Mr. Ted Fletcherasked the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in view of the fact that the present method of presenting statistical information on incomes and prices as average is misleading and unrepresentative of the majority of family budgets and incomes, if she will consider presenting this information in a more sectionalised form.
§ Mr. HattersleyI cannot accept that the published official statistical information on incomes and prices is either misleading or unrepresentative. From the Family Expenditure Survey separate196W results are published for many categories of households analysed by their income. The general Retail Price Index is based on the expenditure patterns of types of households which include practically all wage earners and most small and medium salary earners. Two new indices of retail prices for pensioner households have just been published. Information is being published increasingly showing variations about the averages; for example for retail prices of food and earnings. The recent new survey of earnings has provided an enormous amount of such information, showing the variation of earnings about the average for groups analysed by occupation, industry, age, sex, region and wage agreement.