Impact of inclusion of Council Tax and revised imputed rents on CPIH Articles
The CPIH is a measure of UK consumer price inflation that includes owner occupiers’ housing costs (OOH). These are the costs of housing services associated with owning, maintaining and living in one’s own home. CPIH is currently being re- assessed by the UK Statistics Authority as a National Statistic; before CPIH becomes the preferred measure we are taking the opportunity to introduce improvements and revisions to the statistic, to ensure that it is of the highest quality.The two changes that are being made to the index are to revise the CPIH weights to align the expenditure used in the calculation of the OOH weight with revised National Accounts data published in the Blue Book 2016, and the inclusion of council tax. This paper describes the background to the inclusion of these elements in CPIH; it then presents an analysis of the impact these have on the index.