FOI reference: FOI-2025-2773
You asked
Under the FOI act, I would like to request a copy of all emails sent and received by the following members of staff pertaining to the Sullivan Review:
- The National Statistician
- Deputy National Statistician for Health, Population and Methods
- Director for Population Statistics
If this request is too large and falls outside the 24 hour limit or the £600 please restrict to the senior civil servant who would have been primarily responsible for the stakeholder relations with Dr Alice Sullivan and her review team.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Conducting a comprehensive search for all emails held in scope of your request would exceed the cost limit for FOI requests, even with the suggested narrowed scope.
A wide range of terms would need to be used in our searches, including "sex" and "gender", to capture all possible information in scope. Findings from our preliminary searches have already returned 4850 and 5375 emails in the National Statistician’s and Deputy National Statistician for Health, Population and Methods’ mailboxes respectively, using the terms "sex", "gender", and "Sullivan review". This does not take into account the addition of the Director for Population statistics’ mailbox, nor the additional search terms we would need to use to ensure we pick up all possible correspondence.
Assessing the time taken to review each email at around a minute per email, the sample we have drawn on alone would take a minimum of 170 hours to complete.
The cost limit for responding to FOI requests is £600 (equating to 24 working hours), and we estimate that this would be greatly exceeded to respond to this request.
We therefore recommend narrowing the scope of your request so we may answer within the cost limit. This could be done by identifying a specific correspondent, narrowing the time frame, and specifying a search term for us to use.