UK car tax error overstated inflation by 10 basis points, ONS says
LONDON (Reuters) -An error in car tax data provided by the British government caused the consumer price inflation rate to be overstated by 0.1 percentage points for the year to April, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.
The retail price index, which is used to set payments on index-linked gilts, was also overstated by 10 basis points, as was the CPIH rate that includes home ownership costs, it said.
The ONS said the statistics would not be amended, but it was reviewing its quality assurance processes for external data in light of the issue.
The British statistical agency was already facing criticism over its unreliable labour market figures, and the government in April launched an investigation into the effectiveness of the official economic data it publishes.
According to data published last month, consumer price inflation rose by 3.5% in the 12 months to April, up from 2.6% in the 12 months to March.
The ONS said the incorrect data overstated the number of vehicles subject to Vehicle Excise Duty rates in the first year of registration.
It said it would be using the correctly weighted data from May figures onwards, meaning no further statistics would be affected.
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But a 'cycle of violence' is a very common way that violence escalates: One side attacks, the other side retaliates, prompting another attack, and on up the chain. Once they start, such cycles can be difficult to prevent from spiraling out of control. Escalation pathway three: the Iraq analogy, or things fall apart I want to be clear that escalation here isn't a given. It is possible that the US and its Israeli partners remain satisfied with one American bombing run, and that the Iranians are too scared or weak to engage in any major response. But those are a whole lot of 'ifs.' And we have no way of knowing, at present, whether we're heading to a best- or worst-case scenario (or one of several possibilities in the middle). Key decision points, like whether Trump orders another round of US raids on Fordow or Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, will determine which pathways we go down — and it's hard to know which choices the key actors in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem will make. I keep thinking about the 2003 Iraq war in part for obvious reasons: the US attacking a Middle Eastern dictatorship based on flimsy intelligence claims about weapons of mass destruction. But the other parallel, perhaps a deeper one, is that the architects of the Iraq War had little-to-no understanding of the second-order consequences of their choices. There was so much they didn't know, both about Iraq as a country and the likely consequences of regime change more broadly, that they failed to grasp just how much of a quagmire the war might become until it had already sucked in the United States. It's over 20 years later, and boots are still on the ground — drawn in by events, like the creation of ISIS, that were direct results of the initial decision to invade. Attacking Iran, even with the more 'modest' aim of destroying its nuclear program, carries similar risks. The attack carries so many potential consequences, involving so many different countries and constituencies, that it's hard to even begin to try to account for all the potential risks that might cause further US escalation. There are likely consequences taking shape, at this moment, that we can't even begin to conceive of. The nature of the Trump administration gives me little hope that they've properly gamed this out. The president himself is a compulsive liar and foreign policy ignoramus. The secretary of defense has run his department into the ground. The secretary of state, who is also the national security adviser, has more jobs than anyone could reasonably be expected to perform competently at once. It is, in short, far less competent on paper than the Bush administration was prior to the Iraq invasion — and look how that went. It's possible, despite all of this, that the Trump administration has adequately gamed out their choices here — preparing for all reasonably foreseeable contingencies and capable of acting swiftly in the (inevitable) event that some response catches the world by surprise. But if it didn't, then things could go badly and tragically wrong.
