Research and development services and related consultancy services

Tender description

The Office for National Statistics is looking for a supplier to deliver the Annual Survey for Goods and Services (ASGS) and the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Survey. We anticipate that the tender will be published in lots: Lot 1: ASGS; Lot 2: FDI; Lot 3: Both services. The Annual Survey of Goods and Services (ASGS) is a statutory ONS survey launched in 2017 in response to an independent review of ONS statistics conducted by Sir Charles Bean. ASGS plays a key role in improving the coverage of the UK services economy sampling approximately 40 000 businesses from services industries annually and captures granular information about the composition of selected businesses turnover. ASGS has become a key data source used primarily to inform wider ONS outputs and is seeing demand increase from other government departments requesting access to survey data. Since the survey was set up in 2017, the data collection and validation work for ASGS has been outsourced to an external provider, the contract for which expires in April 2021. ONS are seeking develop a relationship with a provider that possesses the ability to continue to run the survey on ONS’ behalf delivering data that is high in quality and collected electronically via an electronic questionnaire. The Trade and Investment Development Project was established in 2016 in order to meet the user needs of key stakeholders across government, particularly Department for International Trade (DIT). The current focus for the development is on re-developing the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) survey and systems to begin to capture new data for us to understand the UK’s investment position at a more granular level than currently available. In order to meet needs at the pace our users demand, particularly on FDI, we have to capture new data which is not otherwise obtainable from alternative sources. Therefore, we are aiming to launch a redeveloped version of the FDI survey in March 2021 which will include new questions to collect the data we need. ONS are seeking to develop a partnership with an organisation that possess exceptional digital capability and can provide a high-quality, accessible, electronic questionnaire and response management portal to host both inward and outward, quarterly and annual, redeveloped FDI surveys. The sample and questions will be provided by ONS; we are purely looking for a partner who can host these questionnaires and provide a tool for our business operations team to manage responses as and when they’re received.