UK consumer price growth unexpectedly accelerated in June

According to the report from Office for National Statistics, the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH) 12-month inflation rate was 0.8% in June 2020, up from 0.7% in May 2020.

The largest contribution to the CPIH 12-month inflation rate in June 2020 came from recreation and culture (0.32 percentage points).

Rising prices for games and clothing resulted in the largest upward contributions to the change in the CPIH 12-month inflation rate between May and June 2020.

Falling prices for food resulted in a partially offsetting downward contribution to the change.

As a result of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we identified 67 CPIH items that were unavailable to UK consumers in June, as detailed in Table 58 of the Consumer price inflation dataset; these account for 13.5% of the CPIH basket by weight and made a downward contribution of 0.02 percentage points to the change in the CPIH 12-month rate; the number of unavailable items is down from 74 in May and 90 in April; for June, we have collected a weighted total of 84.0% (excluding unavailable items) of the number of price quotes collected for February (the most recent "normal" collection).

The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) 12-month rate was 0.6% in June 2020, up from 0.5% in May.