Cabinet Office written question – answered at on 31 March 2014.
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Peter Fullerton, dated March 2014
On behalf of the Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the average personal savings in each year from 2010 to 2013 (193745).
The Office for National Statistics does collect information on the personal savings of households and individuals from the Wealth and Assets Survey; a longitudinal study of the economic circumstances of households in Great Britain. However, currently only data pertaining to the first two waves of the survey (2006/08 and 2008/10) are available. The main findings for the period 2010/12 will be published in May 2014.
Table 1 below presents gross financial wealth for eligible adults for the years 2006/08 and 2008/10.
Table 1: Estimated gross financial wealth1 of individuals2: Great Britain, 2006/08 and 2008/103 | |
Median (£) | |
2006/08 | 2,200 |
2008/10 | 3,000 |
1 Gross financial wealth for individuals includes any formal financial assets held such as: current accounts in credit, savings accounts, ISAs, fixed-term investment bonds, unit trusts, shares, saving bonds and gilts, life insurance; plus any informal financial assets such as monies either loaned or saved with friends and family. It does not include endowments associated with a mortgage as this is only collected at a household level. 2 Includes eligible adults only i.e. those over the age of 16 and not in full-time education. 3 The distribution of wealth is highly skewed. Therefore, the median is a better measure of average. The mean, which provides the arithmetic average, is likely to be influenced by high values so it does not reflect the experience of most individuals and is therefore not presented within the table. Note: The figures quoted are estimates and are based on a responding sample of 54,951 individuals at wave one and 36,218 at wave two. Source: Wealth and Assets Survey, Office for National Statistics. |
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