The Money and Pensions Service's Financial Wellbeing Survey 2021 "is a nationally representative survey of over 10,000 adults living in the UK. The questionnaire covers the building blocks required for people to feel financially resilient, confident, and empowered.” It is “about how people spend, save and generally manage their money and bills both day to day and longer term”. The 2021 survey builds upon previous Financial Capability Surveys carried out in 2015 and 2018.
The survey questions and answers are grouped into the following sections:
- Basic demographic questions (age, sex, location (using 2011 LSOAs to approximate), employment status, internet usage)
- Household composition
- Life/financial satisfaction and confidence
- Debt/current finances
- Money attitudes
- Goals
- Current account, budgeting, shopping around
- Managing credit use
- Saving
- Resilience and insurance/protection
- Planning for Later Life (66+)
- Advice, guidance and life events
- Retirement planning (working age)
- Financial Numeracy (quiz)
- Income
- Demographics (e.g. ethnicity, religion, health, education)
Content
GeoDS holds the anonymised individual records containing the responses from each survey participant. Access to this data is available through the GeoDS Data service. The survey answers are available as two record-level CSVs (one with codes and one with labels). There is also a code to a label lookup file, a questionnaire copy and a technical report.
Please note that the supplied data does not include the extra variables mentioned in the linked technical report (Section 6.3 Table 7) apart from LSOA11CD. It should however be possible for a user of the data to map both of these from the LSOA11CD using lookup tables from the ONS or other statistical authorities.
Quality, Representation and Bias
The survey is a high quality survey organised by a professional customer surveying firm on behalf of MaPS, online or by post. The survey includes quota/screening questions at the beginning to ensure a broadly representative sample of the population across the UK is included. Each respondent is assigned a weighting value which, when applied, should result in a survey that reflects the demographics of the UK.
Special Stipulation
MaPS requires a disclaimer on publications using the data, that the publication does not necessarily represent its views. The following text is recommended: “Disclaimer: the views and recommendations in this report are those of the organisation publishing this report and its author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Money and Pensions Service whose data was used to produce it.”
