FOI reference: FOI-2026-3709
You asked
I am requesting the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
1. Any estimate held by the ONS, published or unpublished, of the proportion of average household expenditure that represents return to capital --- whether as dividends, interest, or a regulated allowed return --- in sectors where a household cannot practically change supplier. By this I mean water and sewerage, energy networks, and comparable regulated services supplied under monopoly conditions.
2. Any analysis held by the ONS that aggregates, across more than one such sector, the total annual amount a median household pays in charges to providers it cannot switch away from.
3. Any briefing, submission, minute or internal assessment dated on or after 1 January 2020 concerning whether a statistic of this kind could or should be produced, including any assessment of feasibility, methodology or data availability, and any decision not to proceed.
4. Any request received on or after 1 January 2020 from a government department, parliamentary committee or regulator asking the ONS for analysis of this kind, and the response given.
If no information is held in relation to any of the above, I would be grateful if you could confirm that separately for each numbered question rather than collectively.
We said
Thank you for your request.
In relation to the first part of your request, we produce estimates of average household weekly expenditure on housing(net), fuel and power, including water and energy as part of our annual Family Spending in the UK official accredited statistics. These data are available across a range of household demographics, and are most recently available for financial year ending 2025.
We also produce estimates of Household expenditure defined as the total money that households spend on goods and services. We publish these estimates as part of our Consumer Trends release including both estimates of nominal data (Current Price) and real term data with the effects of inflation removed (Chained Volume Measures).
Data are included for lower-level commodity splits, so we have expenditure categories for commodities like water, sewerage, and energy. However, the figures purely represent the amount spent by Households for these commodities.
More background detail on these figures can be found in our User guide to consumer trends and our Consumer trends QMI.
We have also provided the associated download dataset which shows household holdings of deposits, debt securities and equity/investment funds shares/units and the corresponding interest and dividend income received, for all sectors. Unfortunately, we do not collect the data at the sector level you have requested. Property income will cover more than just dividends, withdrawals from income of quasi-corporations and interest so this has been included separately. In our UK Economic Accounts publication, tab '6.2.3' provides the full breakdown of data for property income. Similarly, tab '6.2.11' covers the asset holdings of households at a more granular level than provided in the associated download. Please also note that dividends will include those paid in lieu of salary.
In relation to question 2, 3 and 4, the relevant teams have advised that they are not aware of anything held in scope of these questions. However, for us to be absolutely certain that we hold no information in scope, we would have to conduct comprehensive searches of the inboxes of individuals across a number of teams, across more than one division and file location across the organisation, over almost 6 years worth of records. To definitively determine this would exceed the cost limit for FOIA compliance (24 working hours for one person to search for and collate relevant records).