ONS is currently transforming our consumer price statistics by using new data sources such as scanner data taken directly from checkouts, information scraped from shops' websites and administrative data.  These data sources provide many benefits compared with our current sources, including improved product coverage, high frequency of collection, as well as potential cost savings. Our ambition is to collect billions of prices every month from the UK's leading retailers, which will improve our understanding of how prices of products, as well as the number of each product sold, are changing in the UK economy. This has the potential to significantly improve the quality and granularity of the UK’s headline measures of consumer price inflation. This presentation will provide an overview of the progress made so far and our future plans.
 

Speaker: Michael Hardie 
Michael Hardie is currently Deputy Director of the Prices Division at Office for National Statistics (ONS); he is responsible for the production and dissemination of consumer, business, and house price statistics. Michael is also responsible for the transformation of consumer prices including using new data sources, methods, and systems. Michael has previously undertaken a range of roles at ONS working on National Accounts and Balance of Payments statistics.

Organising group: RSS Finance & Economics Special Interest Group 

Organiser: Dr Jia Shao