Letters between ONS and HMT/BoE

FOI reference: FOI-2024-2174

You asked

I am emailing under the terms of the freedom of information act to request the following information in a digital form:

• A list of all official communication to have occurred between the Bank of England and the Office for National Statistics over the past five years.

• A list of all official communication to have occurred between HM Treasury and the Office for National Statistics over the past five years.

Please could this include the subject area and format of all communication, the date and who the sender and recipient were (if applicable). It would be ideal to receive the information as a spreadsheet, with the following columns: SUBJECT/DATE/SENDER/RECIPIENT.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

The 'List of statements and letters' section of our website provides some of the official correspondence you have requested. You can use the search function on the left-hand side of the page to search for key words to find correspondence between ONS and the Bank of England and HM Treasury. 

We have also produced a table, which can be found in the associated download to assist with your request. Names of external individuals that appear in the subject lines have been redacted under the personal data exemption, found under Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). 

We have interpreted 'official communication' as letters on headed paper between the ONS National Statistician, Second Permanent Secretary, Deputy National Statisticians and the Bank of England (BoE) and HM Treasury (HMT).

Please note, unfortunately, we have not been able to include 2 ex-members of staff (Deputy National Statisticians) in our searches, as the content of these mailboxes has been archived. It is not possible to filter the content by sender or recipient. Furthermore, the dates in the archive show the date on which the correspondence was archived, rather than the date sent/received. 

Following a sampling exercise looking at just 1 of these mailboxes, we discovered we would need to individually interrogate in excess of 11,800 emails to see if they are in scope. This would involve opening each file to see who the email was from and to, and the date on which it was sent. This exercise also measured that it would take at least a minute to check 8 emails. 

The cost limit for actioning FOI requests is £600, which equates to 24 working hours of 1 person. We believe we need to greatly exceed this to include these 2 mailboxes in our searches. However, we hope that the data provided above fulfils the aims of your request. Please get in touch if we can assist any further.