Money broker Tullett Prebon has created an index of price inflation in "essentials" in Britain, which it's calling (unsurprisingly) the Tullett Prebon UK Essentials Index [2]. It defines "essential" goods as:

• Food, alcohol and tobacco
• Council tax, water charges and home insurance
• The costs of domestic heating and power, principally gas and electricity
• Fuel, road tax and vehicle insurance
• Train, bus and other public transport fares

(Yes, alcohol and tobacco are essentials.) Between them, those components make up 40 per cent of the RPI, with the other sixty per cent being non-essentials.

Defining the difference lets us take a look at how bad inflation is hitting just the act of day-to-day living. Tullett Prebon estimates inflation in essentials was 3.7 per cent over 2012, well above the CPI, which increased by 2.8 per cent. And, since wages have been rising below even CPI, the price of essentials has soared in comparison to income:

Between 2007 and 2012, nominal incomes expanded by 10% whilst the cost of essentials soared by more than 33%, meaning that the average working person would have been 17% worse off if he or she had spent the whole of their income on essentials.

Of course, few people do spend their entire income on essentials. However, with real incomes under pressure, and with the prices of essentials now increasing at annual rates of close to 4%, the proportion of household incomes going into essentials is clearly rising, and is set to continue to do so.

As the chart below makes clear, this is entirely a post-recession phenomenon:

It's been known that inflation is worse for the worse off [3] for quite some time now, but it's largely been a fact bandied around by the far left. The Communist Party of Britain [4] — that's the one which publishes the Morning Star — produced a Working Class Price Index in 2010, which made much the same point. That pegged inflation for the working class (which included a broad mixture of non-essentials as well) at over 10 per cent for some years.

This isn't quite the same point as the one made by those at the intersection of compassionate conservatism and inflation hawkishness, which is that high inflation disproportionately hits the poor. That may or may not be true — I'm inclined to think it does, but not as much as high unemployment and low growth does, and insofar as inflation hawks call for that trade-off they're being disingenuous — but what is true is that whatever the headline rate of inflation is, if you're poor, life is getting more expensive much faster than that indicates.

One final point (I think made originally by Left Outside [5]) is that a closer look at the categories which count as essentials reveals a far greater extent of government control over prices than is normal. Council tax, road tax and almost all public transport fares are set (in aggregate) by the government; a massive proportion of the cost of alcohol, tobacco, fuel and heating and power is similarly driven by taxation.

As a result, standard understanding of inflation goes out the window. There is no intrinsic link between monetary policy and the rate of inflation for "essentials", because the prices aren't set by the market. It's a rare situation where the government could have its cake and eat it; it could implement expansionary monetary policy to boost demand, while at the same time capping, temporarily, rises in those direct regressive taxes and fares to below inflation.

But for that to happen, there first needs to be wider understanding of the problem. That's why the essentials index is an important piece of research, and worth keeping an eye on.

Updated to replace the giant picture of some rice with the chart which was actually supposed to be there.