Cost of basic items in UK supermarkets has rise by 8% over past year

Price rises: the ONS has found that the cost of basic items has risen on average 8% over the past year
Chris Radburn/PA
Gareth Vipers2 September 2015

The cost of everyday items in supermarkets has risen eight per cent over the past year, according to the latest figures.

A cross-section of basic food and drink item, including milk, potatoes and tea bags, were compared in the report conducted on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Other goods were found to have risen even faster in price, with a kilogram of cheddar cheese going up by 15 per cent and a 500g packet of spaghetti by 19 per cent.

The figures cover the period June 2014 to June 2015, and have been released as part of an ongoing project by the ONS to find new ways of monitoring the cost of items in the "basket of goods" - the list of products used to calculate inflation.

The new data has been compiled using a process called "web scraping".

A computer programme scanned the websites of Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose every day at 5am, recording the prices for each of the 35 items in the ONS inflation basket.

Around 6,500 prices were collected each day, which adds up to roughly 200,000 a month, a much larger number than that gathered by the traditional approach used for calculating the consumer price index (CPI) rate of inflation.

The new figures suggest recent supermarket "price wars" may not have had a consistent impact across the country.

The ONS has linked falls in food and non-alcoholic drink prices to current low levels of inflation, including a CPI rate of 0.1 per cent in July

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