The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is planning to collect data directly from supermarket scanners to feed into its statistics on grocery prices.
The move is aimed at improving the quality of the ONS consumer price statistics and how it measures inflation.
A spokesperson told UKAuthority that ONS has data sharing agreements with supermarket chains, most of which prefer to remain unnamed, covering half of the grocery market. The only chain that is willing to have its agreement in the public domain is the Co-op.
Its deputy director, prices transformation division, Mike Hardie, said the process will begin in March of next year and cover approximately 300 million price points from sales of over a billion units of products per month.
This will apply to 50% of the grocery market and replace the existing ONS approach of sending people into shops to collect 25,000 prices per month.
Improving coverage
Hardie said the main benefits of the change will be to improve coverage of price changes, recording a wider range of products and having access to prices across the month; and in providing data on the quantities of specific goods being sold.
“It is important to emphasise that, while this new system will tell us what shops are selling, it won’t tell us anything that identifies individual consumers or their shopping habits,” he added.
ONS measures records the prices of a ‘shopping basket’ of 750 products to produce its measures of inflation.
