The coalition government started using the CPI as its escalator for social benefits to reduce its expenditures, not because it is a good cost-of-living index. The RPIJ is a far better measure for that purpose but the ONS stopped calculating it last month. Fortunatey, it can still be estimated, and the RPIJ inflation rate would appear to have been 2.4% in March, unchanged from February, in both months 0.1 percentage points higher than the CPI inflation rate.