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 January 2024 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
July’s inflation rise was slightly higher than what most economists had predicted and compares with a rise of 3.6% in the year to June.<\/p>\n
ONS Chief Economist Grant Fitzner said the “hefty” increase of 30.2% in air fares between June and July was the biggest jump for that period since the collection of monthly data began in 2001. <\/p>\n
He said it 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. It was the fourth month in a row in which food and drink inflation had risen, bringing prices to their highest since February 2024. <\/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":79602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-79601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}