British people’s love of gin has seen it become a common feature in our shopping basket, so much so that the official statistics body has begun including the spirit in a typical “basket of a goods” that it uses to calculate inflation.
The Office for National Statistics, which has not included the price of gin in inflation calculations for 13 years, says it is now reintroducing it this year in light of increased expenditure on gin.
Chief Executive of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, Miles Beale, said: “2016 became known as the Year of Gin and we have seen the quintessentially British spirit continue to fly off the supermarket shelves. It comes as no surprise to us that gin has become a regular feature on the UK shopping list and made it into the ONS typical basket. Last year gin sales both home and abroad smashed all records. We broke the £1bn mark for the first time for sales in the UK and sold more British gin overseas than ever before, worth almost half a billion pounds.”