Expenditure and Food Survey (now the Living Costs and Food Survey)
In 2008 the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF) replaced the Expenditure and Food Survey. More information on the LCF can be found on the Office for National Statistics web site.
The Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS)
is the result of more than two years' development work to bring together the
Family Expenditure Survey and the National
Food Survey. 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. From 2001-2002,
both series are completely replaced by the EFS.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has overall project management and
financial responsibility for the EFS, whilst the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) sponsors the food data. As with the FES and NFS,
the EFS 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 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.
*Whilst the NFS and FES series are now finished, users should note that previous
data from both series are still available.
Users should note that the current
dataset contains only the expenditure component from the 2001-2002 EFS, as deposited
by ONS. Extra data and documentation for the food component of the study (including
low-level food variables and food consumption/weight data) are to be deposited
by DEFRA. These will be added to the study when received.
The EFS/LCF pages on the National Statistics
web site also contain some detailed
information about the survey and links to the reports.
Latest data
