Sunny weather and the Women’s Euro football tournament helped to lift retail sales in July, according to the latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics.

Retail sales volumes rose by 0.6% in July, which was more than analysts had been expecting, with clothing and footwear stores, as well as online retailers, seeing strong sales growth during the month.

However, while sales volumes in July rose, sales in the three months to July were down 0.6% compared with the previous three months.

“Supermarkets, sports shops and household goods stores had a strong start to the year, but spending there has fallen since March,” commented James Benford, Director General of Economic Statistics at the ONS.

Back-to-school shopping provided a boost to retail sales, with research from fulfilmentcrowd revealing searches for school-related purchases peaked in late July.

With this summer confirmed as the hottest on record, year-on-year garden category sales saw a significant increase, according to new data from NIQ.

“The weather so far this year has been extraordinary,” Anthony Creaby, customer success manager at NIQ, commented. “For a number of categories this has provided the boost they very much needed.”

The release of the ONS figures had been delayed by two weeks over concerns about the quality of the statistics with the official statistics institute admitting it had made errors in how its survey data matched up to calendar months.

Commenting on the postponement and correction, Benford said: “Our annual review of how we adjust for seasonality found that we had not adjusted figures correctly. This resulted in our previous figures overstating the monthly volatility in retail sales in the first half of the year.”