Evaluation Scotland Wales
The UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing is taking forward the work of the Financial Capability Strategy Opens in a new window

The Strategy aims to encourage significant improvements in the UK’s financial capability by 2025.

What the Strategy needs to achieve

The Money Advice Service will measure the impact of the Strategy against our aim of improving people’s ability to:

  • manage money well day to day
  • prepare for and manage life events
  • deal with financial difficulties.

We will focus on:

  • developing people’s financial skills and knowledge, for example, improving their ability to use basic numeracy in complex situations
  • their attitudes and motivation, for example, saving for tomorrow rather than spending today.

We aim to provide robust evidence that these approaches, combined with an inclusive financial system, can improve financial capability.

How we will measure the success of the Strategy

The Money Advice Service has developed a small set of composite measures that combine the key indicators of financial capability. (You can read more about composite measures in the Money Advice Service publication ‘Barriers & Building Blocks: An overview of the 2015 Adult Financial Capability Survey’.)

These will be monitored over the life of the Strategy, together with the impact of specific financial capability interventions.

The two main vehicles for measuring success will be:

  • The Financial Capability Survey, which will measure how behaviours, skills, knowledge, attitudes, motivation and accessibility change over time
  • robust evaluation of interventions, targeted at specific groups of people and tracked through longitudinal studies.

This approach is consistent with that taken by other OECD countries around the world who have developed financial capability strategies.

We also commissioned Ipsos MORI to evaluate the UK Financial Capability Strategy, exploring its progress and achievements since it was launched in October 2015. This report sets out the findings of the study, which surveyed and spoke to a range of stakeholders across the financial capability system. Download your copy.