FOI ref: FOI/2023/4936
You asked
Please provide a list of any and all contact your organisation and/or staff have had with British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Japan Tobacco International, Philip Morris International, as well as any other domestic or transnational tobacco companies or anyone representing the tobacco industry including subsidiaries of tobacco industry.
I would like this information for the period from 1 April 2021 to 20 February 2023.
Contact would primarily include attending or arranging meetings or functions, and responding to correspondence or phone calls.
Please break down the information by:
Tobacco company or representative's name
Date of contact(s)
Type of contact (meeting, email, letter, phone call, text/app message or video call, e-card or any other form of electronic communication)
Place of contact, if relevant
Purpose of contact
Outcome of contact, including if no action taken
We said
Thank you for your request.
The Office for National Statistics collects statistical data from a variety of small, medium and large businesses across all industries, which enables us to produce a wide range of economic statistics. We conduct approximately 80 different surveys of businesses, organisations and local authorities in the UK, issuing around 1.4 million questionnaires to about 325,000 businesses every year.
As part of this business data collection process, we are regularly in contact with thousands of UK businesses to response chase questionnaires and query and validate the data that is collected via our business surveys. The tobacco businesses will be contacted alongside all other UK industries. Our data collection teams will use a variety of methods to collect the data, i.e. online surveys and paper questionnaires and will also use several modes of engagement. This will include telephone calls, emails and online data collection tools.
We also have a variety of other teams, who may need to engage with businesses to carry out analytical research which allows us to improve the quality of our published statistics. Again, several methods of engagement are used such as telephone and video calls and, in some cases, these teams may carry out face to face visits.
Therefore, in order to fully action your request, we would be required to conduct a wide-spread bespoke manual search of multiple systems to locate, extract, and collate the requested information.
The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is 24 hours work, and in our view, we would need to greatly exceed this to answer your request.
We would therefore recommend that you consider limiting the scope of your request to allow us to respond within the cost limit.
However, please be advised that we would be unable to disclose the names of the any industry organisations which we liaise with or the names of their representatives, as this is personal information, as defined by Section 39(2) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA). Section 39(1) prohibits the disclosure of personal information. We are therefore legally prohibited from sharing this information.
We would also be limited in the detail we can disclose regarding the purpose and outcome of contact with these companies at present, as the nature, purpose, and outcome of this contact would often be indicative of a specific company, risking disclosure.