| Time | Items | Speakers |
| 2.30 pm | Welcome – Introduction | Tony Dent, Better Statistics |
| 2.35 pm | Keynote 1: How inflation changes behaviour
– people, business and Government. |
Frances Coppola, Financial Economist and
Author |
| 2.50 pm | Topic 1 – What is the outlook for Inflation?
How good are our forecasts? What goes up must come down? |
Session Chair: Tony Dent
Steve Farrington, Chief of Staff, Office of Budget Responsibility. Kay Neufeld, Head of Forecasting, Centre for Economics and Business Research |
| 3.20 pm | Topic 2 – Is the cure worse than the disease?
The May Monetary Policy Report. Micro business – Post Pandemic Productivity |
Session Chair: Vicky Pryce
Nick Bate, Economist, MPC of the Bank of England Ian Cass, Managing Director, Forum of Private Business. |
| 3.50 pm |
Keynote 2: Misjudged metrics? A perspective on inflation from the frontline. |
Session Chair: Tony Cox
Morgan Wild – Head of Policy, Citizens Advice |
| 4.05pm | Followed by – The Big Debate
Choose between CPI / RPI / CPIH or one of the HCI’s? |
Debaters include:
Matt Corder – Deputy Director, Prices, Office for National Statistics Jill Leyland – Royal Statistical Society Geoff Tily – Trades Union Congress |
| 4.45 pm | Closing Keynote: The Politics of Inflation | Professor Sir John Curtice – psephologistSEE SLIDES |
| 5.00 pm | Meeting closes | |
To register to attend, in person or by teams, visit www.betterstats.net/inflation-sem-form-23
Meet the speakers:
Tony Dent is chairman of CMR Group and past Chairman of both Sample Answers Ltd and the Alliance of International Market Research Institutes. The latter has now been submerged within the Insights Association. He is a statistician with over 40 years of International Market Research experience and has acted as a consultant to a number of companies, including the Civil Aviation Authority, DHL, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Radio Free Europe, and the Xerox Corporation. Tony holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics and Statistics from Reading and Southampton.
Frances Coppola spent 17 years working for banks, where much of her work was concerned with settlement, accounting and risk management systems. She left banking in 2002 to concentrate on her singing career, but after the financial crisis returned to write about the banks that had so nearly blown up the world. For over a decade now she has been writing about banking, finance and economics. Her work has featured in a wide range of media and industry publications including Forbes, the Financial Times, American Express, The Independent, Open Democracy, CapX, MarketWatch and CoinDesk. Frances is a frequent commentator on financial and economic matters for the BBC, and is in demand as a speaker and moderator at economics and finance conferences. Her blog Coppola Comment is widely read in the finance & economics community.
Steve Farrington has been Chief of Staff at the OBR since 2018, where he is responsible for leading the OBR’s 45 permanent members of staff. Prior to that he spent over 15 years at HMT Treasury where he was Deputy Director of Economics and oversaw HMT’s economic analysis teams, including the published assessments of the economic impact of Scottish independence and Brexit. From 2016 to 2018 he was also a member of Stakeholder Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices.
Kay Neufeld leads Cebr’s Forecasting and Thought Leadership team and is responsible for all UK forecasting activities as well as the delivery of the Prospects Service reports at Cebr. Kayprovides regular commentary on current economic events in the UK, the US, China and the eurozone. He is an experienced consultant and has advised clients across a variety of sectors including retail, trade and financial services. He has led innovative research projects for clients including American Express, Legal & General, Brewin Dolphin, Principal Financial Group and the Federation of Small Businesses. He is regularly featured in the national and international media and speaks at conferences around the UK.
Kay joined Cebr as an economist in 2015 after completing his MSc in Economics for Policy at University College London. Prior to that, Kay worked for a management consulting firm in Berlin and in the private sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC.
Vicky Pryce is Chief Economic Adviser and a board member at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Vicky has held senior positions in business and the Civil service including as partner and chief economist at KPMG and joint head of the UK government economic service.
Nick Bate is a Senior Manager in the Current Economic Conditions Division at the Bank of England. He has also worked as an economist at HM Treasury and in the City
Ian Cass originally joined the Forum of Private Business in 2013 and took the reins as Managing Director three years later in Summer 2015. Ian worked for Diageo for 14 years before forming the Venture team, he also runs Jack in the box Training, owned a couple of pubs, Founded Hunters gin and has been a business angel and investor for a variety of small businesses.
Tony Cox is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and chairman of the RPI / CPI user group within the Statistics User Forum on Stats User Net.
Morgan Wild is Head of Policy at Citizens Advice, where he works with advisers and researchers every day to understand the underlying causes and (hopefully) help fix them. Before joining Citizens Advice, he worked as a social research consultant at the Office for Public Management on a range of public and private sector projects. He holds an MA in Political Economy from King’s College London and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
Matt Corder is Deputy Director of Prices at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). He joined ONS in 2022 on secondment from the Bank of England. In his 20 years at the Bank, Matt has held various roles including Policy Adviser to two external MPC members, senior economist responsible for the Bank’s short-term inflation and labour market forecasts and, most recently, Private Secretary to the Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy.
Jill Leyland represents the Royal Statistical Society on the National Statistician’s “Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices – Stakeholder” and she has been an Expert Witness on inflation measurement. She was a Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society from 2009 to 2012 and is a Fellow of the Society of Professional Economists. In the past she worked for the World Gold Council, the OECD, the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Government Statistical Service
Geoff Tily has been senior economist at the TUC since 2014. Before that he was 25 years in the government statistical and economic services, mainly at the Office for National Statistics but also at HM Treasury. His parallel academic activities include a book (2006) Keynes’s General Theory, the Rate of Interest and ‘Keynesian Economics’: Keynes Betrayedand ongoing contributions to the macro policy debate.
Professor Sir John Curtice is a Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research; he is also chief commentator on What UK Thinks.
Image source: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/sites/default/public-files/styles/panel_image_1_2_768px_/public/general-images/ultimate-seminar.jpg?itok=U-VvEE-f