FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4325
You asked
I am looking to get more granular data from the Wealth and Assets Survey.
Is it possible to find out separately the amount of cash that each age bracket has, and the amount of investments people have?
At present in the Wealth by Characteristics section of the survey it is shown just as net financial i.e. including savings, investments net of financial liabilities and is therefore an amalgamated figure.
Is it possible to drill further down into that data and pull out how much cash savings people have dependant on age and how much people have in investments dependant on age separately?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) provides estimates for individual and household wealth (and it's components, property, financial, private pensions and physical) from private households in Great Britain.
This survey collects data to provide estimates for the distribution of net financial wealth which consists of financial assets minus liabilities. Financial assets are made up of informal and formal assets. Informal assets include savings held in cash or loaned to family and friends, while formal assets include assets held in areas such as bank or building society current or saving accounts, investment vehicles such as Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), endowments, stocks and shares.
The financial wealth tables are estimates published as part of the Wealth in Great Britain release, the latest data is from April 2018 to March 2020 and covers household level financial wealth.
Within these tables:
- Table 5.1 shows the distribution of households with formal financial assets with a breakdown of the asset type, eg. ISA, Natonal Savings certificates and bonds.
- Table 5.2 shows the distribution of households with informal financial assets with a breakdown of these assets limited to; saved informally, (saved in cash, given to someone else to look after for you, paid into a savings and loans club) and lent to others informally.
Neither of these tables are produced by age of the household reference person.
We have also published the following information that shows the number of individuals by age band and sex that hold formal financial assets by banded formal financial assets, (investments would be one of the components of formal financial assets):
Although the WAS collects lower-level data that are aggregated to form informal and formal assets we have not published some of the separate units, eg. total savings in cash.
We can produce this information for you as a bespoke request, however such services are outside the remit of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Such services are subject to legal frameworks, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact wealth.and.assets.survey@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there will be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.
As this information is reasonably accessible via another route, even if only accessible on payment, Section 21(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
More information on our publication scheme on the ONS website: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/whatwedo/statistics/publicationscheme