Business
The CSPI Business-to-business
service prices
The Corporate Services Price Index is a quarterly
survey of prices charged for services provided by
UK businesses to other UK businesses and government.
The CSPI is conducted by the
Office for National Statistics and provides a key
measure of inflation, alongside other indicators such
as the Retail Price Index (RPI) and the Producer Price
Index (PPI).
The CSPI is part of an ongoing
commitment to improve the scope and quality of statistics
for service industries, the fastest growing sector
of the UK economy. It also meets the growing demand,
from both within and outside government, for this
type of information.
Price indices for business activities
from across the service sector, such as freight transport,
telecommunications, property rentals and accountancy
are covered. Indices for areas such as computer services,
legal services and banking are currently under development
and will be introduced progressively over the next
2 years.
Movements in price are weighted
to reflect the relative importance of transactions
in a given year (the “base year”, which
is currently 1995) and are then aggregated for each
of the individual industries within the corporate
services sector. The resulting indices show overall
price movements, relative to the base year. The top-level
CSPI is derived by weighting together the price indices
for each industry to estimate price movements in the
corporate services sector as a whole.
All available industry-level
indices (currently 31 in total) plus the top-level
CSPI are released quarterly via the National Statistics
website. The results are also summarised in the National
Statistics publication Economic Trends.
Main customers include the Treasury
and the Bank of England who use the information in
their assessments of the UK economy. Within the Office
for National Statistics, industry-level CSPIs are
used to take account of inflation in the calculation
of UK industrial output. The indices are a useful
information tool for UK businesses, and also for purposes
such as the calculation of price variation clauses
in commercial contracts.
