10th Jul 2025 12:27
(Alliance News) - The Office for National Statistics on Thursday said it will restart producer price inflation data releases in October after stating that a review found prior figures had been understated.
The statistics body suspended publishing PPI data in March after identifying issues, mainly around 2022 and 2023. It said at the time that upward revisions to previous releases were likely.
The effects are mixed for different products and industries, but the largest effects on PPI inflation rates are in 2022 and 2023, the ONS said.
The largest impact on the headline output PPI annual inflation rate was in July 2023, with a 1.4 percentage points increase.
Over the whole period covered by the data, from December 2019 to April 2025, the average annual inflation rate of output PPI is now estimated to be 4.9%, compared with 4.4% before the methods correction.
The impact of the changes on published estimates of gross domestic product growth for 2025 is expected to be negligible, the ONS added.
The ONS said it will publish a full impact analysis of the revisions in October, which will explain how it plans to address issues highlighted.
The ONS said the pause in coverage has allowed a "substantial" rebuild of the processing system and time to sufficiently quality assure the output.
"There is some additional work to undertake, though further corrections are mostly expected to be small in magnitude," the ONS added.
Issues with the implementation of chain-linking methods, introduced in November 2020, led to errors in PPI, the ONS said.
But "the new chain-linking method was coded up incorrectly in our production system," the ONS explained.
"The price relatives were not being reset to 100 in each annual rebasing process. This means that historical price movements were effectively distorting the weights being applied in more recent periods," the ONS added.
It has proved to be a tricky year for the ONS, which acknowledged an error in the April inflation figure, specifically a 0.1 percentage point overestimation in the consumer prices index due to an issue with vehicle tax data.
This meant the CPI inflation rate for April, which was previously reported as 3.5%, was actually 3.4%.
In May, the head of the ONS Ian Diamond resigned due to health reasons.
By Jeremy Cutler, Alliance News reporter
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