A fall in the price of clothing and fuel in the UK ahead of the coronavirus lockdown helped ease the rate of inflation, new figures show.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) measure slowed from an annual rate of 1.7% in February to 1.5% in March.
The only broad group to make a downward contribution to the CPI including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) inflation rate in March 2020 was clothing and footwear. Prices in the category fell by 1.2% in the year to March 2020, resulting in a downward contribution of 0.06 percentage points.
The contribution from clothing and footwear has varied between positive and negative over the last two years, with the largest downward contribution during this period seen in February 2019.
Prices for the category fell by 0.3% between February and March, compared with a rise of 1% for the same period a year ago.
According to the ONS, prices usually rise between February and March, and this year’s fall is the first since 2015 and only the second since the start of the constructed CPIH series in 1988. The fall in prices reflects an increase in the proportion of items on sale between February and March 2020, compared with a fall between the same two months a year ago. The effect came from a wide range of women’s, men’s and children’s clothing items.
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By GlobalData“Sales patterns this year are likely to have been influenced by the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic,” the ONS explains. “Although prices were collected around 17 March, before the formal government lockdown was introduced on 23 March, consumer behaviours and retailers’ expectations of that behaviour might have changed as a result of social distancing and other precautions.
“A number of factors might have contributed to the change, including less browsing in physical stores, people spending more time at home where they might have been less interested in clothing, and a shift in spending patterns towards other necessities such as food and cleaning products.”
