The food poverty campaigner is claiming victory after statistics chiefs pledged to revise their methods.
Image source, Getty Images
Food poverty campaigner and chef Jack Monroe is claiming victory after statistics chiefs pledged to revise how they measure the cost of living.
Ms Monroe had complained that everyday essentials were going up in price by more than the official inflation rate, hitting poorer people hardest.
But she said the official way inflation is calculated failed to reflect this.
On Wednesday, the Office for National Statistics admitted that “one inflation rate doesn’t fit all”.
“Delighted to be able to tell you that the ONS have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances,” Ms Monroe said in a tweet.
Delighted to be able to tell you that the @ONS have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances 👊 #VimesBootsIndex
— Jack Monroe (@BootstrapCook)
Earlier, she told the BBC: “People who are buying the 29p pasta, the 17p kidney beans, the 45p bags of rice – those statistics don’t exist, so those people aren’t represented.”
That followed a series of tweets in which she highlighted budget supermarket lines being discontinued.
The ONS is understood to have been working on a way of broadening its measure of inflation for some time.
In a blog, head of inflation statistics Mike Hardie said: “We are currently developing radical new plans to increase the number of price points dramatically each month from 180,000 to hundreds of millions, using prices sent to us directly from supermarket checkouts.
“This will mean we won’t just include one apple in a shop – picked to be representative based on shelf space and market intelligence – but how much every apple costs, and how many of each type were purchased, in many more shops in every area of the country.”
The ONS said it had no plans to carry out research on spending patterns of different income groups, but the changes would offer a much more accurate reflection of overall price rises.
It added that it was in the process of working out how to incorporate supermarket checkout data into the official statistics.
This would take place over the next year or so, with no official timetable for the changes.