FOI reference: FOI-2026-3534
You asked
1.a) In each calendar year from 2016 to the date of this request, how many settlement agreements or non-disclosure agreements meeting the above definition were concluded between the authority and current or former members of staff?
1.b) Please provide this information broken down by year. Where the number in a given year falls below five and you consider that a precise figure risks identifying individuals, please amalgamate adjacent years so that each reported cell contains at least five agreements.
2.a) In each of the same calendar years, what was the total value of financial payments made to employees as part of the agreements described above?
2.b) Please provide this information broken down by year, applying the same approach to aggregation as in Question 1.b) where necessary.
3.a) Does the authority have any policy, guidance, or internal procedure governing the circumstances in which non-disclosure clauses may be included in settlement agreements or other agreements with departing staff? If so, please provide a copy or summary of that policy.
4.a) What is the total headcount of the authority's workforce as of the most recent available date? Please state the date to which this figure relates.
Please cover the period from 1 January 2016 to the date of this request.
We said
Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Unfortunately, we do not centrally collate non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed by previous members of staff. Therefore, to locate and extract the requested information, we would need to individually interrogate the file of every person who has left the ONS since 2016. The resource required to action this would exceed the 24-hour cost limit for FOI requests and Section 12 of Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
We have no explicit policy position on the use of non-disclosure agreements or settlement agreements.
Our headcount as at 31 March 2026 was 5,980.