The material pick-up in inflation predicted in Fathom’s last UK Update duly took place in November, with headline CPI rising 0.3 percentage points and core 0.2 percentage points — slightly short of our forecast. We expect that underlying inflation will rise steadily through the first half of the year, as private-sector wage inflation continues to feed through more strongly to consumer price inflation than in the pre-pandemic period. With growth figures likely to continue to disappoint, there will be difficult