Details of the island’s latest household income survey really take the biscuit.

Some 1,000 households, out of a random sample of 18,000 addresses, took part in the year-long survey, each recording their spending over two weeks.

The government conducts the household income and expenditure survey every five years, under the VAT-sharing agreement with the UK.

Results are used to calculate how much the island receives in VAT and other duty.

This survey is also used to measure island inflation and will begin in April 2018, running for a year.

But the minutiae of the breakdown of detailed household expenditure is intriguing.

Appendix one lists, for example, under food and drink, the £1.10 spent on average per week on ’buns, crispbread and non-chocolate biscuits’.

There is a separate listing for ’chocolate biscuits - anything coated, fully or partly in chocolate - excluding chocolate chip’.

Average weekly expenditure on these is 82p.

Presumably, we can do all do our bit to increase the island’s VAT share by munching on more chocolate Hob Nobs rather than choc chip cookies.

Under vegetables, the survey lists crisps - kids everywhere will want to include these in their five-a-day - and helpfully cites the examples of ’Walkers, Pringles, Wotsits and Hula Hoops’.

Money spent on these totals an average of £1.42.

Turning to the main survey results, weekly household incomes averages at £1,098.70, of which 58% comes from wages and salaries and 11% from private pensions.

Average weekly household expenditure is £1,049.17.

This is broken down between consumption expenditure which is the day to day spending on food, clothes or leisure activities; and non-consumption expenditure which relates to items such as the capital repayments on the mortgage.

Consumption expenditure totalled £735.25, 70% of total weekly spending, with non-consumption expenditure averaging £313.90.

Some 78.6% of householders are owner occupiers, with 45.5% owned outright and 33.1% paying off a mortgage. Some 12.4% rent privately and 8.1% are renting social housing.