Prices in the UK rose by 3.8% in the year to July, driven mainly by a jump in the price of air fares coinciding with the school summer holidays.<\/p>\n
That means inflation is at its highest level since last January and still far above the Bank of England’s target of 2%. <\/p>\n
A rise in the cost of eating out, as well as food and non-alcoholic beverages more generally, also helped to push up prices, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).<\/p>\n
The Bank’s latest forecast expects inflation to peak at 4% in September.<\/p>\n
ONS Chief Economist Grant Fitzner said the “hefty” increase in air fares was the biggest jump in July since 2001. He said the rise was “likely due to the timing of this year’s school holidays”.<\/p>\n
This year the collection day for the ONS data overlapped with the start of the school holidays in a way they didn’t last year.<\/p>\n
The cost of food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 4.9% in the year to July, up from 4.5% in the year to June, according to the ONS.<\/p>\n
Coffee, fresh orange juice, meat, and chocolate saw the biggest price rises.<\/p>\n
Reacting to the latest figures Chancellor Rachel Reeves said there was “more to do to ease the cost of living”.<\/p>\n
“We have taken the decisions needed to stabilise the public finances, and we’re a long way from the double-digit inflation we saw under the previous government, but there’s more to do to ease the cost of living,” she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prices in the UK rose by 3.8% in the year to July, driven mainly by a jump in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,164],"class_list":["post-81852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}