You asked
Please could you provide information on the total amount spent on third party data by ONS in financial year 2017/8 and who the top ten third party data providers were by spend.
We said
We obtain data to support the development of outputs from a number of sources using various contractual arrangements.
We contract with third party providers, such as Kantar, NatCen, Ipsos Mori, to conduct surveys, for example the Crime Survey for England and Wales and RPI/CPI collection, and the services to be provided under these contracts typically include the servicing, collection, cleaning and delivery of data
In addition, we contract with organisations who collate data from multiple sources and commercially sell access to this type of data, such as Equifax, D&B.
We do not routinely pay to have access to data to support its statutory functions.
In exceptional circumstances, we may reimburse on a cost recovery basis to have access to data from some organisations, where their business is not data provision and we require an element of data cleansing or formatting to the raw data available from the organisations.