The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will continue its General Lifestyle outputs, covering smoking, drinking and health, following a public consultation from 2 September to 31 October 2013.
As a result of strong support for the General Lifestyle reports, ONS will continue, however, it said "there was no strong support for continuation of the households, families and fertility or marriage and cohabitation outputs."
The issued sample on the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN), the data collection vehicle for the General Lifestyle questions, will also be reduced by one third.
This will lead to a loss of precision of up to 25% in a given estimate.
This will increase the minimum detectable effect that can be reported on (i.e. a greater difference between given estimates will be required to infer a statistically significant difference).
Between 2008/09 and the end of 2014/15, ONS funding dropped by 25%; it needs to find £9 million of savings in the coming year.
However, 80% of its £153.2m 2014/15 budget is earmarked for legislative requirements. The remaining 20% is incurred by non-legislative requirements, which is where it looks to make savings.
Macmillan Cancer Support had strongly recommended that funding for the report continue, saying the data was necessary in pinpointing cancer causes.
Responding to the announcement, Ciarán Devane, chief executive at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "The General Lifestyle Report provides crucial information about our lifestyle habits which helps to explain why cancer incidence and mortality rates in the UK are different to those in other countries.
"This will help us understand what is stopping us having the best international cancer survival rates in the UK and how we can fix that."
