Living Costs and Food Survey (previously known as the Expenditure and Food Survey)
In January 2008 the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF) replaced the Expenditure and Food Survey. The LCF collects information on spending patterns and the cost of living that reflects household budgets across the country. The survey is conducted throughout the year across the whole of the UK and is the most significant consumer survey undertaken in the UK. More information on the LCF can be found on the Office for National Statistics web site.
A household expenditure survey has been conducted each year in the United Kingdom since 1957. From 1957 to March 2001, the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) and National Food Survey (NFS) provided information on household expenditure patterns and food consumption. Both survey series were well established and important sources
of information for government and the wider community, charting changes and
patterns in Britain's spending and food consumption since the 1950s. In April 2001 these surveys were combined to form the Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS), which completely replaced both series. From January 2008, the EFS became known as the Living Costs and Food (LCF) module of the Integrated Household Survey (IHS). As a consequence of this change, the EFS questionnaire was altered to accommodate the insertion of a core set of questions, common to all of the separate modules which together comprise the IHS.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has overall project management and
financial responsibility for the LCF/EFS, whilst the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) sponsors the food data. As with the FES and NFS,
the LCF continues to be primarily used to provide information for the Retail
Prices Index, National Accounts estimates of household expenditure, the analysis
of the effect of taxes and benefits and trends in nutrition. The results, however,
are multi-purpose, providing an invaluable supply of economic and social data.
The merger of the two surveys also brings benefits for users, as a single survey
on food expenditure removes the difficulties of reconciling data from two sources.
The design of the LCF/EFS is based on the FES, although the use of new processing
software (SPSS) by the data creators has resulted in a dataset which differs
from the previous FES structure. The most significant change in terms of reporting
expenditure, however, is the introduction of the European Standard Classification
of Individual Consumption by Purpose, or COICOP, in place of the codes used
in the FES and NFS, which were unique to the two surveys. An additional level
of hierarchy has been developed for the EFS to improve the mapping to the previous
FES and NFS codes. The LCF/EFS was conducted on a financial year basis from 2001, but was moved from a financial to a calendar year basis from January 2006 in anticipation of the introduction of the IHS.
*Whilst the NFS and FES series are now finished, users should note that previous
data from both series are still available.
The EFS/LCF pages on the National Statistics
web site also contain some detailed
information about the survey and links to the reports. Further information about the LCF/EFS food databases can be found on the DEFRA Family Food - Methodology web pages. Previous versions of the LCF documentation are available on DEFRA's archives website.
Latest data
