UK factory gate inflation revised upwards after ONS admits error
The UK’s Office for National Statistics has been forced to revise up its producer price inflation figures due to an error, which means factory gate inflation has been higher than published.
Headline annual output producer price inflation (PPI) was revised up by an average of 1.8 percentage points from January - October 2022, with the latest reading for last month revised to 17.2%, from 14.8% previously.
"The error was because of diesel fuel not being allocated a correct weight within the output price index, which resulted in Petroleum Products being around half the correct weight of 6.5% since the start of the year," the ONS said in a statement.
"The correction in output PPI weights, and the inclusion of diesel prices within the data, now mean that from January to October 2022 Petroleum Products has the largest positive contribution to the 12-month rate of output inflation. For October 2022, Petroleum Products contributed 6.1 percentage points to the 12-month rate (revised from 0.0)."
"This is notably higher than the second main contributor, Food Products, which has a revised contribution of 3.5 percentage points in October."
It also revised up slightly its October reading for annual input PPI to 19.5% from 19.2% previously.
"We are adopting additional system checks to ensure that this does not happen in the future. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused," the ONS said.
Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com