Dear Ed,
Household wealth statistics
We are writing regarding the designation of Household total wealth in Great Britain statistics from the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) as official accredited statistics. Prior to publication of the latest statistics in January 2025, the ONS carried out its own internal assessment of quality of the WAS. Our view at the time was that while we had some concerns with the quality of the estimates at a more granular level, we had sufficient confidence in the robustness of the headline estimates of wealth to retain the accreditation of these statistics.
Since publication, we have continued to assess the ongoing quality of these statistics. We have seen a further drop in the WAS response rate for Round 9, which will impact on the next release of wealth statistics for 2022-2024 (provisional planned publication date in 2026). While we will explore whether our methodology can be updated to offset some of the current quality issues, there may still be increased uncertainty around the quality of these statistics. In addition to our own engagement, you have sought the views of users as part of your review.
On balance, and in line with the emerging findings of your assessments, we would like to request that you suspend the accreditation of the ONS’s core outputs using the WAS from Round 8 onwards. These outputs include: Household total Wealth in Great Britain, Saving for Retirement in Great Britain and Household Debt in Great Britain. Suspending the accreditation of these statistics will help to convey the uncertainty and signal the limitations of these data to users to support their appropriate use.
We will communicate our decision on accreditation to Chief Statisticians at departments who publish outputs using the WAS and encourage them to carry out their own assessment of quality and consider the designation of their WAS outputs.
As part of wider work to improve and enhance ONS economic statistics, we are developing a plan for the collection and processing work required to bring wealth statistics back to the standard needed for our key users, which we intend to publish in the Autumn.
We will, as always, keep users and yourselves abreast of any further developments.
Yours sincerely
Alex Lambert, Director of Social Surveys
Jen Woolford, Director of Public Policy Analysis