We have been addressing the challenge of falling survey response rates in a number of ways and continue to focus our efforts on boosting the sample for the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which underpin headline economic statistics on prices and the labour market. This is already having an impact and we’ve seen responses to these surveys increase by over a third.
As part of this plan, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is today announcing the cessation of the Survey of Living Conditions (SLC). The SLC had been primarily used to provide European-wide comparable statistics on income and living conditions, of which we ceased publication following the UK’s exit from the EU.
More recently the SLC has been used to boost the data we publish on household income. From next year, we will launch a newly streamlined Living Costs and Food (LCF) Survey questionnaire, which will include current LCF information on spending patterns, as well as core information on income previously collected using the SLC, giving an improved cross-cutting picture of household income and spending patterns.
We also have bold plans to almost double the size of our interviewer team over the coming year. Once our number of interviewers increases, in addition to putting more resource into collection of labour market data, we plan to further boost the size of the LCF sample. In the meantime, the information derived from the LCF that feeds into GDP and inflation weights is completely unaffected. In the short term, because the SLC feeds into wider ONS household income statistics, these may see an impact on quality until the LCF sample is boosted further. Any impact on quality would be clearly set out when these statistics are published.
We will be working closely with our stakeholders on next steps and welcome input on how we are developing the LCF questionnaire to maximise the value of the data we collect on household income and expenditure.