ONS employment by sex and disability status

FOI REF: FOI-2023-1249

You asked

Please could I request:

1. The total number of people recruited to ONS on a homeworking contract between August 2020 and December 2021. By ‘homeworking contract’, I mean individuals whose place of work stated on their contract was their home address.

2. The number and percentage of people recruited to ONS on a homeworking contract during the time period above by sex and disability status.

3. The number and percentage of all ONS employees by sex and disability status in December 2021. When providing figures for those on homeworking contracts, please provide these separately for fieldworkers/survey interviewers and non-fieldworkers, if possible.

We said

Thank you for your request.

To answer questions 1 and 2 we have taken data from our Human Resources (HR) system based on the August 2020 – December 2021 time period as requested. This shows employees whose record on our HR system is denoted as "homeworking". As you will see, we have split fieldworkers/survey interviewers and non-fieldworkers as requested. Please see this data in the associated download named 'ONS employment contract types August 2020 to December 2021'.

We recognise that this is slightly different to your question of "the number of people recruited to ONS on a homeworking contract" because it is possible that a small number of colleagues recruited in that time period may have subsequently become home based contractually for other reasons, such as reasonable adjustments after employment. Likewise, it is possible that a small number of colleagues recruited on a home-based contract could have subsequently become engaged on a non-homebased contract.

Also, in order to provide a definitive answer specifically regarding ONS employees recruited to ONS on a home-working contract, we would need to manually interrogate every person's contract between August 2020 and December 2021 to collect the specific information held in scope of the request.

The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24-hours work, and in our view, we would need to exceed this with 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.

To bring this specific request within the cost limit, the time frame requested could be reduced to around a 6-month period. Please note however, that due to small numbers in disability status the data provided in relation to your request was suppressed for non-homebased workers to avoid the potential to disclose confidential personal information. A narrowing of the scope to 6 months could also require suppression of data regarding those recruited on homebased contracts for the same reason. We would therefore recommend referring to the information provided in this response, taken from our HR systems instead.