Update 31 July 2017: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH)
CPIH has been re-designated as a National Statistic on 31 July as documented in correspondence.
Update 26 July 2017: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH)
We plan to publish the latest update about the process of considering whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic on 31 July.
Update 14 June 2017: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH)
This note provides the latest update about the process of considering whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic.
During March and April 2017, the Assessment team continued to review further evidence from ONS. This included updated published information about ONS’s quality assurance of some of its administrative data sources, and a published blog post outlining the landscape of different consumer price inflation measures.
This matter was considered at the UK Statistics Authority’s Regulation Committee at its meeting on 25 April 2017. At that meeting, the Committee recognised the significant progress made against many of the Requirements. The Committee decided to consider CPIH again at its July meeting, as ONS further refines its quality assurance arrangements and its articulation of the purpose of CPIH alongside other ONS outputs.
Update 10 March 2017: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH)
Further to our published note on 25 January 2017, this note provides the latest update about the process of considering whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic.
During February 2017, the Assessment team continued to review ONS’s further evidence, comprising published and draft documentation, in response to our Requirements and engaged with a number of users or potential users of CPIH. In doing so, we formed our regulatory judgement on whether CPIH could be designated as a National Statistic. This matter was considered at the UK Statistics Authority’s Regulation Committee at its meeting on 16 February 2017.
At that meeting, the Regulation Committee decided not to confer the National Statistics status of CPIH at this point in time. This is because although considerable progress has been made, ONS has not yet fully addressed some of the Requirements in the Assessment Report, particularly related to comparisons with other sources, explanations of the methods of quality assurance and description of the weights used in the calculation of CPIH.
We will continue to consider further evidence from ONS to demonstrate how it is addressing the outstanding Requirements and this matter will be considered again at the next Regulation Committee meeting on 25 April 2017.
Update 25 January 2017: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH)
This note, which supersedes our update published on 12 October (below), provides an update about the process of considering whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic, following the published statement on 10 November 2016 by the National Statistician on the future of consumer price inflation statistics in the UK.
Since our 12 October update, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published a range of documentation in response to Requirements set out in our Assessment Report. These published documents include:
- CPIH Compendium (published in October 2016)
- Comparing measures of private rental growth in the UK: 2016 (published in October 2016)
- Understanding the different approaches of measuring owner occupiers’ housing costs (published in October 2016)
- Owner occupiers’ housing costs in CPIH: quality assurance of administrative data, Dec 2016 (published in December 2016)
- Impact of inclusion of Council Tax and revised imputed rents on CPIH: Dec 2016 (published in December 2016)
Our Assessment Report highlighted three areas of general concern, underpinned by ten detailed Requirements:
- the absence of documented quality assurance applied to the private rents administrative data sources demonstrating how the quality assurance has been strengthened
- a lack of comparative analysis to monitor the index compared to other data sources over a period of time and explanation that facilitates users’ understanding of the statistic
- a lack of positive and open engagement with a wide range of users
Our plans for considering re-designation are as previously published – we will judge whether ONS can demonstrate that it has transparently documented its decisions, supporting analyses and quality assurance of CPIH; and that it has established the credibility of, and increased users’ confidence in, CPIH.
We will form our independent judgement by
- reviewing all ONS’s published documentation in response to our Requirements; and
- engaging with users ourselves over the coming weeks
This follows our normal process of considering National Statistics designations following our publishing an Assessment Report.
Update 12 October 2016: Re-assessment of Consumer Prices Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH) – Process for Designating as a National Statistic
This note provides an update on the process of considering whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic following the Regulation team’s receipt of a range of documentation from ONS on 26 September 2016, which we understand ONS plans to publish during October 2016.
Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation said:
“We have encouraged ONS to release this evidence in the public domain as an important step in enhancing its engagement with users. A pre-requisite to any decision to re-designate will be consideration of the extent to which ONS has established the credibility of CPIH as a measure of inflation, and how it has instilled a greater level of user confidence in its quality.
“Our plans for considering re-designation are as previously published – we will not base a decision to designate CPIH as a National Statistic on this documentation alone, but will consider whether ONS can demonstrate that it has established the credibility of, and increased users’ confidence in, CPIH. Specifically this means that the Regulation Committee has no plans to make a decision about whether CPIH can be designated as a National Statistic at its meeting on 13 October 2016.
“We will continue to engage with users ourselves over the coming months to inform our decision.”