Dear Jane and Rob

Foreign Investment Statistics

Thank you for your recent letter setting out the progress you have made on your respective FDI and inward investment statistics following the publication of our compliance check on 19 April 2021. We appreciate ONS and DIT working together and with OSR to develop these statistics.

Your joint work will take forward important improvements to these statistics to better answer questions raised by stakeholders, users and Parliament about this important area of economic performance at national and sub-national levels. The developments to ONS’s FDI surveys will help users better understand the different types of FDI, for example greenfield and brownfield investments.

It is useful that you have made checks on the robustness of your data sources to provide important re-assurance around the quality of your data. Additionally, sharing FDI and Inward Investment data between ONS and DIT should facilitate cross-referencing DIT’s project-level data and your respective data, potentially creating new insights for direct investments in the UK..

We support the creation of a Trade and Investment user group meeting, and as it expands, more feedback will enhance the public value of your statistics further.

We look forward to the continued benefits of your collective development of these statistics.

 

Yours sincerely

Mark Pont

Assessment Programme Lead