Dear Ed,
Review of statistics from the Wealth and Assets Survey
In June, you wrote to us supporting our request to suspend the accreditation of ONS’s core outputs using the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS). In your corresponding review of wealth statistics, you set out five requirements that ONS must meet to regain accreditation in due course.
We would like to update you on our progress towards each of these:
- Requirement 1: The work to provide more information about the relative comparability of different data sources we use to triangulate the WAS is underway. We are expecting to publish this by Spring 2026 as part of planned updates to our Quality and Methods Information (QMI) report.
- Requirement 2: We are reviewing our decision not to publish the back series of data following a change to the way we estimate Defined Benefit (DB) Pension wealth, given the strength of user feedback. WAS Round 7 (April 2018 to March 2020) data are currently under production, which will allow for year-on-year comparisons between Round 7 and Round 8 (April 2020 to March 2022) for all pension and household total wealth data tables. We are also considering producing further years of data and discussions are taking place with the Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) and expert users to scope feasibility and priorities, expecting initial discussions to complete by January 2026. Following this, we will update users on our publication plans.
- Requirement 3: To improve our communication and engagement with users of the WAS, we have established an Expert Group on Wealth Statistics to increase our engagement with key users and stakeholders. We will be providing regular updates on WAS developments and plans, including a household finances stakeholder engagement plan to be published as part of a progress update to ONS’ Economic Statistics Plan scheduled for early December.
- Requirement 4: To improve our communication of data quality, we have reviewed the material included in our existing QMI and identified improvements that we will incorporate as part of our upcoming update, to be published by Spring 2026. We have also made initial progress on improving the way in which statistical uncertainty is communicated for wealth and pensions estimates. For example, we recently published confidence intervals as part of an ad hoc publication of summary statistics for household total wealth by household reference (HRP) person ethnicity and HRP sex. Further work is underway to finalise the methodology for integrating confidence intervals into regular WAS outputs and quality indicators.
- Requirement 5: In our previous letter, we informed you of our wider work to develop a plan to bring the wealth statistics back to the standard needed by users. We anticipate publishing an update on this work as part of an update on the Economic Statistics Plan in early December, following which we will seek further input from users on our priorities. We will then continue to review the resource needed across the end-to-end production of wealth statistics in early 2026 (aligned with the ONS business planning process for 2026/27) and communicate our priorities transparently with users, including via the new Expert Group.
We will continue to keep you, and your team, updated on further progress.
Yours sincerely,
Alex Lambert, Director of Social Surveys Jen Woolford, Director of Public Policy Analysis