A Downbeat survey of UK high street conditions yesterday from the Confederation of British Industry made last week�s news of a 3.5% month-on-month rise in official retail sales in May look even more strange.

A Downbeat survey of UK high street conditions yesterday from the Confederation of British Industry made last week's news of a 3.5% month-on-month rise in official retail sales in May look even more strange.

Thirty-nine per cent of retailers surveyed by the CBI said sales volumes in the early part of this month were lower than in the same period last year, with only 30% saying they were higher and the remainder finding them unchanged.

Particular weakness was recorded in the clothing sector, which the CBI said had suffered the biggest year-on-year drop in sales since the employers' organisation began its distributive trades survey in 1984.

And retailers do not see shoppers flocking to the July sales, with a net 7% expecting a year-on-year drop in volumes next month.

The CBI said the balance of 9% reporting a year-on-year fall in sales volumes between May 29 and June 11 "equates to annual volume growth of just over 2% on the ONS (Office for National Statistics) measure".

According to the ONS, the seasonally-adjusted, month-on-month leap in retail sales volumes in May left them 8.1% higher than in the same month last year.

Economists yesterday homed in on the yawning gap between the CBI survey and the official retail sales figures, even though the former showed a slight improvement this month from the respective 14% and 26% balances reporting a year-on-year fall in May and April.

Vicky Redwood, UK economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said: "Even after June's modest improvement, the weakness of the CBI's...survey is still massively at odds with the strength of the official sales data."

Contrasting the 2% year-on-year growth on the ONS measure signalled by the CBI with the 8.1% out-turn for May in the official numbers, Redwood added: "The gap between the two...remains absolutely huge."

She says the sectoral breakdown in the CBI survey "sits far more comfortably with anecdotal evidence" than that in the ONS data, noting the former shows weakness in household goods. The ONS data showed a 9.1% year-on-year leap in household goods sales in May.

Redwood said: "As always, the CBI survey needs to be read with care. The survey covered barely a third of the month...Nonetheless, given the pressures on consumers' finances, we still suspect that the survey is giving the more accurate picture of the state of high street demand. We therefore continue to think that the official sales data will soon weaken sharply.

"To close the gap with the CBI survey entirely, retail sales would need to fall by around 5% month-on-month in June. Such a big fall in a single month is perhaps unlikely but, at the very least, we expect May's sharp 3.5% increase to be more or less fully reversed."