UK retail sales in December were the weakest in a decade, barely rising from a year before. So said the industry’s lobby group, the British Retail Consortium.
Statisticians at the Office for National Statistics said they were up 2.7% over the same period. The discrepancy highlights the difficulty in trying to track retail sales in an industry that remains highly fragmented in some quarters, and where more trade is moving online.
Retail sales are a vital indicator in an economy such as the UK where consumer spending plays an outsized role.
