Reprieve! The British consumer has received a stay of execution. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show inflation last month fell to 2.8 per cent – down from 3.3 per cent in March and by more than most economists had forecast. But don’t bother reading the ‘corner has been turned’ press release that the government will issue later, because today’s improvement is sadly not about to become a trend.
Rachel Reeves has played some part in these figures: by removing various energy levies from household bills and freezing some other regulated costs. That’s meant price rises in April were not as bad as they might otherwise have been. But the real reason the figures have come down is because of how bad Awful April was last year. At the start of the new tax year, regulated prices, inflation-linked bills and other annual price increases all kick in at once. This year they were just less extreme than in 2025 and so the net effect is to bring down the headline rate of CPI.
The way the ONS statisticians collect inflation data played a role too. Air fares, for example, fell by 3.3 per cent last month compared with a jump of nearly 28 per cent in April 2025. The reason: last year’s data was collected in the run-up to Easter while this year’s ‘index day’ happened after Easter, meaning no flights ‘departed in the holiday period’.
