Payments made to the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE)

FOI REF: FOI/2023/5079

You asked

Please can you publish the individual payments made to the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE), since its establishment, with each year's items adding to the total amount paid by UKSA in each year. Please itemise the "deliverables" that triggered each payment.

We said

Thank you for your request.

ESCoE projects are set up to cover a 6 year programme. Many projects will cross over funding years and financial quarters within each year. There are also yearly overheads that are spread out across the quarters that cover the general running of the programme and the administrative tasks associated with a large complex programme. All invoices are discussed in an Office for National Statistics (ONS)/National Institute of Economic and social research (NIESR) meeting including representation from commercial, deputy directors, programme lead within ONS and programme director and team in NIESR. No invoice was issued without ONS confirming the breakdown of costs.

The payments for Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE) are driven by:

a) Individual research projects

b) Wider events such as conferences

c) Pure headquarter / administrative costs

Whilst we can identify a) and b), the third group is more generic and thus harder to pin down in the fashion requested. Equally payments were quarterly against the basket of deliverables in each quarter. There is not a perfect alignment as different projects had different deliverables at different times.

In summary of the above:

The research projects are attached to evidence against a). However, due to iterative redesign of the costs of each project to reflect work undertaken we do not hold a summary of these costs in the form requested.

Each May, a 3 day ESCoE conference is held alongside other events and seminars under (b). Finally, there was an overhead component representing the 'overhead / HQ costs' in each quarterly invoice.