You asked
I would be grateful if you could supply me with details of how many letters have been sent by the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority to members of the Government between May 2005 and May 2010, and again from May 2010 to the present day.
By members of the Government, I am referring to MPs or Lords who hold ministerial positions. If possible, I would be grateful for a list of the names of ministers who have been reprimanded- but this is less of a concern for me than the first question and should be left alone if it would cause this FOI request to pass the reasonable costs threshold.
We said
UKSA does not keep a record of the number of correspondences sent to particular bodies or individuals, however all correspondence from the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority to members of the Government is in the public domain and can be viewed on the UK Statistics Authority website at the link below. Correspondence from before 2008 does not exist, as the UK Statistics Authority did not exist prior to 1 April 2008.
As this information is already available to you via this route ONS considers that S21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
ONS was formed in 1996 by the merger of the Central Statistics Office and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys and from then until 2008, was an executive agency of Her Majesty's Treasury. In 2008, when the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 established the UK Statistics Authority as an independent body at arm’s length from government with the statutory objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that ‘serve the public good’, ONS became its executive office.
ONS maintains databases of the National Statistician’s correspondence for the period 2000 to the present. However, records are broken down by year and into only four broad categories of correspondence, which would not allow easy identification of any material that might fall into the scope of your request. The numbers of items of correspondence by year are as follows:
2001/2002 – 244
2003 - 1029
2004 - 1151
2005 - 959
2006 - 1148
2007 - 1480
2008 - 1122
2009 - 986
2010 - 988
2011 - 1469
2012 - 698
2013 - 751
2014 - 552
This is in excess of twelve thousand pieces of correspondence in total. As an example, if we allowed only 30 seconds to check each piece of correspondence, a full search would take in excess of 12 days. Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act states that a public authority is not obliged to conduct a search for information, if such a search will exceed the cost limit of £600, or 3.5 days. ONS considers that in this case a search would exceed the cost limit.
You might also like to note that in June 2000 the Statistics Commission was set up as an independent body to monitor, quality assure and audit the use of official statistics. Its aim was to ‘help ensure that official statistics are trustworthy and responsive to public needs’, to ‘give independent, reliable and relevant advice’ and by so doing, to ‘provide an additional safeguard on the quality and integrity’ of official statistics. The Statistics Commission may have corresponded with members of the UK Parliament under the scope of your request. The Statistics Commission was abolished in 2007 following the creation of the UK Statistics Authority. The Statistics Commission website was archived in 2008, and is available here: