U.K. Historical Price Converter Added

This month as a service for our friends in the U.K. we have added a U.K. Historical Price Converter. This handy little calculator will tell you the equivalent value of any prices from 1751 to the present.

It is based on the “Retail Prices Index” which was instituted in Great Britain in 1947 in an effort to determine how much the war was affecting prices. The data was later “backdated” to include prices back to 1751 by Jim O’Donoghue, Louise Goulding, and Grahame Allen in a paper entitled ‘Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750’.

In it they state that, their article presents:
“a composite price index covering the period since 1750 which can be used for analysis of consumer price inflation, or the purchasing power of the pound, over long periods of time.”

The Data  is a Composite of Several Data Series

They created this composite price index by linking together data from a variety of different sources. For the period of 1947 to the current day they chose the retail prices index (RPI).

1870-1947

Prior to 1947 since there was no national index they used data prepared by the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University (Feinstein, 1972). This data was compiled from the unofficial national accounts of the United Kingdom and is called “the implied deflator for consumers’ expenditure”.

Margin of Error

Whenever we work with data this old there is always a substantial margin of error and this case is no exception.  For the data from 1914-1938 Feinstein estimates  the margin of error to be less than 5%. But for the data between 1890 and 1913 the margin of error climbs to between +/-5% and 15%. And for the period of 1870 -1889 the margin of error could be as high as 25%.

1850-1870

For  the period between 1850 and 1870, a retail price index constructed from statistics compiled by the  Board of Trade and partly compiled by G H Wood himself. Some of this data is considered “more of an intelligent guess than an authoritative statement of the course of retail prices.”

1750–1850

For the years from 1750 through 1850, there isn’t much data available. But this price index was one compiled by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins. It covers the prices of consumables, prices are generally based on records from a few local markets, the accounts of colleges and hospitals in the South East of England, and from records of the Navy Victualling service.

The Data Results

The data shows that: between 1750 and 2003, prices increased by around 140 times.  Although prices roughly doubled between 1750 and 1800 the majority of the increase in prices resulted after World War II. It is interesting to note that from 1750 and 1938, (slightly less than 200 years) prices slightly more than tripled. But in the 3/4 century since prices have increased more than fifty-fold. At the time this report was originally written (2003) the increase was only forty-fold. At that time the authors noted, “Put another way, the index shows that one decimal penny in 1750 would have had greater purchasing power than one pound in 2003.”

See the U.K. Historical Price Converter . or download the full report ‘Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750’. and International Inflation Data Links

The data for the Retail Prices Index is included in the following table:

See Also:

• U.K. Historical Price Converter
• Misery Index
• Pressures Mount on Bank of England (BOE) to Devalue Pound
• International Inflation Data Links