Consumer trends, UK: January to March 2024

• In Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2024, household spending growth (adjusted for inflation) was positive 0.4% compared with Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2023.

• Compared with Quarter 1 2023, household spending decreased by 0.2%.

The quarterly consumer trends data are typically published around 90 days after the end of the quarter.

This release contains data that are consistent with the UK National Accounts, The Blue Book: 2023, released on 31 October 2023. As such, data for all periods within this release are subject to revision in line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy.

The Blue Book is the UK's annual compendium of national accounts data and incorporates a number of improvements to methods and sources into the UK's National Accounts. Details of improvements introduced in Blue Book 2023, which affect household expenditure and revisions to the previous publication, can be found in our User guide to consumer trends.

The reference year and last base year for all chained volume measure estimates is currently 2019.

Further information on the latest developments and changes soon to be implemented in Blue Book 2024 (including updating the reference year from 2019 to 2022) can be found in our Proposed changes to be implemented in Blue Book and Pink Book: 2024 article, released in December 2023. These changes will be introduced in the next release of Consumer trends in September 2024, which will be published alongside Blue Book 2024.

We have produced an update to the Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose (COICOP) to Classification of Products by Activity (CPA) mapper for 2020.

Household final consumption expenditure (HHFCE) includes spending on goods and services, except for:

• buying or extending a house
• investment in valuables (for example, paintings and antiques)
• purchasing second-hand goods

Explanations for these exceptions and the related concepts are available in our Consumer trends QMI.

Quality

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Consumer trends QMI.

Impact of coronavirus (COVID-19)

From Q1 2020, estimates of Household Final Consumption Expenditure (HHFCE), along with other components of gross domestic product (GDP), are subject to more uncertainty than was the case previously. This is because of the challenges we faced in collecting the data under government-imposed public health restrictions. In the case of HHFCE, these challenges were compounded by the suspension of data collection for the International Passenger Survey (IPS) between March 2020 and January 2021, and the temporary suspension of the Living Costs and Food survey (LCF) between 16 March and 14 April 2020.

Accredited official statistics 

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in January 2012. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".