Duty changes announced in British Finance Minister Gordon Brown's budget this week will have a negligible effect on annual consumer price inflation, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday.
The ONS said the measures announced in Wednesday's budget would add 0.19 percentage points to the monthly change in consumer prices if the duty changes were passed on immediately and in full to consumers, the same as duty increases in 2006-2007.
It said the effects of the budget measures would feed into the CPI over several months and the impact on the annual rate of RPI inflation would also be negligible. (Reuters)