In addition, the ONS is 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 it directly from supermarket checkouts.
But pensioners or students have totally different experiences of inflation. The ONS has the answers to this too. Last year it released an interactive shopping basket to enable users to see and compare how the price of different items have changed in the past year. It also has a personal inflation calculator.
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Perhaps celebrated author Mark Twain was not so far wrong when he said: “There are lies, damned lies and statistics”. Time for a rethink?
Stephanie Hawthorne is a freelance journalist
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