ONS Releases Latest Consumer Trends Update

The UK Government Office for National Statistics has released the latest update (Q3 2006) from their consumer trends research programme. This provides key economic indicators about household expenditure trends broken down by category.

There is loads of interesting stuff in there but I've just picked out three things that caught my eye.

1) Since this time last year the types of goods and services that have seen the most substantial increases in household expenditure are clothing and footwear and recreation and culture...

2) Whilst we've heard a lot about the rising cost of electricity and gas, the growth in household expenditure on such fuels has actually started to fall back ...

3) The last chart shows the collosal shift from from non-durable expenditure (food & drink, vehicle fuel, health and housing costs incl. household bills) towards service expenditure (financial services, communications incl. mobile phones, leisure services incl. gyms, pay television, broadband etc.) over the last 35 or so years.

So few companies have any long term data trends any more which is what makes this data all the more interesting.