ONS Annual Spend on Procurement of Goods and Services from 2015 to 2023

Release date:
23 February 2024

FOI-2024-1755

You asked

Under Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following information: 

  1. The annual departmental spend on the procurement of goods and services for each year from 2015-2023 
  2. The percentage of annual departmental procurement spend on good and services that went through frameworks for each year from 2015-2023 
  3. The percentage of annual departmental procurement spend that was directly awarded through a framework for each year from 2015-2023 

If possible, we would also like to know the following (if data is available):

  1. The annual departmental spend on the procurement of services only for each year from 2015-2023 
  2. The percentage of annual departmental procurement spend on services only that went through frameworks for each year from 2015-2023 
  3. Each framework operator your department used and the annual procurement spend on goods and services through each (for each year from 2015-2023) 
  4. Each framework operator your department used and the total procurement spend on services only through each (for each year from 2015-2023) 

If each year from 2015 to 2023 isn't possible, just the most recent full year would be great.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Unfortunately, we do not record the requested information in a central source as part of our spending tracking at ONS.

To collate the requested information, we would be required to extract and manually interrogate over 300 files (using the FY 2022/2023 as a basis). We estimate that each file would take around 9-10 minutes to extract and collate the requested information. This would take a minimum of 45 hours to complete, which exceeds the 24 working hour cost limit in place for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. This would be even more burdensome if we were to fulfil the entire request asking for 8 years-worth of data. Therefore, Section 12 of FOIA applies. 

We would recommend limiting the scope of your request so we may answer within the cost limit. As ONS records its information in financial years, the latest complete year that we hold data for is FY22/23. We could provide an overall spend with a goods/services split and a summary list of the main framework operators used for FY22/23 within the 24-hour limit.

Please get back in touch if you would like to submit a refined request. 

In the meantime, please see the following published information regarding our expenditure, which may be of use to you.

The costs of purchasing goods and services by financial year, is disclosed in the Statement of Comprehensive Net Expenditure within the Annual Report and Accounts publications: 

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