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Coffee pods and leggings added to inflation ‘shopping basket’

Joanna Faith
Written By:
Joanna Faith
Posted:
Updated:
15/03/2016

Night club entry fees and CD Roms are out of the official list of products used to measure consumer price inflation (CPI), while coffee pods and leggings are in.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) uses a basket of goods and services to calculate CPI and reviews the basket annually.

This year it has removed night club entry fees because the number of night clubs in Britain has declined, with many high profile closures, and many have removed entry charges.

Phil Gooding, a CPI statistician at the ONS, said: “With the number of night clubs charging entry declining, we can no longer justify keeping these fees in the basket.”

CD Roms and rewritable DVDs have also both been removed, reflecting the change in the computer market away from physical media and towards downloadable files. Computer software, such as for word processing, antivirus or web design, and downloaded computer games have been added to the basket.

Additions include Nespresso-style coffee pods, leggings, pouches of microwavable rice and cream liqueur such as Baileys.

The new basket features 704 items, of which 15 are new this year, with 14 other items being removed and 13 being modified.

Consumer price inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise or fall.