It’s the January sales and, once again, Britain’s supermarkets are offering some spiffing deals. Tesco sent out a press release not once but twice, boasting of the £280m in savings it was offering on 12,000 popular grocery items on top of £170m of savings in the Tesco seasonal sale the week before. Naturally, the Tesco share price didn’t even murmur.

Asda was also trumpeting its seasonal rollbacks, totalling £170m, it claimed, with 3,600 essentials rolled back in price by 13% on average. And while Sainsbury’s declined to put a price on the total savings from its own sale, it reduced the price of “over 3,600 products”.

The claims will be familiar to anyone who works in the industry, arriving with the same seasonal retail regularity as Valentine’s Day, Easter, British Food Fortnight and, of course, the ultimate set piece that is Christmas.

But this year the claims carry an added élan, because they coincided with the hike in VAT. In the past week alone (the supermarkets didn’t tell us), 12,500 VAT-able items increased in price across these three retailers. And they will be even less keen to divulge the fact that 4,500 of these items increased over and above the 2.2% increase the revised 17.5% rate entails.

In fact, far from fessing up, the supermarkets have been bragging how they are absorbing the extra costs associated with VAT. “Britain’s favourite retailer freezes VAT at the lower rate of 15% on thousands of products,” said Tesco in another press release. “Customers shouldn’t expect to see dramatic changes at Asda on 1 January. In fact, more than half of VAT-able items we sell won’t move in price.”

And Sainsbury’s was promising “hundreds” of products currently on promotion would be exempt from price increases as a result of the 2.5% VAT increase… [as well as] an extensive range of non-food goods.” A case, then, of lies, damned lies, and VAT-related statistics.

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