YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research said with UK energy bills set to continue increasing and inflation rising all over the world, the overall index fell by 4.2 points in August from 103 to 98.8, the largest decline since the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The fieldwork for the study took place over the month of August, before Liz Truss took office as Prime Minister and announced her plans to freeze energy bills at £2,500 a year for a typical household.
Measures tracking household finances for the past 30 days fell by 3.1 points from 60.3 to 57.2, but outlook for the next 12 months crashed by 10 points from 51.8 to 41.8, which was the lowest scores for the metric – which has been net negative since August 2021 – on record.