FOI reference: FOI-2025-3273
You asked
Please provide the following:
A month-by-month breakdown from January 2017 to October 2025 of all staff recruited and leaving the Office for National Statistics:
by month
by reason
by grade
by division
We said
Thank you for your request.
To provide the requested information, we would be required to conduct a large amount of manual work, as we do not hold a complete centralised list with the requested information including division. This is due to the numerous organisational restructures and division changes that have occurred across the eight-year period requested. We would therefore need to carry out manual work to ensure we correctly reference the division of each starter and leaver at the time of their appointment/departure. As there have been 8,520 starters and 6,497 leavers in this period, this would be an extensive undertaking. The cost limit for FOI compliance is 24 working hours (3 working days) for one person to search for, locate, extract, and collate the requested information. We would need to greatly exceed this limit to comply fully with your request.
Should you wish to submit another request, we would recommend reducing the scope of your request so we may answer within the limit. This can be done by not including division, and you may also wish to consider a shorter timeframe. Please note, a breakdown by month, grade, and reason (for leavers only as we do not hold a reason for starters) is likely to be identifiable, so there remains a likelihood that we would not be able to release this information if you do resubmit. You therefore may also wish to include alternative groupings in your request, such as year as opposed to month.