Cabinet Office written question – answered at on 25 February 2013.
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Glen Watson, dated February 2013
As Director General for the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question asking for an estimate of the cost of living, at today's prices, for the average family in each of the last 30 years (144272).
The information requested is not available.
The consumer price inflation statistics produced by ONS are specifically not intended to measure what people often refer to as the “cost of living”. In popular usage, what this means is ill defined. Some use it to mean a measure of the cost of buying sufficient quantities of various items to maintain some minimal standard of living. However, defining this standard is very subjective. Also, if the minimal acceptable standard rises over time, such an index would rise more rapidly than our inflation measures.
Another definition is an index restricted to basic essentials. However, it would be difficult to reach a consensus on what constitutes “basic essentials”. For example, items such as tobacco could be excluded because tobacco may or may not be considered an essential item. Also, many former luxuries such as telephones are how usually considered essential.
The economic definition of the cost of living is the answer to the question “What is the minimum cost, at this month's prices, of achieving the level of utility actually attained in the base period?” Due to the stress on minimum, a cost of living index will usually give a lower rate of inflation than our inflation measures.
Furthermore, consumer price statistics do not measure inflation for the average family. The statistics measure changes to the cost of a “basket” of goods and services bought by households. The content of the basket reflects household expenditure—the more that is spent on an item, the greater importance it has on inflation. The basket looks at total expenditure by households in aggregate rather than expenditure for an ‘average’ family. For example, the prices of gas, electricity and coal heating are included in the basket, although it is unlikely that many households would use all three.
Here is a link to our latest CPI (Consumer Price Indices) release:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/cpi/consumer-price-indices/january-2013/index.html
Please note that these are not cost of living indices and do not approximate cost of living indices.
Yes0 people think so
No0 people think not
Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.