Family spending before the coronavirus crisis helps us to understand its potential impact

a post by Fahmida Rahman for the Resolution Foundation blog

Last week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual rundown of how UK households spent their money. These statistics provide the most detailed and direct insight into current living standards, and with a coronavirus-driven economic crisis in the making, they also give us a guide as to how we might expect things to pan out in the rest of this very unusual year.

The big picture from the ONS release is that, after several years of steady increases, household spending has stagnated. In 2018-19, average weekly household spending was £586, down slightly on the year before and not far off from the figure for 2016-17 (£582).

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