The crisis-hit Office for National Statistics apologised yesterday as it revealed its latest blunder – admitting that it had overestimated retail sales this year.
July’s figures were delayed for two weeks after an error in compiling them was identified, prompting revisions to mistakes in previous months’ figures.
The revisions suggested retail sales grew by 1.1 per cent over the first half of the year rather than 1.7 per cent as previously calculated.
Britain’s number-crunching agency is already under enormous pressure after admitting to mistakes in unemployment and inflation data.
The chronic problems at the ONS have created major frustrations for ministers and the Bank of England trying to assess the state of the economy.
Retail sales figures for July – which showed a 0.6 per cent increase – were better than expected.
Crisis-hit: The Office for National Statistics has admitted that it had overestimated retail sales this year
They were supposed to have been released two weeks earlier but were delayed after the ONS admitted to a mistake in how it adjusts figures to account for seasonal variations such as when Easter falls each year.
James Benford, the ONS’s director general of economic statistics, said: ‘I apologise for the delay to this release and for the errors in how we have been seasonally adjusting these data.’
The official retail sales figures have long attracted scorn among analysts, with independent expert Nick Bubb deriding the data as coming from ‘planet ONS’.
But it is ONS labour market figures that have come under particular scrutiny.
Jobs figures are critical to the Bank of England in helping to decide whether it needs to cut interest rates as the economy stutters or leave them higher for longer if it is threatening to overheat.
Back in 2023, Bank governor Andrew Bailey said the official employment number could be out by as much as a million.
Former Bank chief economist Andy Haldane has said it meant rate-setters were ‘flying in fog about the labour market’.
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