A wave of aggressive discounts to tempt consumers to carry on spending despite the recession delivered a surprise fillip to the high street last month, official figures revealed yesterday.

Stores and shopping centres across the country, as well as online retailers, confounded predictions that sales would slump as the economic downturn and a rising toll of job losses sent anxious Britons into headlong retreat from the shops.

The quantity of goods sold by retailers last month dipped by only 0.1 per cent, after a 0.5 per cent drop in September. That left sales still 1.9 per cent higher than the level a year ago, the Office for National Statistics reported.

In the three months to the end of October, the volume of goods sold was also unchanged from the previous three-month period.

The figures suggested that promotions and big discounts from some retailers were succeeding in luring shoppers into their stores. Sharp discounts offered by online retailers and mail-order operators fighting for custom in the crucial run-up to Christmas helped to raise their sales by 0.9 per cent.

Overall trading last month was buoyed by a jump in food sales as people opted to eat at home more, rather than go out to restaurants.

“The UK consumer continues to show an unexpected, and surprising, degree of resilience,” said Geoffrey Dicks, of Royal Bank of Scotland.

The amount of cash spent at the nation’s tills last month was up by 4.2 per cent on September. That increase almost matched the average surge in spending of 4.8 per cent seen during recent years in the build-up to Christmas between those two months, Mr Dicks noted.

Overall prices across all retailers fell by 0.8 per cent last month, with prices charged by online retailers tumbling by 1.2 per cent.

Experts predicted that Christmas shoppers would continue to enjoy a bonanza of bargains and discounts as retailers resorted to even steeper price cuts.

“We suspect many retailers will increasingly feel the need to engage in discounting, special promotions and flash sales in the run-up to Christmas to try to get hard-pressed consumers to spend,” Howard Archer, of IHS Global Insight, a consultancy, said.

Stephen Robertson, the director-general of the British Retail Consortium, said that although conditions on the high street were making things hard for retailers, more price cuts made it “a great time \ to pick up a bargain for Christmas”. Not all retail sectors succeeded in staving off a slide in sales in the face of mounting economic woes, however, and there were warnings from some economists that the benign picture shown by the official figures could well prove misleading.

The stores groups most exposed to the impact of the downturn, notably household goods outlets, which are suffering because of the house price slump, were hit hard.

Sales of items such as fridges, washing machines and furniture fell by 3.4 per cent last month.

Clothing retailers also struggled, with their sales down 1.5 per cent. At department stores, the amount of goods sold was down by 1 per cent.

The apparent conflict between yesterday’s data and rival industry figures fuelled further controversy over the reliability of the official numbers.