FOI reference: FOI-2023-1611
You asked
Please supply details of ONS total costs for reasonable adjustments at work for the Financial year 2022/2023.
Please provide details of the highest cost item funded by the ONS during the same period.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Workplace adjustments costs for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are paid for using cost codes.
Whilst we do now have a central cost code for workplace adjustments, this was only established for the current financial year (2023/24). During the current year we have begun centralising more of our spend on adjustments using this code, however many other cost codes remain in use across business areas for workplace adjustments.
Therefore, in order to provide the total cost of workplace adjustments for the FY 2022/2023, we would be required to search the entire contents of ONS's internal cost code reports.
This would involve the manual interrogation of each payment made under every internal cost code in the organisation, to determine whether the phrase 'workplace adjustment' had been used.
Furthermore, in many cases, we may not be able to determine whether the purchase of equipment was specifically for a workplace adjustment, so even with a complete manual review, we would not be able to provide a comprehensive overview of the costs as requested.
The cost limit for actioning an FOI request is £600, which is equal to 24 working hours. We believe this would be exceeded if this request were actioned in the above manner.
To bring your request within the cost limit, we would recommend limiting the scope to cover the central workplace adjustment cost code only. However, please be aware that only a small proportion of adjustments are currently assigned to this code. This figure would not be representative of the real total cost to ONS of workplace adjustments, and meaningful data could not currently be extrapolated from this information. We are continuing to work on further centralisation of our adjustments budget.
For reference, the highest cost item funded by the ONS during the requested period derived from the new workplace adjustments cost code in the current year is £4,546. This was paid for licenses for TextHelp assistive technology. Please note, as mentioned above, this may not be the highest cost item overall across ONS.