Poverty and Income Inequality in Scotland 2022-25

8      Data source

All the figures in this publication come from the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Households Below Average Income dataset, which is produced from the Family Resources Survey (FRS). UK figures are published by DWP in Households Below Average Income on the same day as this publication. For the UK figures, as well as more detail about the way these figures are collected and calculated, see the DWP website.

8.1  What does HBAI measure?

Households Below Average Income (HBAI) uses household disposable incomes, adjusted for the household size and composition, as a proxy for material living standards. More precisely, it is a proxy for the level of consumption of goods and services that people could attain given the disposable income of the household in which they live.

The unit of analysis is the individual, so the populations and percentages in the tables are numbers and percentages of individuals - both adults and children.

Data is collected during the financial year, so between April and March of the following year. Statistics are usually published in March, a year after the end of the data collection.

The living standards of an individual depend not only on their own income, but also on the income of others in the household. Consequently, the analyses are based on total household income: the equivalised income of a household is taken to represent the income level of every individual in the household. Equivalisation, a technique that allows comparison of incomes between households of different sizes and compositions, is explained in the Definitions section.

8.2    Population coverage

The Family Resources Survey is a survey of private households. This means that people in residential institutions, such as nursing homes, barracks, prisons or university halls of residence, and also homeless people are excluded from the scope of the analysis presented here. The area of Scotland north of the Caledonian Canal was included for the first time in the 2001/02 survey year.

For further information see the DWP’s Households Below Average Income publication.

8.3     Data collection during the coronavirus pandemic

The coronavirus - COVID 19 pandemic severely disrupted the data collection in 2020/21. As a result, we were unable to obtain a representative sample for Scotland in that year. This means that the periods 2018-21, 2019-22 and 2020-23 only contain data from two financial years. Therefore, some real changes that happened to incomes, such as the furlough scheme or the temporary increase of Universal Credit, are only partially captured in the time series.

Statistics reverted to a 3-year average in 2021-24. However, although we have 3 years’ worth of data, the pooled sample is around a third less than in 2017-20 due to response rates being lower since the pandemic. Response rates are showing signs of recovery but results can still be volatile, and changes need to be interpreted with caution. In the 2024/25 survey year the Scottish sample was 1,900 households.

More information about the impact of the pandemic on data collection and the data itself is available in DWP’s HBAI Technical report. DWP’s FRS report also includes further detail on the 2024/25 fieldwork.

8.4    Reliability of estimates

Estimates in this report are based on a sample survey and are therefore subject to sampling variation as well as other measurement error.

Confidence intervals describe measurement uncertainty that comes from using a random sample to represent a whole population. There are other sources of measurement error, which are not captured by confidence intervals. This means that confidence intervals can only represent part of the measurement uncertainty.

We use two kinds of confidence intervals. “Bootstrap” confidence intervals for 2022-25 presented in the measurement uncertainty section. We have also provided indicative confidence intervals for download in two spreadsheets (one-year and three-year estimates are packaged up separately). The indicative confidence intervals are not as accurate as those calculated for the key figures, but they provide a time series going back to the mid 1990s and sufficiently reflect how sample size and variation affect measurement uncertainty.