RFI - Foreign Direct Investment Data Capture

The ONS is looking to identify and engage with industry partners to help capture respondent data via digital channels; principally an electronic questionnaire. This will help improve the quality and usefulness of official statistics that decision makers, businesses and citizens need.

This Request for Information concentrates on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and ONS are seeking to develop partnerships with organisations that possess exceptional digital capability and can provide a high-quality, accessible, electronic questionnaire 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 raw unedited data to ONS in the desired format.

Summary information for these surveys are as follows:

About the survey: The purpose of the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) survey is to collect financial data on assets and liabilities. The survey collects information on an annual and quarterly basis between foreign parent companies and their UK affiliates (Inward FDI) as well as between UK parent companies and their foreign affiliates and branches (Outward FDI). FDI is a major driver of globalisation. As investment patterns of multinational enterprises become more complex, reliable and internally comparable FDI statistics are necessary for sound policy making.

Coverage: UK wide enterprises involved in foreign direct investment (sample will be supplied by ONS)

Frequency: Calendar quarters dispatched in March, June, September and December and annual launched in April

Sample Size: Quarterly Outward - approximately 963 enterprise groups

Quarterly Inward - approximately 1488 enterprise groups

Annual Outward - approximately 2,305 enterprise groups

Annual Inward - approximately 4,128 enterprise groups

Question Overview: a) Earnings: income from investments, for example profits, interest and tax

• b)Flows: changes within investments, for example, reinvested earnings, acquisitions, disposals and loan movements
• c)Positions: these data represent an enterprise's total investment value at a point in time, of equity capital and other capital. Positions data are then used to calculate the international investment position.

For more information, please visit the ONS website.

The types of organisations that should consider partnering with us include:

• oResearch agencies with experience of large and complex electronic data capture.

Supporting information:

It would be very useful if any organisations interested in providing this service to the ONS could respond and include;

• oIndicative costs for hosting the 2021 quarterly and annual surveys,
• oEstimate lead time required for questionnaire set up, and;
• oOutline of your electronic questionnaire functionality offering.

What can a partnership with ONS offer?

An opportunity to work with a world class ...

Additional information:

How to respond to this RFI

If you can provide this information, please either login or register on the ONS e-tendering portal https://in-tendhost.co.uk/ons and use the "express an interest" function against the project title 'RFI -Foreign Direct Investment Data Capture' ref PU-20-0262.

When you have expressed an interest, please attach the following information to allow ONS to have an understanding of what your company can offer. Please include as a minimum:

• oOrganisation Name
• oContact details
• oBrief description of primary activity of organisation
• oResponses to the information outlined within the 'Supporting Information' above.

Additional Information

This Exercise is NOT a pre-qualification or a selection exercise. It is intended to act as an awareness and information gathering exercise offering an opportunity for suppliers to advise the extent to which they potentially are able to provide some or all of the services that ONS may require, in order to help ONS with its future intentions. The responses to this exercise will be used to base decisions on whether future tenders would be viable in securing this service. Any future tenders will be conducted through the In-tend portal.

Is a Recurrent Procurement Type? : No