UK statistics agency admits more figures are flawed

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Britain’s statistics agency on Friday admitted even more of its figures were flawed as it paused the publication of two price indices used to help calculate GDP, deepening concerns about the reliability of UK economic data.

The Office for National Statistics said it had found flaws in its producer price indices and services producer price indices, which give a sense of price pressures within business supply chains.

Release of the PPI and SPPI data, which had been due on March 26, would be paused “while we rectify this issue”, the agency added.

The delay will fuel questions over the reliability of figures produced by the ONS, after the agency this month postponed the publication of trade data with one day’s notice.

It is also still grappling with long-running problems in a key survey on the state of the labour market, which have left ministers and Bank of England interest rate-setters without solid employment data since late 2023.

Rob Wood, chief UK economist at consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics, said errors in ONS data were “now becoming widespread . . . which must raise the questions of how reliable all the statistics are”.

With flawed figures on the labour market, trade and PPI, “there must be questions about what other errors and problems are lurking that we haven’t found out yet”, he added.

Problems with the detailed price data — which is used to help calculate the size of the UK economy — could lead to revisions to estimates for services, production and construction, notably in 2022 and 2023, the ONS said.

The impact of the revisions to PPI and SPPI in various industries “should be offsetting to an extent” so there would “not be a notable change in . . . recent economic trends”, the ONS said, while warning that issues with the figures date as far back as 2008.

The problem also affected how trade in goods and trade in services have been adjusted for inflation.

“Early analysis suggests that some goods export and import data from 2023 may be impacted, and some goods export data prior to 2014,” the ONS said, adding that it planned to restart publication in the summer.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, said the PPI and SPPI errors were “obviously unfortunate” but not “unusual”, given that the ONS had introduced a number of methodological changes around the use of deflators over time.

The ONS said it did not expect any changes to the publication timetable for monthly, quarterly or annual GDP. It also said the headline consumer prices index and a broader inflation measure that includes housing costs, CPIH, were “completely unaffected”.

Earlier on Friday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank said a major revision by the agency to official estimates of private pension household wealth was “fundamentally flawed”, leaving policymakers with no reliable guide as to how wealth is distributed among households.