You asked
I have contacted the met police for FOI for the number of deaths of police officers by suicide in 2020.
They do not collect this data. Do you?
If so please provide the numbers for 2020 when you have them.
We said
Thank you for your request.
ONS are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.
Most suicide deaths are investigated by coroners in what's known as an inquest. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a lag between the date of death and the date of death registration, referred to as a registration delay. Registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average.
We produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the most recent update including deaths that have been registered from January to September of 2020. This is for deaths registered in 2020, and due to the registration delay described above, many of these deaths would have occurred in 2019.
Finalised annual suicides data for 2020 is scheduled to be published in September 2020.
As such, the information you have requested 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.
ONS has published Suicide by occupation, England and Wales, 2011 to 2019 registrations, suicides for individual occupations are available in table 4. When the annual mortality dataset for 2020 is produced, it is likely an update will be provided for this suicide by occupation dataset.
If you would like to discuss your request further, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.