FOI reference: FOI-2025-2747
You asked
I am emailing to request the headline response rate and sample size for all the regular surveys the ONS currently runs. I am interested in both the headline and wave-specific data covering the last 15 years. Please can you provide the data in a spreadsheet and in a comparable format.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Many of our statistical bulletins include information on response rates.
The response rates for Financial Survey of Pension Schemes are included in Section 8: Data sources and quality section of our Funded occupational pension schemes in the UK: April to September 2024 bulletin.
Our Business investment bulletins provide provisional and revised figures:
Provisional figures – see the Data in this bulletin paragraph in Section 3: Data sources and quality of our Business investment in the UK (provisional results) bulletin.
Revised figures – see the Data in this bulletin paragraph in Section 7: Data sources and quality of our Business investment in the UK (revised results) bulletin.
Labour Market statistics:
- Labour Force Survey (LFS) – detailed response data (including time series of response rates) are published quarterly as part of our Performance and Quality Monitoring Report.
For Vacancies, short-term employment and earnings, we publish the latest response rate in our bulletins:
For the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, the latest sample size is included in our lead bulletin:
For the Living Costs and Food survey (LCF), used as part of the Household Expenditure estimates, response data are published annually as part of our Living Costs and Food Survey technical report.
For Monthly Business Surveys (MBS), we publish response rates information for production and services sectors separately each month. These are on a turnover and forms response basis, and are at the intervals of Month 1 estimate, Month 3 estimate and Month 13 estimate (the last month we are open for revision for the MBS). These are available back to Nov 2016.
For construction:
Construction response rates back to May 2018 can be found in Table 11 of our Output in the construction industry dataset.
Before this date, response rates could be found in Table 14 (the earliest date they were included was in the release on 11 January 2017, where response rates were provided back to August 2016). Previous versions of the data are available.
For prices, see Table 5 in our Producer price inflation, UK bulletin.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) conducts over 80 different surveys of businesses, organisations, local authorities, households and individuals in the UK. We contact around 325,000 businesses and over 1 million addresses (for our surveys of households/individuals) to participate in our surveys each year.
These surveys comprise (or have comprised) a mix of weekly, fortnightly, monthly, twice monthly, quarterly, and annual returns. The majority of business surveys are statutory, while surveys of households and individuals are voluntary. Because of the magnitude of the ONS survey operations and the methodological variations across surveys, the cost of retrieving and compiling comprehensive data for the 15-year period requested substantially exceeds the limits set out in Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
While response rate information is collected regularly as part of ongoing performance monitoring, the collation of a comprehensive time series of historic response rates would be prohibitively difficult. The ONS's 80 different surveys are monitored across several business areas at varying intervals, depending on the survey. Collation of the data would therefore involve cross-comparison of our published information, lines of communication between several teams across the business, and historic Management Information to collate initial response rate information. These would then need to be quality-assured to account for revisions and late submissions. Calculations would also be required to ensure the data are comparable. We believe this exercise would exceed the 24 working hour time limit for FOI requests.
We hope the published sources of information on this topic provide you with the data required. However, if you require further information, we advise submitting a revised FOI specifying a smaller subset of surveys over a much shorter time frame.
If you wish to obtain information for the Family Resources Survey (FRS), please liaise with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), as this is a DWP-owned survey.