The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is an instrument aimed at collecting timely and comparable cross-sectional and longitudinal multidimensional microdata on income, poverty and social exclusion. It is the European Union (EU) reference source for comparative statistics on income distribution and social exclusion at European level, particularly in the context of the 'Programme of Community action to encourage cooperation between Member States to combat social exclusion' and for producing structural indicators on social cohesion for the annual spring report to the European Council.
The EU-SILC instrument aims to provide two types of data: cross-sectional data pertaining to a given time or a certain time period with variables on income, poverty, social exclusion and other living conditions, and longitudinal data pertaining to individual-level changes over time, observed periodically over, typically, a four years period. Further information may be found on the EU EU-SILC webpage.
Users should note that only the cross-sectional data are currently available from the UK Data Archive, and these data only cover UK. It is currently anticipated that four datasets will be deposited each year. The Great Britain component of the EU-SILC dataset is collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as part of the General Lifestyle Survey (GLF) (held at the Archive under Special Licence access conditions - see GN 33403). The Northern Ireland component is collected by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) as part of the Living Conditions Survey (LCS) (not currently held at the Archive). The EU-SILC dataset has been produced in accordance with EU regulations under guidance from Eurostat. In addition, every year a European Commission regulation describing the list of secondary target variables (annual modules) is published (see Main Topics section for details).
The accompanying documentation for EU-SILC comprises: a Guidelines document that describes the survey, the variables including the module and recommendations given to the EU member states for data collection; and a document detailing the differences between the data collected and that held in Eurostat's User Database (UDB) (as described in the guidelines) for all member states, including the already established issues or particularities for the UK.
2006 and 2007 EU-SILC data
It is currently planned that EU-SILC data for 2006 and 2007 will also be deposited at the UK Data Archive in due course. The microdata to be deposited at the Archive go through a lengthy anonymisation and disclosure control process. Due to critical deliveries and developments for the ONS UK EU-SILC team there have been delays to the work to be carried out on the 2006 and 2007 EU-SILC cross-sectional datasets. The microdata will be produced and made available to users via the Archive as soon as possible.
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