We are improving how we produce consumer price inflation statistics. This includes making use of new large datasets such as retailers’ scanner data; that is, data collected by retailers as transactions are processed at the checkouts or online. This will hugely increase the number of data points available to us to calculate inflation figures, while also increasing coverage across the ‘basket of goods and services’. You can find out more in our blog.

In March 2025, we plan to make some processing changes that will allow us to readily incorporate these large new data sources into our headline inflation measures. This reflects a significant milestone in our modernisation plans. We now plan to introduce scanner data for groceries in March 2026. This will allow us to run the data alongside our usual processes for a year to further assure the quality of our data. We expect to be able to share some experimental outputs in April 2025.

You can find more about these changes and how they affect our headline measures of inflation in our articles which we have released today:

• Impact analysis on transformation of UK consumer price statistics, January 2025
• Redevelopment of Northern Ireland private rental statistics, impact analysis.

These plans will lead to changes in the item indices data and price quote microdataset, which are published at the same time as our inflation data. More information will be provided in the upcoming January Consumer Price Inflation bulletin published on 19 February 2025. We recently ran a user feedback survey to better understand how these datasets are used. Our response is now available on our engagement platform.