The Times last week published the Report of the Court of Appeal’s decision on the question of whether the government was breaking the law when it decided to change to using the CPI rather than the RPI for calculating the annual increase needed in public sector pensions to keep them in line with inflation.
I do not suppose that this is the first time that the courts have had to consider, in evidence, technical reports produced by the Office for National Statistics, but it is the first time I can remember reading such a judgement.
And impressive reading it makes, as a comprehensible summary of even such user-unfriendly language as ‘a Laspeyres-type consumer inflation or pure price index measuring the average price change on the basis of changed expenditure of maintaining the consumption pattern of households and the composition of the consumer population in the … reference period’. It makes me regret even more the fact that an English High Court judge was not, in the event, ever asked to rule on the vexed question of the number next to zero.
It must have come as a comfort & relief to the statisticians that the court found that
“when asking whether a particular index is appropriate for assessing whether there has been any change, and if so what change, in ‘general prices’, it is appropriate to consider whether the index … is regarded by the relevant professionals, in this case economic statisticians, as having the appropriate characteristics.”
However, what intrigues me, is that those who lost their appeal, in part on the basis of their appropriately professional opinion, included the First Division Association (FDA), the union for higher civil servants to which, at least in years gone past, the majority of government statisticians belonged.
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