each month is an enormously complicated task. To address this, the ONS produces often highly detailed guidance on what exactly the price-hunters should be looking for.
I recently acquired this guidance using freedom of information laws. It makes for interesting reading, driving home just how strange an exercise price-gathering is.
Take for example a “child’s soft toy/teddy bear”. Agents are told these can be of any type or size, and are asked to record whether the toy is sitting or standing. But importantly — in a piece of writing that evokes some unforgivable past error — the guidance states: “No hand puppets”.
An “individual meat pie” must be sold cold, but can be eaten heated. Slices and pasties are acceptable for this category, but a pork pie is not. Quiches, by contrast, are positively laissez faire — any mix of ingredients is allowed, as long as the quiche itself stays in the 340g-450g weight category.
Other items are less clear. A “wall hanging mirror” may be any shape as long as it doesn’t exceed 1.5 square metres in size. Last March, agents observed one mirror in this category that cost £1.99, and another that cost £3,695. Both prices were deemed acceptable — thankfully, they use a median average rather than a mean.
The ONS is trying to improve how it gathers prices. A potentially significant change — recently postponed — is to use scanner data from supermarkets to capture prices on a previously impossible scale.
Zoom in and the basket approach will probably always appear absurd. The hope is that by stepping back, the bigger picture will make more sense.
louis.ashworth@ft.com
