Office for National Statistics

Geographically sampling the Consumer Price Index

 The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) is responsible for the Consumer Price Index, a measure that is used to calculate inflation rates in the UK economy.

For ONS, Geofutures has developed a method of enabling enumerators to sample retail prices across spatially consistent zones reflecting the underlying distribution of retail activity across the country.

Some outputs of the ODPM town centres model were employed, using GI systems to combine them with measures of retail intensity within a town’s retail core. Effective use of spatial statistical techniques is required to deal with anomalies such as ‘doughnut’ retail cores and the aggregation of smaller zones to create sufficiently large sampling areas.

Geofutures’ model is delivered online, offering ONS analysts a powerful window to the modelling environment over the web.