On 21 March 2025 we announced a pause to the ONS Producer Price Index (PPI) and Services Producer Price Indices (SPPI) due to an issue identified with the chain-linking methods used to calculate these indices.
Our investigations so far have concluded the problem affects the period from December 2008 onwards. However, investigations suggest that the main impact on annual producer price inflation rates was in 2022 and 2023, because of the large movements in relative prices during that period.
The Consumer Prices Indices (CPI), Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) are completely unaffected by this issue.
As mentioned in our previous statement, these detailed price data are used within our GDP calculations. This may lead to impacts on the level of estimated output in some industries with revisions to estimates for services, production and construction particularly likely in 2022 and 2023.
At an aggregate level for GDP, these revisions should be offsetting to an extent, while taken alongside regular data deliveries. Early indications continue to suggest that there will not be a notable change in the recent economic trends seen in these data, but we will provide a further update once more information becomes available.
This problem within PPI also affects some of the deflators used for both trade in goods and trade in services, including the import price indices (IPI) and export price indices (EPI). This will impact our inflation-adjusted (chained volume) trade estimates. Further analysis is required to understand the full impact to trade, including impacts at a more detailed level, for example by country and commodity. Early analysis suggests that some goods export and import data from 2023 may be impacted, and some goods export data prior to 2014.
In the short term, we have chosen to prioritise correcting the detailed price deflators which are needed for high priority economic statistics, a substantial proportion of which rely on underlying inputs from PPI, IPI, EPI and SPPI. These include the inputs needed for our 2025 Annual National Accounts (Blue Book and Pink Book) revisions. Therefore, the publication of PPI and SPPI will remain paused while we continue to investigate the issues mentioned. We will look to restart publication of monthly PPI and quarterly SPPI during summer 2025. This reflects the need for a significant rebuild for the processing system, and time required to sufficiently quality assure the outputs.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) apologises for the inconvenience caused.