Sunny weather and the Euro 2025 women’s football tournament helped boost retail sales in July, according to delayed official figures that have been blighted by errors.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) apologised for the mistakes and delay in releasing the retail sales figures for Great Britain, which were published two weeks later than planned.
The UK statistics agency made another error on Friday morning, issuing a link to the wrong blog by a senior executive explaining that the ONS needs to improve its performance.
The ONS said retail sales volumes grew 0.6% month on month in July because of a combination of factors, including good weather and sales of clothing and merchandise related to the Lionesses’ winning run.
The rise in retail sales exceeded the 0.2% expected by economists and followed a revised increase of 0.3% in June.
James Benford, the ONS’s incoming director general for economic social and environmental statistics, said the postponement and correction to its figures highlighted a need to “prioritise and put more resources behind work to improve economic statistics, and to bring more transparency”.
Bedford, who was parachuted into the statistics body in June to lead its turnaround plan, said: “I apologise for the delay to this release, and for the errors in how we have been seasonally adjusting these data.
“Our annual review of how we adjust for seasonality found that we had not adjusted figures correctly. This resulted in our previous figures overstating the monthly volatility in retail sales in the first half of the year.”
Deann Evans, a senior executive at Shopify, said sales of school uniforms rose almost 500% month on month in July in the run-up to the new school year.
The ONS said supermarkets, sports shops and household goods stores had a strong start to the year but that spending had fallen since March. “The new figures published today show a similar overall pattern of three-month on three-month growth, but with less volatile month-on-month changes,” Benford added.
Deep problems at the ONS with the quality of its data has piled pressure on officials in the run-up to the autumn budget, which was this week scheduled for 26 November.
