A new approach to the analysis of diffractive deep inelastic data is presented. We show that the collinear factorisation theorem, which holds for diffractive DIS, has important modifications in the sub‐asymptotic HERA regime, which can be quantified by using perturbative QCD. In fact the diffractive parton densities are shown to satisfy an inhomogeneous evolution equation. Moreover it is necessary to include both the gluonic and sea‐quark t‐channel components of the perturbative Pomeron.