FOI/2023/1047
You asked
I would like to have a copy of any documents provided to the ONS during its consultations for Census 2021 from the following:
- Gender Identity Research and Education Society
- Stonewall
- The National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Partnership
- Forum for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Equality By documents, I define this as including but not limited to: emails (and their attachments), letters, reports/briefings, and presentation slides.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Development of the topics, question and outputs for Census 2021 took place over five years. We talked to a number of groups across sectors and engaged in widescale testing, before the questionnaire was finalised for Census 2021. This included running a census rehearsal, in which over 100,000 households took part, in diverse areas around England and Wales.
This development work began with the Census 2021 topic consultation in 2015, which was part of a wider array of development outlined in our Question and Questionnaire Development overview. The questions were finalised through the census legislation in 2020. A further 2021 Outputs Consultation was carried out in 2021.
Information about the testing and research for the gender identity question was published at the time, for example in the December 2017 and December 2018 topic updates, which informed the recommendation in the Census White Paper to include the question in Census 2021. This work and subsequent testing and research are summarised in the Sex and Gender Identity question development page; this sets out various testing and engagement activities we undertook, some of these are further described on linked pages on the ONS website.
Submissions to the 2015 topic consultation and the 2021 outputs consultation are published and accessible via the pages cited in this response.
The 2021 Census consultations in 2015 and 2021 generated a large volume of emails, reports, briefings and other recorded material. Therefore, in order for our response to capture the breadth of information requested, we would be required to conduct a wide-ranging search of the email accounts, business databases, files, shared drives, and personal workspaces of every member of staff involved in the consultation period. This would involve at least 4 areas of the ONS and would include a number of people who have moved position. Archived material would also need to be interrogated, to encompass any information held by staff members who have left the organisation. Once located, this information would then need to be extracted and collated ready for review and release.
The cost limit for responding to an FOI request is £600, which equates to 24 hours (3 days) work for 1 person. The time taken to search for, collate, and extract all the relevant material in scope of this request would exceed this threshold. Therefore, we believe Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) is engaged.
We would advise that you narrow the scope of your request so that it can be answered within the cost limit. For example, your request could be narrowed to refer to specific engagement activities identified in the webpages referred to above.
There are a few previous Freedom of Information releases on the ONS website that may be of interest:
- ONS correspondence with Stonewall in the last 2 years
- Meetings between the CEO of Stonewall and the Deputy National Statistician and National Statistician from 2019 to 2021
- Correspondence between the Office for National Statistics and Stonewall in relation to how the ONS gathers data on sex and gender in the past two years
Please get back in touch should you wish to submit a revised request.