text: Whoever wrote this story should be ashamed of themselves. The headline inflation measure for the UK Office of National Statistics became the CPIH with this February update, replacing the CPI. This is the first time this has happened since the UK CPI (previously designated the UK Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP)) replaced the Retail Prices Index in December 2003. It should not simply have been ignored. As it happened, the change could not have been more anticlimactic, as the CPI rate of inflation for February 2017 was the same as for the CPIH, but this won’t always the case. It was a terrible decision by the ONS, as argued by Shaun Richards in his blog yesterday, “Headline UK Inflation or CPIH is an example of official ‘Alternative News’”.