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Friday, the British Statistics Agency admitted that more of its figures had been imperfect while it interrupted the publication of two price indices used to help calculate GDP, which deepened concerns concerning the reliability of British economic data.
THE National Statistics Office said that he had found faults in its price indices and producer producer services, which gives a feeling of pressures on prices in business supply chains.
The release of PPI and SPPI data, which had been due on March 26, would be interrupted “while we correct this problem,” added the agency.
The delay will feed the questions on the reliability of the figures produced by the ONS, after the agency has postponed this month publication of commercial data With a day notice.
It is also still struggling with long -term problems in a key survey of the labor market state, which has left the ministers and the Banque d’Angleterre interest rates without solid employment data since 2023.
Rob Wood, chief economist of the United Kingdom to the Pantheon Macroeconomics of Advice, said that errors in ONS data “now became generalized … which must raise the reliability of all statistics”.
With defective figures on the job market, trade and PPI, “there must be questions about other errors and problems hiding that we have not yet discovered,” he added.
Problems with detailed prices data – which is used to help calculate the size of the British economy – could lead to revisions of estimates of services, production and construction, especially in 2022 and 2023, according to the ONS.
The impact of revisions on the PPI and the SPPI in various industries “should be offset to one extent”, there would therefore be “no significant change.
The problem also affected the way in which trade in goods and the trade in services was adjusted for inflation.
“Early analysis suggests that certain goods for exporting and importing goods from 2023 may be affected and that certain goods export data before 2014,” said the ONS, adding that it was planning to restart the publication in summer.
Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at the King’s College of London, said that the PPI and SPPI errors were “obviously unhappy” but not “unusual”, since the ons had introduced a certain number of methodological changes around the use of defenses over time.
The ONS said that it did not expect changes in the publication calendar for monthly, quarterly or annual GDP. He also said that the head consumer price index and a wider inflation measure that includes housing costs, CPIH, were “completely uninformed”.
Earlier Friday, the reflection group on the Institute for Tax Studies said that a major revision of the agency Official estimates of the private wealth of retirement households was “fundamentally imperfect”, leaving decision -makers without a reliable guide on how wealth is distributed between households.
