Falling food and drink prices reduce inflation rate
A 1.4% fall in the prices of food and non-alcohol drinks between February and March helped to reduce the overall CPI annual inflation figure from 4.4% in February to 4.0% in March.
The fall in food and non-alcoholic drinks prices was a record fall for the February to March period and compares to a 0.3% increase between the same two months a year ago.
The downward effects were widespread and reflected supermarket led sales. The most notable contributions came from fruit where prices fell by 4.7% and bread and cereals where prices fell by 2.6%.
There were also large downward pressures from recreation and culture products, principally from games, toys and hobbies (particularly computer games), recording media and data processing equipment.
As an internationally comparable measure of inflation, the CPI shows that the UK inflation rate in February was above the provisional figure for the European Union. The UK rate was 4.4% whereas the EU’s as a whole was 2.8%.
