March 24, 2021
United Kingdom Office of National Statistics, recent data shows an increase of 0.7% in Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) in the 12 months to February 2021, down from 0.9% in the year to January 2021 CPIH. While consumer prices (CPI) rose by 0.4% for the 12 months to February, 0.7% down from January CPI. Furthermore, on a monthly basis CPIH and CPI both rose by 0.1% in February 2021 compared with larger increase of 0.3% and 0.4%, respectively in February 2020.
According to the Office of National Statistics, “the largest downward contribution (of 0.13 percentage points) to the change in the CPIH 12-month inflation rate came from clothing and footwear. Prices, overall, fell by 1.5% between January 2021 and February 2021, compared with a rise of 0.9% between the same two months a year ago.” It was noted that is movement is as a result of the adverse effect of Covid-19.
Notably, the downward movement were partially offset by large upward contributions from rising prices for motor fuels, and housing and household services overall.
Furthermore, “as a result of the ongoing restrictions caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in February 2021, the number of CPIH items identified as unavailable was 69, accounting for 8.3% of the basket by weight; this is unchanged from January 2021 but lower than the 72 items that were unavailable during the lockdown in November 2020; for the February 2021 price collection, we collected a weighted total of 81.1% of comparable coverage collected before the first lockdown (excluding unavailable items),” as per Office of National Statistics.
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