FOI Reference: FOI/2022/3906
You asked
I humbly make use of this medium to ask for your kind assistance to please provide a copy of the anonymised raw data on deaths in the UK - specifically the following information in an excel or csv format.
- Date of Death
- Age at Death
- Cause of Death
- Secondary causes of Death
- Date Covid 19 was Diagnosed (if available)
- County of residence
- County of death registration
We said
Thank you for your request.
We have interpreted your request as asking for individual record level deaths including only the following variables:
- Date of Death
- Age at Death
- Cause of Death
- Secondary Causes of Death
Date COVID-19 was diagnosed (if available)
- County of residence
- County of death registration.
We do not hold information for Scotland and Northern Ireland, only England and Wales. We consider the information for England and Wales to be exempt from release under s.14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
This dataset would involve a large number of unique combinations of variables and so would very likely prove to be personal information as defined under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA). S.39(3)(c) of the SRSA states that personal information is such if an individual's identity can be deduced from the information taken together with any other published information. S.39 also makes it a criminal offence for us to release personal information. In England Wales in total there has been 607,922 deaths in 2020. We have not published figures for 2021 yet but provisionally there has been 585,899, similarly for 2022 there has been 96,591. A large amount of work would need to be conducted to determine which pieces of information would be identifiable. Specifically, we would need interrogate information in the public domain and test whether this could be linked to any of the individual records and assess whether we would be disclosing additional information unlawfully. As there are 1,290,412 individual death records, we would need to conduct this exercise 1,290,412 times to fulfil your request.
Whilst we recognise the genuine intentions behind requesting this information, it would be highly unlikely we would be able to fulfil your request as much of it would be personal information and exempt from release. Furthermore, it is likely that there would be very little wider public benefit in the production of this dataset, as the information would be fragmented would have little statistics significance. We do not believe that the degree of detriment caused by actioning this request would be justified therefore constituting disproportionate burden under s.14(1) of FOIA.