An ungrateful nation

Earlier today I was a bit worried that there could have been one of those unfortunate statistical glitches. First the BBC reporter told us that inflation had fallen, but by less than analysts had expected. Later we were told that, according to the National Statistics information, numbers of retailers & service providers had failed to pass on the VAT reduction

Could the statisticians have missed the fact that a lot of reductions (still) happen only at the till & are not reflected in the price labels?

Oh ye of little faith

The National Statistics website defeated me again, but I was able to find the following in the Google cache:



“A note in the November CPI First Release announced that the publication of December CPI/RPI might be delayed. This was because of the additional work involved in collecting information about whether the VAT reduction has been applied and, where applied, whether the reduction has been made at the till. We can now advise that the December CPI/RPI publication will not be delayed; it will be published on Tuesday 20 January”


Which just goes to show that it is not just retailers who have had extra costs to bear in implementing this policy

And although I suppose I am grateful for the reduction in my shopping bill, I get a stab of irritation on those occasions when I find that I have carefully tendered the ‘correct’ amount, only to find that I have counted out too much

Related post

The politics of large numbers