FOI reference: FOI-2025-2918
You asked
I would like to submit a freedom of information request to understand:
The number of employees who reside outside of the UK who are employed by UK companies
An update on the UK outward foreign affiliate statistics (OFATS) last published in 2019
a. Please provide as many years of information as possible – ideally from 2015-2025, but as recent as possible
b. Please could you also provide further definitions on which employees and enterprises are included in the dataset
We said
Thank you for your request.
1. The number of people employed by UK companies can be found in our outward foreign affiliates (OFATS) statistics. These are labelled "EMP" in our statistics published in May 2022. These are our latest estimates for OFATS, which are for 2018 and 2019.
2a. We do not hold any OFATS statistics for any year from 2020 onwards. From 2020, we combined our OFATS survey with the outward annual Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Survey. This increased the sample size from around 200 companies, to the just over 2,000 companies on the annual survey. At the same time as combining the FDI and OFATS surveys, we also introduced a commercial data source to inform our FDI populations.
We paused production of our FDI statistics at the end of 2023 because of technical challenges in processing data from the ONS FDI Survey. The pause enabled us to complete a thorough review of our production systems for both quarterly and annual statistics. We have prioritised our main FDI statistics to ensure high quality data can be fed into the UK Balance of Payments, with further re-development required to be able to reintroduce OFATS statistics; as a result the latest year available remains 2019. We plan to return to this project in the future.
2b. Our OFATS statistics for 2018 and 2019 published in May 2022 used the separate OFATS survey. More information about how the statistics in the dataset in the request link have been calculated can be found in Section 3 of our UK outward foreign affiliates statistics (OFATS): 2019 statistical bulletin. The enterprises included in our OFATS statistics are those within the FDI population that control at least one overseas affiliate. In line with international statistical standards, control is defined using voting power (shareholder equity) of more than 50% in another entity in a different economy to that of the direct investor. The OFATS survey collected information on the number of people employed in those overseas affiliates, which is then presented in the employment values (EMP) in our results. We also combined the OFATS survey with information received from the Bank of England for monetary financial institutions and our inter-departmental business register to produce our previous OFATS statistics.