Britain's Inflation Problem

Preview of coming attractions...

In a quiet corner of a Newport office, a group of 10 statisticians worked late into the night on Friday to put the finishing touches to January's inflation update. Theirs looks like any other open-plan office, except that the Office for National Statistics prices team works alone and keeps its market-moving documents hidden in safes over the weekend.

Having already double- and triple-checked the newly updated weightings, tweaked annually, for the basket of goods and services that are used to calculate consumer price inflation (CPI), their final tasks were to identify the likely talking points in the data and pre-empt the likely questions their team leader, Darren Morgan, will face.

Those final preparations were conducted with even more care than usual – as this month, more than any other, is likely to be incendiary. All together, when the number is announced on Tuesday, CPI is expected to rise to at least 4pc, twice the Bank of England's target level and above December's already alarming 3.7pc.

Retail price inflation (RPI), which includes housing costs and is traditionally used as a benchmark for pay settlements, will be even worse, with the average estimate at 5.1pc.

On the rather more glamorous setting of Threadneedle Street in London, home to the Bank of England, the figures will be keenly awaited by Bank officials, who alongside their counterparts at the Treasury, Number 10 and the business department, receive the data 24 hours ahead of the markets.

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