You asked
Please supply the death rates due to suicide for each year separately for 2018, 2019, 2020 and up to the end of June 2021.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Numbers and rates of suicides for England and Wales are available via the following link: Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 registrations. This publication will be updated to include 2020 data in September 2021; when a publication date is finalised it will be announced via our release calendar.
As such, finalised 2020 data for England and Wales is considered exempt under Section 22(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, whereby information is exempt from release if there is a view to publish the information in the future. Furthermore, as a central government department and producer of official statistics, we need to have the freedom to be able to determine our own publication timetables. This is to allow us to deal with the necessary preparation, administration and context of publications. It would be unreasonable to consider disclosure when to do so would undermine our functions.
This exemption is subject to a public interest test. We recognise the desirability of information being freely available and this is considered by ONS when publication schedules are set in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The need for timely data must be balanced against the practicalities of applying statistical skill and judgement to produce the high quality, assured data needed to inform decision-making. If this balance is incorrectly applied, then we run the risk of decisions being based on inaccurate data which is arguably not in the public interest. This will have an impact on public trust in official statistics in a time when accuracy of official statistics is more important to the public than ever before.
We also produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the most recent update including deaths that were registered from October to December of 2020. This publication presented numbers of deaths registered in 2020 with the median registration delay in Quarter 4 2020 being 177 days.
We will publish data on suicides in 2021 in autumn 2022.
If you wish to discuss this further, please contact: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.