From 4% in January to 3.4% in February, inflation was gradually approaching the bank’s 2% target.
The decrease indicates that the rate of increase in the cost of living is the lowest since September 2021, when it was 3.1%.
The rate of change in prices over time, or inflation, has been progressively declining since it reached a 40-year high of 11.1% in October 2022.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) stated that the primary cause of the decline was a slowdown in the inflation of food prices.
Prices are still rising, but they are doing so more slowly than they were before.
The new ONS numbers show that while food, restaurants, and cafés witnessed the largest reduction in price increases, other sectors saw a slowdown as well, including alcohol and tobacco, apparel, and footwear.
On the other hand, the costs of housing, household services, and motor gasoline defied the downward trend and kept rising.
The ONS’s chief economist, Grant Fitzner, stated that the food price inflation rate had decreased “quite a bit” from 6.9% to 5%, which was one of the factors contributing to the larger than anticipated decline in the previous month’s data.
