Reuters with the statement from the UK's stats agency
CPIH is a measure they've been running alongside the main inflation numbers and it includes housing costs. It was brought in back in March and was designed to replace the CPI number as the best gauge of inflation. It's currently running at 1.2% y/y.
Starting this March
"CPIH is a measure of UK consumer price inflation that includes owner occupiers' housing costs (OOH). These are the costs of housing services associated with owning, maintaining and living in one's own home. OOH does not include costs such as utility bills, minor repairs and maintenance, which are already included in the index.
CPIH uses an approach called rental equivalence to measure OOH. Rental equivalence uses the rent paid for an equivalent house as a proxy for the costs faced by an owner occupier. In other words, this answers the question "how much would I have to pay in rent to live in a home like mine?" for an owner occupier. OOH does not seek to capture increases in house prices. Although this may be inconsistent with some users' expectations of measures of OOH, the inclusion of an asset price and therefore capital gains would make the index less suitable as a measure of consumption. OOH currently accounts for 16.5% of the expenditure weight of CPIH. This compares with a weight of 19.5% in 2005."
