You asked
Please provide population statistics by socio-economic group (or wealth/earnings) for the populations of Winchester and Salisbury, with their surrounding areas.
We said
Thank you for your query regarding socio-economic groupings and earnings in Winchester and Salisbury.
There are a number of different options that can provide information that you may find useful.
The first issue is regarding the geographic definitions to use. The most commonly used local areas are local authorities. Using local authorities have the advantage that more statistics are produced for them than for many other geographic areas. Winchester is a local authority in its own right, however Salisbury falls within the much larger local authority of Wiltshire. An alternative would be to use parliamentary constituencies, which have closer alignment to both Winchester and Salisbury, but reduces the range of available statistics.
We classify individuals to socio-economic groupings based on the National Statistics Socio-economic classification (NS-SEC). We produce NS-SEC statistics from the household Annual Population Survey (APS). Individuals are classified to NS-SEC classes based on their responses at interview.
It would be possible to request estimates using NS-SEC from the APS to be produced to meet your requirements from our Social Survey team (socialsurveys@ons.gov.uk). Special extracts and tabulations of data are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate).
As this information is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
A number of tables were produced from the 2011 Census that include information on NS-SEC at a local level that may be of interest. To see the full list of NS-SEC tables available from the Census, you can look at the Table Finder on our Nomis website and filter the tables by the NS-SEC keyword;
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/data_finder
Two particular tables to note are the Key Stats table KS611, which gives a 14 category NS-SEC breakdown and the Quick Stats table QS607, which has a more detailed NS-SEC classification available. Both tables are available at local authority and parliamentary constituency level. In addition table QS607 is available for a geography called Built Up Area, which closely maps the continuous built up area around towns and cities, which includes both Winchester and Salisbury;
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/ks611uk
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/qs607ew
An alternative option to NS-SEC would be to look at earnings information. We produce a range of earnings information for local areas using the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). ASHE tables give an earnings distribution for a local area, based on decile earning points, that is breaking the earnings profile into a point that 10% of the population earn more than, 20% and so on. ASHE statistics are available for both local authority and parliamentary constituency.