Catalogue description Ministry of Labour and National Service: Returns of the Household Expenditure Enquiry (1953 to 1954)

The Household Expenditure Enquiry was the first large-scale enquiry into household expenditure and income in the United Kingdom since the Family Budget Enquiry made in 1937-1938 for the purpose of revising the cost of living index. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented the revision of the index, which continued to be fixed on 1914 standards.

Following the Second World War there had been a period of rising world prices in raw materials and shortages of consumer goods which had caused variations in the pattern of expenditure which made a new enquiry necessary. A number of definite long-term changes in spending habits had emerged. Rationing for food and household goods had disappeared and controls had been relaxed giving a greater freedom of choice. Changes had also been brought about by the re-distribution of incomes, and by social security schemes. Following a recommendation in the report of the Cost of Living Advisory Committee in March 1947, a technical committee was set up, and an interim index created, based on the 1937-1938 returns, pending a new enquiry. The Household Expenditure Enquiry was carried out to provide a more satisfactory weighting basis for the index of prices then in use.

The new enquiry was commenced in January 1953, and continued into the early part of 1954. It was intended to cover 20,000 households of all ranges of income, and complete details were returned for 12,911 of these. The field documents consisted of a set of completed questionnaires recording information on expenditure, income and household characteristics. The results were published in the Ministry of Labour Gazette in 1957, and the returns used to revise the cost of living index after 1956, the survey was the fore-runner of the Family Expenditure Survey of 1957.

The data from the Household Expenditure Returns in LAB 24 has been extracted and made available to researchers thanks to the work of the British Living Standards Project Team at the University of Sussex. The data (with related codebook and guide) has been deposited with the UK/ESRC Data Store and a link to this is available from the British Living Standards website