Consumer Price Inflation Data and Education

Today the Office of national statistics released a data set describing cost of living information along with a number of other key economic statistics. If you are interested in the ONS spreadsheet itself you can find it here.

If you go to Table 23 there is Consumer Price Index data from 2004 to 2017. This roughly covers the time I have been in the UK.

What I had not appreciated was the enormous inflation in education. Here is a graph.

This indicates that education costs have increase by nearly a factor of 3 over a 13 year period. This is as troubling as it is unsustainable. Nothing else comes close. Overall inflation was about 32% but for education it was about 269%. 

It can be argued that some of this is due to the government moving education costs from taxes to consumers, but this is not sufficient. Everyone would have expected a step when top up fees were introduced and another when the new fee regime came into force. This is very different.