You asked
Please provide the following:
Please list all individuals and organisations consulted to date on the 2021 census sex and gender identity/transgender status questions and accompanying guidance.
Please confirm if the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) was one of the organisations consulted.
Please provide a list of all meetings to discuss these questions, stating which individuals/organisations attended, and on what date.
For each meeting listed, please state which census question was discussed (sex, transgender identity, or both). Please also indicate the main purpose of each meeting (for example, to discuss the guidance to accompany the sex question).
For each meeting listed, please provide the meeting minutes.
Please provide copies of all correspondence between ONS and all these individuals/organisations on this topic.
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request regarding correspondence and meetings with certain organisations and individuals about the 2021 Census sex and gender identity questions and accompanying guidance.
We can confirm that we have consulted with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
In order to ensure that we have fully answered the remainder of your request, we would need to search across the email accounts of many staff members working on sex and gender identity questions (including staff who have moved on to other business areas), as well as numerous business databases, files, shared drives and personal workspaces for correspondence received or sent, and documents relating to all meetings for the past four years. The search would also need to encompass a wide range of possible search terms to ensure all relevant documents are found. 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 greatly exceed this with your request.
We would therefore request that you consider limiting the scope of your request to allow us to respond within the cost limit.
It would be helpful to separate out the requests in terms of the questions and the guidance, but even then the cost limit is likely to be reached given the work that has gone into question and guidance development over the years, and so further narrowing of the scope may be required, for example limiting to just minutes/correspondence or specifying a preferred timeframe for the information.
May we also highlight that, alongside a number of other census topic reports, we have recently published a full report on the development of sex and gender identity questions for 2021.
Furthermore, with regard to the development of question guidance, in September 2019, we published a report on development of sex and gender identity question guidance for the 2019 Rehearsal. This can be accessed via the following link: Guidance for questions on sex, gender identity and sexual orientation for the 2019 Census Rehearsal for the 2021 Census
You may also be interested in the following previously answered FOI requests regarding this topic:
Documents relating to the mandatory sex question. This provides documentation that is pertinent to the signing off on draft proposals subsequently put forward by the Cabinet Office in a white paper to not provide a third, neutral response option for a mandatory question [Sex].
Sex and gender identity consultation for the 2021 Census. This provides details of all individuals, groups and organisations consulted by ONS wirth regard to the development of questions on sex and gender identity for the 2021 Census.