Update to publication, Pensions in the National Accounts 2018

FOI reference: FOI-2025-3134 

You asked

I refer to the ONS release titled "Pensions in the national accounts, a fuller picture of the UK's funded and unfunded pension obligations: 2018" (published 8 February 2021), which provides estimates of UK pension liabilities as of end-2018, using an accrued-to-date methodology.

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting the following: 

1. Updated estimates
   • Has ONS produced more recent versions of these pension liability estimates (i.e. for years after 2018)?
   • If so, please provide the most recent estimate(s) and the accompanying data (tables, models, assumptions), particularly for public sector (government-managed) and state pension liabilities.
2. Ongoing work
   • Whether there is work in progress (or planned) to extend the series beyond 2018 using the same methodology (accrued-to-date pension entitlements).
   • A timeline for when updated public release(s) can be expected, if applicable.
3. Methodological changes
   • Whether any changes in discount rates, actuarial assumptions, or data sources have occurred since the 2018 release that would materially affect estimates.
   • If yes, what those changes are, and how they affect comparability with the 2018 figures.
4. Internal documentation
   • Any internal reports, memoranda, or correspondence from the last four years discussing updates, revisions, or critiques to the 2018 estimates (or their methodology), especially in relation to extending the time series beyond 2018.

We asked

Thank you for your request. 

Estimates for years up to and including 2021 were published in January 2024. The 2024 publication is linked here: Accrued-to-date pension entitlements in social insurance from UK National Accounts Table 29 - Office for National Statistics 

With regard to future publications, normally we produce these estimates every three years in line with international data reporting requirements. On that basis, it might be expected that new estimates would be produced in 2027, but this is, as yet, unconfirmed 

With respect to methodological changes, no changes were made to the discount rates, actuarial assumptions or data sources in the 2024 publication. 

Regarding your final query, for us to collate all internal reports, memoranda and correspondence over a period of four years discussing the update, revision, or critique of these estimates, we would need to conduct wide-ranging searches of business databases, files, shared drives, personal workspaces, and archives across at least seven divisions in ONS to locate relevant materials. In addition, as this request includes all correspondence, this would involve the location and collation of all working-level communications of at least 16 individuals. Actioning this in practice would require the interrogation of each email returned from a wide range of search terms to determine if it was in scope of the request. We anticipate the number of email files returned from our searches would be significant, as these would pertain to an entire project's work across 4 years. 

The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24 hours work to search for, extract, and collate the requested information. In our view we would need to exceed this to action your request.  

Therefore, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is engaged, whereby a public authority is not obliged to answer a request if the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. 

We would therefore advise limiting the scope of your request so that we can answer within the cost limit. This could be done by focusing on a particular decision that you're interested in to reduce the number of emails in scope.