Flights booked by UK Statistics Authority 2024 to 2025

FOI reference: FOI-2025-3306

You asked

Please provide:

• In the Calendar years 2024 and 2025, how many flights were booked for civil servants within the department?  
• For the same years, please provide a breakdown of how many of these flights were booked in Business Class and First Class. 
• Please provide the total cost of flights for these two calendar years, with a breakdown for the amount spent specifically on Business Class and First Class tickets. 
• Please provide details of the five most expensive tickets that were bought in each year - the departure and end destination, total cost and date. 

We said

Thank you for your request. 

As the national statistics institute, we are required to represent the UK internationally, influencing statistical standards and best practice. We also provide technical assistance to other national statistics institutes globally, through the UK government-funded Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) programme. This necessarily involves overseas travel.

Business class travel is permitted only through an exceptions process and limited to specific business cases (e.g. health considerations and/or most effective use of time). All business class flights relate exclusively to long-haul destinations. 

Table 1 of the associated download provides flights booked by UK Statistics Authority and Office for National Statistics staff in each calendar year. The data are based on the itemised costs charged to us by our corporate travel provider and confirmed, where possible, against other data held internally to ensure the correct class of travel has been identified in each instance. 

The data in Table 1 includes flights that were funded by partner organisations outside of UK government, equating to approximately 6% in 2024 and 4% in 2025 of the number of flights booked, and 7% in 2024 and 6% in 2025 of total cost of flights.

Table 2 in the associated download provides the five most expensive flights in 2024 and 2025. All of these flights were return tickets to long-haul destinations and authorised in line with our internal processes and travel policy.

We have not provided a breakdown of the five most expensive flight bookings made in each year by departure, end destination and date, as this information could be paired with other information in the public domain to allow individuals to be identified. This has therefore been withheld under s.40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).