Transforming the ONS’s household financial statistics

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) ran a consultation on the Household Financial Statistics Transformation (HFST) project, from 1 December 2022 to 23 February 2023. It was designed to provide us with information on how our statistics on income, expenditure and wealth are currently used, and to capture feedback on a series of proposals for the longer-term future of our statistics. For further details, please see our consultation document.  

We would like to thank all respondents for their valuable feedback, which will continue to guide our work in this area. We will keep users informed of our plans for this work as it develops into the future. 

The engagement exercise received 49 responses from a range of stakeholders.   

These consisted of:   

• 20 responses from the government sector, including local government and public bodies  

• 1 response from the business sector  

• 4 responses from think tanks  

• 3 responses from the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector  

• 12 responses from the academia and research sector  

• 9 responses from other respondents responding in a personal capacity  

Responses were submitted on behalf of individuals and organisations.  

Responses to the consultation highlighted the importance of our regular statistics on wealth, income and expenditure for providing valuable insights into the financial well-being of households.  

The consultation has allowed us to further understand user needs relating to these statistics. It highlighted: 

• the need for ONS to continue to produce its current range of Household Financial Statistics covering income, expenditure and wealth 

• while more frequent insights into financial well-being (the proposed household financial indicators) were seen as valuable, they should be developed alongside existing statistics rather than as a replacement 

• the need for a coherent set of income, expenditure and wealth statistics in order to produce consistent analysis across the topics 

• the issues around the coherence of the statistics, particularly on the topic of income 

• the various use cases for expenditure statistics at different levels of granularity 

• that users of wealth statistics would value an annual publication but recognised the challenges around sample size and valued the detail in our biennial outputs 

• the support for the regular publication of financial well-being statistics, particularly on financial resilience 

 For further details, please see our consultation response document.

In taking forward work in this area, we need to balance and phase the improvements we want to make against the resources we have available. Current work is focused on the following developments. 

• Re-introducing our financial well-being statistics with publications planned on poverty and financial resilience. 

• The introduction of a new digital diary tool for our field force interviewers to help with data collection from those that take part in our Living Costs and Food (LCF) survey. 

• Developing our research plans for income estimates for small areas in line with our vision for the future of population and migration statistics in England and Wales and feedback from users sought through the consultation that launched on 29 June 2023. 

• Potentially making our surveys shorter and simpler to reduce respondent burden, at a time when the survey industry faces difficulties engaging respondents.  

Since publishing the consultation, we’ve also further explored some of our proposals, including research and testing of changes to some of our household financial surveys. These include:  

• research into the collection of wealth data on our LCF survey 

• exploration of methods of collection such as the digital diary for the collection of expenditure 

• analysis of alternative data options 

More significant change which we had previously planned as part of the HFST project will require further investment. Responses to the consultation will provide a valuable part of the evidence base for securing funding for this work in the future. 

We would like to thank all respondents for their valuable feedback, which will continue to guide our work in this area. We will keep users informed of our plans for this work as it develops into the future.