Expenditure on activities associated with Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Household Costs Indices (HCI)

FOI REF: FOI/2023/5003

You asked

At a speech on 9 March about economic statistics, the National Statistician said that cost was a constraint on developing HCIs, I.e. producing HCIs faster or in greater detail.

Please can you set out the annual costs of producing inflation figures over as many years as possible (but at least five years), split into as many sub-components as possible (survey, methods, production, development etc), and showing the proportion of the total that is due to HCIs?

We said

Thank you for your request.

The associated download is a granular split of expenditure on activities most closely related to consumer prices inflation and the Household Costs Indices (HCIs). Note this will not include all expenditure involved in the production of inflation. For example, it does not include central business support or other teams whose main role is not consumer prices, but who's output feed into the consumer prices statistics (such as housing analysis and household expenditure).

The budget categories held do not map neatly to the sub-components in your original request, but we have endeavoured to provide an approximate mapping in the following table:

ONS budget codes were revised in the 2021 to 2022 financial year, and this provides less granular detail. Most expenditure is now classified under BB001 (which reflects a mixture of production and some continuous development work) and BD850 (which covers much of our transformation work). The increase in expenditure in financial year 2022 to 2023 reflects additional funding for the ONS's work to transform elements of consumer price statistics.

We do not hold an estimate of how much of these costs related to the HCI. The HCI uses many of the same inputs as other consumer price statistics, so it is not possible to hypothecate costs between different statistical outputs.