FOI reference: FOI-2024-2016
You asked
Can you please inform me of the number of complaints, general enquiries, Ministerial Correspondence, Parliamentary Questions and Treat Officials your organisation have received in 2022 and 2023 calendar years.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Parliamentary Questions and Treat Official Correspondence
Parliamentary Questions (PQs) are questions from Members of Parliament (MPs) or Peers, which seek information from, or action by, the Government. Official Correspondence (OC) is correspondence received by the Authority from MPs, Peers, or Members of the Devolved Administrations. The Authority also records correspondence between staff and key stakeholders or members of the public. We call this ‘Treat’ Official Correspondence (TOC).
Please see the requested figures for PQs and TOC for 2022 and 2023. Please note, as per the request, this does not include OC.
- 2022 PQs: 123
- 2022 TOC: 22
- 2023 PQs: 157
- 2023 TOC: 17
General enquiries
Our organisation has multiple public-facing mailboxes, all of which receive ‘general enquiries’. We do have a Shared Customer Contact Centre, which would be the area best placed to provide an overview of general enquiry figures. The following information has been taken from this team and covers enquiries submitted over the phone, email, and live chat:
- 2023: 8,713
- 2022: 10,146
Please note, this data does not represent all queries received by the ONS.
Complaints
Queries and complaints about our statistics are handled by individual business areas as business-as-usual correspondence. This correspondence is not centrally logged. However, if a member of the public has an issue with how their complaint has been handled, they can request an investigation by the UKSA Complaints Management team. These escalations are logged centrally and the figures for 2022 and 2023 are as follows:
- 2022: 10
- 2023: 6
Ministerial correspondence
To answer your request for ministerial correspondence, we have provided the number of official written exchanges of letters between ministers and the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), the Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), and the UK’s National Statistician.
Correspondence between ministers and the Chair of the UKSA is published on our website here: UKSA correspondence. Information for 2022 and 2023 can be located using the filtering tool on the right-hand side of the page. In addition to the information published, the Chair received 2 letters from ministers in 2023.
Similarly, correspondence between ministers and the Head of OSR is published here: OSR correspondence list. Information for 2022 and 2023 can also be located using the filtering tool.
The number of letters between the ministers and the National Statistician has been collated from the National Statistician’s mailbox. The figures for 2022 and 2023 are:
- 2022: 12
- 2023: 7