Provision of Annual Household Expenditure Data by Products and Source - AWARD

Duration of Contract 2 years with option to extend for one year. Maximum total budget for this contract is £123000 which includes the option to extend for one year.

Prices Division is responsible for the production and quality assurance of two of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) most high profile statistics, the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs (CPIH), and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). The consumer price indices are used widely by, among others, Her Majesty's Treasury for monitoring financial policy, the Department of Work and Pensions for setting social security benefits, the Bank of England for monetary policy decisions, financial institutions for analysis, Trade Unions for wage bargaining and the wider public for a 'sense' of inflation.

The consumer price indices are produced monthly and are never revised, and errors or inaccuracies in the figures or underlying data would be seriously detrimental to the reputation of the ONS. In order to compile the consumer price indices, information is required on the annual expenditure on different groups of products at multiple and independent stores.

This enables the ONS to give each type of shop and product its correct weight or market share in the list of goods and services used to produce the indices. Much of the information is sourced from internal ONS surveys but some additional detailed expenditure information is needed.

The consumer price indices are compiled by weighting together product or item level price data in a way that reflects UK consumer spending patterns. In order to achieve this, detailed consumer spending figures are required at a suitably disaggregated level for lower-level item weights to be constructed without the need for arbitrary decisions.

A list of the items currently used in the CPI and CPIH is attached as Annex A but this is updated annually so the data supply will need to include information on a wider range of goods and services within each product area. A list of the areas against which more detailed information is required is attached as Annex B.

These are the COICOP (Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose) headings on which the CPI is based. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nomenclatures/index.cf... Certain shops in the consumer price indices are treated separately to reflect their more dominant market share. Data are required on the market share of a range of shops for different groups of products leading to more accurate 'shop weight' information.

In order to compile some of the item indices, information is required on suppliers by types of products to ensure that the relative importance of each supplier is correctly assigned. In this context, suppliers include, type of shop ...