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Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shops, the Spectators Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Max Jeffrey and I'm joined today by Katie Bulls and Kate Andrews.

Inflation has slowed to 3.4% we learned this morning, which is the lowest level in two and a half years.

Kate, can you start by giving us the details on today's announcement?

Sure, Max, it's good news from the Office for National Statistics this morning that, as you say,

inflation slowed to 3.4% in the 12 months leading up to February.

That's down from 4% in January.

Everything's going in the right direction.

The data is looking good and it is on track to get us back to target inflation at 2% by the

spring. April's month that we're really going to be looking at, I mean it's great

that we're seeing these updates now but in April off-gen's new energy

price cap comes in as some of the higher energy costs fall out of the data and that's

when you're expecting to see that fall back to 2%. I mean there's some independent

economists and forecasters who think it's going to fall below 2%, that it could be closer to 1.5%.

It should be said that it is then expected towards the latter half of the year that inflation ticks up again,

but nothing like what we've seen before.

We're not going to be talking about double digits again.

It might go back up to 2.5 percent, something like that.

...