In this case, the journalists’ instincts are sound. The CPIH is a strange hybrid of the UK CPI, a Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices, which rejects proxy series on principle, and an imputed rents series used as a proxy for UK homeownership costs. They don’t belong together at all. It has very limited usefulness for analyzing the differences in inflation rates between the UK CPI and the UK HFCE deflator, and that’s about it. It should never have been made the UK’s headline inflation measure.

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