Using consumer price index inflation measure is nothing but a scam | Letters

Your piece on the alleged fall of the inflation rate to 0.3% (Report, 18 February) fails to mention that CPI is the government's claimed measure of inflation, but that RPI is at 1.1%, still not high, but a good bit higher. The government seems to have ground down the journalist profession on this scam and CPI now seems to be the press's preferred form of inflation too. Despite the recent report by Paul Johnson of the IFS favouring CPI (well CPIH but let's not go into that), most statisticians in the Royal Statistical Society still say that RPI is a good deal nearer real inflation than CPI and they have written to the UK Statistics Authority, which commissioned Johnson, to say so. This deception adversely affects most pensions and welfare payments, and it is today's young who will suffer most (as usual) since the effects get cumulatively worse the longer it goes on. It also, of course, allows the government to overstate the real rate of growth.
David Quinn
London

" Charles Foster (Letters, 19 February) claims that a quarter of all tax income is paid by a "tiny percentage" of very rich people. He doesn't quantify the percentage, but let's assume he's talking about the "one per cent". If so, then his figures are tiresomely wrong. It is true that the super-rich are now paid so much more than the rest of us, that they pay about a third of all income tax. But income tax makes up only a third of the overall tax base, meaning that their contribution from income is just over 10% of the pot. Other taxes are fairly equally spread across the whole population. In fact, as you reported six months ago: "The poorest 10% of households pay eight percentage points more of their income in all taxes than the richest - 43% compared to 35%, according to a report from the Equality Trust."
David Williams
York