Staff attendance at the Darlington office

FOI reference: FOI-2026-3615

You asked

Please provide figures showing staff attendance in your office located within the Darlington Economic Campus (DEC).  

To be clear, I need the number and percentage of the total DEC office headcount for staff who attend in-person (i.e. not working from home) for every week, month, or other interval in which the statistics are formatted. Please provide figures for 2025-2026 and 2024-2025.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

We want to see more staff coming into our offices, while also recognising the unique challenges that the ONS has faced.   

We expect the organisation as a whole to achieve around 40% office attendance. Attendance continues to be expected where there is a clear business or team purpose for being in the office and persistent, deliberate non-attendance without reasonable justification may lead to formal action.

We do not hold the exact information requested, however, we have sought to respond constructively.

We are provided with attendance data for the Darlington Economic Campus (DEC) site by the Government Property Agency (GPA) on a weekly basis. These are headcount data reflecting how many ONS persons were in attendance on a given date. The reporting does not distinguish or identify individual ONS personnel and so we are unable to determine the regularity of attendance per individual. Neither does the data include or allow us to distinguish any ONS visitors attending the DEC who are contractually assigned to other ONS sites. 

We do not usually aggregate this data monthly in our internal reporting, but for the purposes of this FOI, we have included a monthly average. The tables in the attached sheet show:

• the ONS headcount contractually assigned to the DEC each month for the period April 2024 to May 2026

• the daily number of ONS attendees at the DEC and that number as a percentage of the headcount 

At present, the Darlington site can accommodate around 20% attendance because of capacity constraints, though occasional attendance above this level is manageable. The expectation is that this will increase to 40% in early 2028, once we have relocated to a new office with greater capacity. 

The ONS hybrid working principles allow for instances or hours to be used to calculate an individual office attendance contribution over a four-week rolling period. The data containing daily numbers of attendees would therefore not reflect hours, only instances.

It is also important to note that swipe data will not be representative of colleagues working patterns, for example, part-time absences such as annual leave or sickness, or those with greater flexibilities such as workplace adjustments.

Individuals who have met the requirement through attendance at other sites, such as London, Titchfield, Newport and Manchester offices and work at other locations (for example, a training event) will also not be reflected in these data.