Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: 17 to 29 May 2023

The following information is for the latest survey period 17 to 29 May 2023, based on adults in Great Britain.

• When asked about the important issues facing the UK today, the most commonly reported issues continue to be the cost of living (92%), the NHS (87%), the economy (73%), and climate change and the environment (60%).
• Around two-thirds (67%) of adults reported that their cost of living had increased, compared with a month ago.
• The most common reasons reported by adults who said their cost of living had increased compared with a month ago were an increase in the price of food shopping (97%), an increase in gas or electricity bills (69%), and an increase in the price of fuel (40%).

This week, we also asked adults about their understanding of green jobs, as part of our workplan on delivering statistics on green jobs.

• Around 3 in 10 (29%) working adults reported that they would describe any part of their job as a "green job", based on the definition of "a job that helps to protect or contribute towards the environment, such as helping to combat climate change or improve the natural environment".
• Around 1 in 25 (4%) working adults reported that all or most of their job relates to "green" activities.
• Around 1 in 7 (15%) working adults reported that they work for an organisation that does specific green activities, but their own work was not directly related.

This release contains data and indicators from a module being undertaken through the Office for National Statistics' (ONS's) Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

Breakdowns by age and sex, including confidence intervals for the estimates, are contained in our Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain datasets.

Where changes in results from previous weeks are presented in this bulletin, or comparisons between estimates are made, associated confidence intervals should be used to assess the statistical significance of the differences.

This week's release includes new estimates on people's understanding of "green jobs", included in our accompanying working arrangements dataset. These questions were added as part of the ONS's defining and measuring green jobs project and will be used to inform the development of our green jobs estimates.

Sampling and weighting

In the latest period (17 May to 29 May 2023), we sampled 4,976 households. This sample was randomly selected from people who had previously completed the Labour Market Survey (LMS) or OPN. The responding sample for the latest period contained 1,980 individuals, representing a 40% response rate.

Survey weights were applied to make estimates representative of the population (based on ONS population estimates). Further information on the survey design and quality can be found in our Opinions and Lifestyle Survey Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).