Third of income is spent on housing

THE true cost of housing in Guernsey was revealed yesterday when the island's most comprehensive Household Expenditure Survey was released. It now accounts for 33% of average household outgoings, while just 10% goes on food.

That means a typical family spends £748.58 a week - £38,926 a year - and £252 of that, or just over £13,000 a year, goes on housing.

Policy and Research Unit senior research analyst, Gareth Jones, said those statistics made particularly interesting reading.

'One of the things that is significant is when you look back at the first survey from 1964 and compare the differences between housing and food,' he said.'The figures have almost swapped and that stood out to us.'

Households spent about 26% of their 1964 income on food, while just 12% went on housing.

A total of 1,004 households took part in the evaluation that was conducted between March 2005 and April last year.

Each household recorded its expenditure over a two-week period and the survey was spread over 13 months to allow for seasonal trends.

The independent RPI Steering Group, chaired by the former Dean of Guernsey, Canon Marc Trickey, monitors the compilation, calculation, and publication of the local RPI index to ensure transparency and impartiality.

The group worked with the Policy Council's policy and research unit with the inception, conduct and analysis of the survey.

More than a million individual purchases were recorded in the survey, ranging from such items as loaves of bread to larger purchases such as cars and holidays.

It also shows that three times as much is spent on women's clothing at £15 a week than on men's.

Total expenditure was broken down into 14 distinct groups, which were based on the UK's RPI HES codes.

Households were defined as one person or a group of people living at the same address and sharing common housekeeping 'defined as sharing meals or a lounge'.

Lodgers or boarders who had at least one meal per day with the household were included but the HES was only concerned with private expenditure, so communal households were excluded.

* The survey can be viewed at www.gov.gg/pru or a limited number of hard copies are available by calling 717240.